IF: Swarm

I have a little "swarm" of butterflies this week for Illustration Friday.  There are all sorts of layers to this one.  I started with a pink checkered background I painted with watercolors, then added flowers drawn with india ink, next came all sorts of scrap papers and acrylic paint, followed by stitching to the butterflies at the end, all done on watercolor paper.  I had a blast creating this piece and found it hard to pull myself from it this past weekend and do more important things such as cooking meals for my family! 

the neighbor ladies

I loove chickens.  It's been my dream for years to have my own chickens.   We live in town right now and we could have chickens, but my husband wants to wait until we move to the country,   We are lucky enough though to have  neighbors that have chickens and I can visit them, talk with them and listen to their little clucking.  This weekend we had the pleasure of going to collect the eggs  while they were out of town. 



Aren't they just beautiful?  I think they have  5 different varieties. They have 10 chickens all together and have started laying eggs now that the days are getting longer. 

These little ladies are friendly too.  They happily clucked as they saw us coming.  Some of them would let Fischer pick them up and most of them would let us touch them.

























Yesterday we got 7 eggs and today 6.    I fried up a couple this morning and they were soo yummy.  We normally buy local organic eggs, but for some reason these seemed to taste so much better.  Maybe it was because we collected them ourselves! 

letting go

 “Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.” — Herman Hesse


This piece is a little different approach than what I usually take with my paintings.  I'm trying to find that happy balance of drawing, painting and collage.  If I do a piece with mostly painting, I feel like I'm not drawing enough, or if I do a piece with mostly cutting and pasting, I feel like I'm missing out on painting.   This piece I feel very happy with the results, it has a little bit of everything, even my new favorite thing to collage with, tea bags!

Cheese and dragons

Woohooo!  They did it!  The Green Bay Packers won the Superbowl!  I can't believe  it, yeahhhh!  Lots of happy cheese heads here in Packer land!  It was a nail biter, but they hung on.

I've been without a computer for 2 weeks now!  When we have technical difficulties, a friend of ours takes our computer home and works on it in his spare time for a very cheap price, my husband and I have such limited computer skills.  Our PC was having problems and he's had it for a Verry long time, but that didn't bother us since I had my laptop and my husband had his, but then my laptop decided it wasn't going to cooperate any longer and needed some serious attention.  So what started as a few days without it has turned into weeks.  Luckily I don't need it really bad, but I am starting to question whether it might be worth it in the future to spend more to get quicker service.  Hmmm, we'll see.  I've been able to check emails,  but today I was finally able to use my husbands laptop for a longer period of time.  (I actually started this post yesterday and then all these terrible bright red words popped up on my husbands computer,  WARNING, threats detected! and things were flashing all over!  Oh man did I start to freak out.  It asked if I wanted to delete this file and I did and I quickly turned the computer off until my husband came home.  Boy was I a bundle of nerves, I was so worried about his work computer, yikes.  Fortunately, everything seems to be in fine working order!  So I'm going to finish this post up quickly and wait for my own computer which should be done today,  Yeah!)

Fischer and I had seen a nature program which had some sea dragons on it.  They were pretty awesome looking.  They are like sea horses but bigger, I guess they are about a foot long.  Fischer and I drew the weedy sea dragon.  I included his picture but cannot rotate the picture for the life of me and I can't get my pictures downloaded to flickr from my camera with this computer.  I think there is some sort of cosmic energy out there that just doesn't want me to be spending my time on computers right now!