A State of Flux

Dear Spring, I too am in a state of flux.  It is often too cold to hold your head up, but on days like this I can see that you are as anxious as I am to begin a new stage of my life.  I see you, my batch of jonquils, waking from your cold sleep.  I see you too, baby buds, wearing your new life like the crown of spring.

We Are All Mad Here

The new Alice In Wonderland movie is coming soon and I have to admit I am anxiously awaiting it.  The fact that Johnny Depp is in it doesn't hurt :-)  Between being inundated with trailers and advertisements and a blog "challenge" of cats I threw this silly little thing together and even included a couple of my own cats.  All with a hideous chesire grin :-) 

Winding Down

Another weekend is winding down.  M and I went to see Avatar 3D yesterday, it was a pleasant surprise.  My biggest concern was the length, 2 hours and 40 minutes for crying out loud! I can barely sit still for a 30-minute sitcom.  I guess if you're not in your home thinking about laundry and dishes and hobbies it's easier to sit for that long (as I sit here staring at 2 baskets full of laundry that need to be put away LOL)

I'm Thankful

My top thankful list today:
My car.  I know, it seems superficial, but without the Xterra, I'd be stuck at school.  Literally.  This is the parking lot at 1:30 today.

  School let out early and believe me, people hit the road.  It doesn't look bad, but a block from school 5 cars were in the ditch and it was less than fun traveling home.  So yeah, I'm thankful for my 4-wheel beast.

I'm also thankful I have a warm house to come home to.  I work in a pretty poor school district, and there are kids who go home to no parents, or frankly, parents who'd be better off NOT being parents, and often no food.  So I'm thankful for my house, and my job to provide for my house and my food, when so many people don't know where or when their next meal is arriving.

Speaking of food and shelter, I'm thankful for my pets.  They provide love and laughter and I'm thankful I can provide them with shelter and food. Even the horses that keep getting out and are the bane of my existence right now.  Who can blame them when they are staring at the stack of hay just past the fence!

That's Shyster on the left.  I have to keep reminding myself she's a Berner and she LIKES the cold.  She has a huge "dog house" if she wants to get out of the weater so don't call the ASPCA!




Pina on the left.  She keeps trying to get on my lap while I"m on the laptop; this is her "I'm tired of sharing you with the laptop look".  Ebony on the right.  He's not my escape artist, Tag is.






 This is Big.  You can't really tell from the picture but he is a pure black German Shepard.  And he IS big.  Very big.  Couple of hundred pounds of dog between the two of them.

Not All Gifts Are Good Ones

See this picture?  It's my bathroom floor.  It's where I spent most of the night before last.  No gross details, but let me tell you - here's one of those things they don't teach you in undergrad school before you start teaching:  you will develop a heck of an immune system, or you will be sick, a lot.  Luckily, after 16 years, I am in the former category, but I think every once in awhile God just wants to remind me how lucky I am.  :-)  I wonder if I could do a math problem on the probability of getting a germ when I see 120 kids a day who are carrying their germs plus their families germs...........

More Tags & A Happy (unrelated) Result

It was a cold, windy, rainy, all-round yucky day today so I stayed inside and got a few more tags finished.  I think this is my favorite of the bunch.  Cut strips from magazines, text stamp, my zentangle heart.  The hat was a happy accident; I had cut the flowers out of a magazine but when I turned them sideways I noticed it was in the shape of a hat so ta-da!  Don't you just love happy accidents :-)

L is kind of the "queen" of our group.  She's been in the district the longest so she got the most elaborate one.  The "queen" is some small foam letters I painted with gold.  The bottom embellishment is plain old aluminum foil that I embossed, drew on with a red sharpie, then used some acrylic ink on.

This is K, our choir teacher (hence the scraps of music torn from an old hymnal).  That stuff on the top is my last attempt at trying to make an acrylic skin.  I swear, I've read every book, watched every video, and am just poo at trying to get one of those suckers.  Maybe because I'm trying to do it from old books?  Anyway, I had this whole page of a song titled we'll have fun when we sing but it wasn't transparent enough so I just cut the title off and attached it with those cute little heart brads I found at Michael's (the craft store).  Her dress is a piece of transparency that I had printed bubbles on for my altered book page and I drew the belt with sharpie (again).

Last but not least.  C is a cat fiend, so her cat got the crown instead of her!

So here's my happy result.  It really doesn't look that great on here but I'm super stoked.  I carved this random pattern on one of those foam trays that chicken comes on and coated it with black paint.  No big deal. 
B
But, when I layed it down on a magazine sheet that I had soaked with an orange-based cleaner some of those random colors came through, along with some of the gesso.  T
You'll just have to take my word for it, it's cool and I'll probably be carving my little heart out now (I eat a lot of chicken LOL

Tag you're it

Once a month a group of my coworkers/friends and I get together for an artsy/craftsy day.  Most of my friends are quilters so they really don't understand my delve into the world of collage but next months "challenge" is "red" so I'm making tags for them.  Since Valentines Day is around the corner I used that idea and a running theme of queen of hearts.This is the first one; I had to keep it pretty simple because J is not into a lot of "stuff".  My classroom drives her nuts because I have my photos all over the walls and 16 years of accumulated teacher items everywhere LOL.  Will be posting the other ones as I finish them.

For this one I put a layer of gesso and stamped it with my text stamp as a sort of resist.  Once it was dry I painted it with 3 different shades of red, glued a piece of scrapbook paper on the right, stamped it, and pasted her face on a playing card.