Beauty after rain

 

The air felt so light a clear this morning after light rain overnight. I am always drawn in by the droplets lining to the rain washed plants and blossoms. The intensity of colour of a single iris  in a kerbside garden drew me in.

Love the crystal clarity of a drop of water on a crinkly kale leaf.

The lorikeets were out celebrating and cleaning and preening this morning; and they are loving the grevillea flowers.

G's orchids were also refreshed.

Over breakfast Fiona and I talked about the importance of finding hope in small things and in random acts of kindness - holding on to those things when there are so many big and darker things are beyond our control.

The magic of multiples

 

Making multiples can be hard work - the task seems to take so long to come to an end. I was determined to get the 7 sets of Daily Leaf Words finished over the weekend - in fact there were 8 sets of leaf words as you can see from the photo above (56 word leaves in all). I managed to find a spare Daily Word bowl at the studio so was able to make up 8 sets as you can see from the photo below.

A couple of photos of the bowls and leaves finished  - one on the work bench and the second of the seven bowls reflecting the painting on the wall.

Following are a closer shots of a few of the bowls with words including the torn bowl and the spiral bowl with a couple micro cracks.

A great outcome.

Stitched metal...

 

I'm making an effort to finish off some metal work before heading to the cottage in Scotland. I planned to make 7 Daily Leaf Word sets. I have all but finished the sets of leaves; but had hardly made a start on the bowls - today was the day as you can see from the photos in this blog post. 

But working with metal can have its challenges. I was using metal cut from different silver-plated trays - some silver over copper and silver over brass. However I discovered that one larger tray I cut up was in fact silver over brass that had nickel added to it - makes it more silvery.  In past blogs I have reported that depending on the amount of nickel the metal can't really be annealed and can be prone to split. The metal on two of the bowls split. As you can see from the opening photo one split badly. Rather than scrap the bowl I decided to finish hammering it into shape and stitching across the split with 1mm brass rod. I like the outcome.

Before I show some process photos, below are few more photos of the two split bowls - including a spiral patterned bowl - the only ones I completed today. The shiny metal was reflecting the painting on the wall - I rather like it.

And as promised some process photos.

I hope to finish the other 5 bowls over the weekend.

Mainly looking down

 

It was a cold morning made bitter by a biting breeze. A couple of photos of the cold dark clear morning light follow.

My hoodie was up so my eyes were mainly looking down at the ground hugging blossoms - but there were a couple of glimpses of the big blue sky as in the opening photo and the one below.

On to those looking down photos.

A walk to G's orchid house offered some morning smiles - unusual bi-coloured crucifix orchid.

Even on a bitter breeze day there are fragments of pre spring beauty.

Small scribed and etched cube

 

It has been a very busy weekend looking after visitors and getting parcels ready to send to Scotland. But I did need a little creative hit so I decided to make a small cube ( 62mm cube) using one of the aluminium plates with etched circles and to create a counter point I carved lines into another plate that had not been etched. Completed cube above.

I cut a 55mm wooden cube; and as you can see I have clad it in aluminium plate using solid brass nails. Some process photo follow.

And of course the cube from a couple of different angles. Each of the six faces is different.

What am I going to do with it I hear you ask - at this stage I have no idea - just created because I thought it would look grand.