School holidays are over.

The last two weeks have been hectic to say the least.  I have had art withdrawal.  Early in the holiday I attempted to do a water colour, nothing special just a cute picture of a kitchen scrubber set my mum gave me.  Easy you may say, but you try to do it while watching a child in a swimming pool, with her pet guinea pig in tow (yes he  was in the water too) and trying to chase three naughty chickens that are getting into every thing.  I have attached photos of my attempt, just to give you an idea of the bedlam which erupts in our house every holiday. 

This is the simple little scrubber set and below is what I did to the poor thing.

The picture was hand drawn and as you can see the bottle is very bent, probably from me leaning around to see what Audrey and the guinea pig were doing.    That is all I managed for the whole two weeks, shameful really.  At least I gave it a try but learned a valuable lesson.  It is far better to give in and just play with my daughter and animals for the two weeks than trying to do both at once and creating a disasterous picture like this. 

Audrey has returned to school, the new chickens are still destroying my garden and I have to run errands for the rest of the week, but next week is mine.  I hope to start a painting, make some clay brooches and attempt to make some greeting cards.

I have a real problem with straight lines (refer to my painting of the soap dispenser above) and this especially applies to cutting.  With my brooches I hand cut the backing cardboard and paper bits and they take around four to five attempts to look slightly straight and yes I use a ruler and set square but it still doesn't work.   Yesterday I went shopping and bought myself one of those cutting boards with the blade and rulers attached and I can't wait to see if I actually cut something straight for once.  If it works (and I hope it will), I have also purchased some blank cardstock and heavy paper and will attempt to make some cards from my old pictures.  I even bought some double sided tape (thanks for that tipTracey) so that I won't get glue up to my elbows.  There is nothing worse than trying to get up after glueing things and you find half of the paper is stuck to you. 

To go with my Marine Madness brooches, I am going to attempt to make some tropical flower brooches.  Not sure exactly what they will be yet but will play with the clay and see where it takes me.  I find it is best not to plan this sort of thing and just let the imagination take over when designing new things.

Now to go chase some chooks off the flower beds, still don't know how three tiny creatures can move so much dirt in so little time.