I have been watching a lot of videos on water coloring flowers.  I don’t know if I can turn my wrist the way the artists show in their demonstrations, but I’m willing to try.  I have water colors, but wanted to create a palette of colors that will inspire me to make flowers.  I know it sounds stupid, because you can blend colors to create any color you want, but when I watch these artists, it seems that their palettes are focused on floral colors.

There’s one artist in particular, that makes me feel like I can do this…and here’s a link to the video I’ve watched, and re-watched.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arw-nteUQ3c    I’m not going to start until I know I can really devote some time to practicing, and I’ve been working on a couple of other larger projects that I want to finish first.  I’ve been collecting everything I need for our great niece’s freshman college journal/album.  I am at the point where I’m ready to put it together, and need to prioritize that first.  I’ll tell you how crazy I am, if you didn’t already know.  I bought a bunch of chipboard squares that are 6 x 6″ each.  I am making the base of the album from those.  They are white on one side and cardboard colored on the other.  Her college colors are purple and gold and her sorority colors are black and gold, so I thought I’d make the spine gold and the edges of the cardboard black.  How can you go wrong with black, right?  So I started by edging the cardboard with black ink, and that would have taken me forever….then decided maybe Oxide ink in black would be easier, and yet, it wasn’t.  So then I thought maybe paint…and finally, I had my answer…Black acrylic paint.  Worked like a champ..Believe it or not, messing around with all of those mediums and then finally painting the cardboard, took me an entire evening.  Of course I got sidetracked a few times, and then decided I needed to arrange my craft area, well, you know how I am…Squirrel…If you don’t recognize the squirrel reference, you need to watch the animated movie, “Up.”  It has a dog that talks, and he’s easily distracted…when he is mid-sentence, he might see a squirrel and says “squirrel.”  Rich immediately latched onto that phrase and when I lose focus, he’ll say “squirrel.”  Back to my story…

So I cleaned the area where I video and arranged a couple of drawers, then decided I needed to get back to the album.  I had pulled out some watercolor card stock that already has a gold pattern on it, and decided to paint some of them purple and some black.  The trick is wiping the excess paint off of the gold foil that’s on the card stock without wiping off the purple or black paint.  I had the worst time attempting this, and in the end, might not use some of the papers I painted.  I tried dabbing, wiping, using a baby wipe, a kleenex, the bibs I keep on my chair, and none of them seemed to wipe only the gold foil…they took most of the watercolor off of the areas without gold foil.  Frustrating?  Yes…You’ll definitely hear the whole story when I make the album video.

We’ve been having a lot of thunderstorms this week, and Honey has been spending most of her time in the basement with the door closed.  I, on the other hand, am not feeling like myself, as the change in barometric pressure messes with my arthritis…And boy do I hate the weather forecasters who don’t have a clue what the weather will be doing…The weather channel should employ a lot of people whose bodies are great weather predictors, as I am sure we’d have a much more accurate forecast.  Squirrel….

Tonight I’m having a video chat with my best friends from college.  We started doing this during quarantine, and have been keeping in touch every couple of weeks with this method.  I honestly hate watching myself live time, and don’t like to see myself, but love seeing my girlfriends and catching up.  There’s nothing like talking to old friends who know all of your secrets and still love you for your flaws.

Tomorrow is a big garage sale day and I’m looking forward to two church rummage sales nearby.  You never know what you’ll find at those, and “rummaging around” is great for the soul….

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