Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

Here comes the Sun,   Here comes the Sun and I say It's all right Little darling It's been a long cold lonely winter Little darling It feels like years since it's been here ....  At   Tag Tuesday , the current theme is  "Here comes the sun" . The challenge is to create a tag with the sun on it, with an optional twist of including a Beatles image.  My first tag is simply a gelli plate print background, with a photo transfer of grass and a stamped image of a fairy. The second tag suggests a  peace-loving Beatle (or a look alike) against a sunny background. In both these tags, the sun is implied rather than figurative image and  I have associated "gold" with the sun.  (    

  Happy New Year - today is full of hope for a healthier, happier, more settled and  more stable times.  Today, we have had a grey day most unfitting for heralding a new beginning, but this afternoon, the skies are beginning to clear, just giving us a glimpse of better days ahead.  Did you know 1 January wasn't always the beginning of the year ?  The first time New Year's Day was 1 January was 45 BC , based on solar calculations instead of lunar cycles.  As the Roman Calendar needed reform, Julius Caesar enlisted the  experitse of an Alexandrian astronomer,   Sosigenes,    who advised  ignoring  the lunar cycle  and  recommended  following  the solar year, as did the Egyptians. The year was calculated to be 365 and 1/4 days, and Caesar added 67 days to 46 B.C., making 45 B.C. begin on January 1, rather than in March. He also decreed that every four years a day be added to February, thus theoretically keeping...

At Tag Tuesday   design team member, Michele is celebrating the summer sun in the northern hemisphere. Here in Australia, the winter sun is milder  but still shines brightly on clear crisp days.    Lately we have been experiencing quite grey days with heavy cloud cover, but the sun seems to peek out from behind for at least some of the day - my inspiration for this tag.  My tag for this theme is paper collaged and then stitched by machine. The papers include magazine pages, prints of my own photos, gelli plate prints and mono prints with wax . I stitch paper collages with a very old Bernina Nova ( free form stitching with the feed dogs lowered)  I am also including in this post some of the collaged envelopes I made for #The100 Day Project  - these envelopes were based on scenes or experiences I had while out walking each day for 100 days, so it is no surprise that  sunshine and sunsets were featured.  All 100 collaged envelo...

This seems to have been a long hot summer here in Australia.... so when Tag Tuesday's theme was announced last week as "Use a Quote" , I began to think of some 'sunny' quotes.  Both of these tags use quotations which have been printed on my laser printer and then transferred using a 'sticky tape' method.  Here is a video which describes this technique well.  The first tag also has magazine images, a water coloured sun and a background of gelli -plate printed paper. The second tag is an eco print which I originally thought was not so great, but it seems to have worked for this tag.  As an aside, I was really interested to find out whether we do in fact have a lot of sunny days...  I live in Newcastle NSW  and my home town is Townsville, Queensland, so compared these two places with a few of the Australian State capitals.  Average total days a year with sun City           ...