Houston we have a problem

Hola Friends!

Long time etc… Been mighty busy, have taken on something not huge but not tiny.

In so doing, I’ve had to reassess certain technical problems that were kind of bugging me.

Basically, the Mermaid’s eye has to come out.  It’s too heavy and simply wrong.

Then I realised that the Rococo shells were not to my liking.  I painted them individually from a drawing, whereas I should have worked from a photo of the the 3-d object.

I like more than I dislike overall, but what I dislike is so in my face, it has to go.

I need to completely understand what those holes at the base of the shells are doing, as they are not convincing in my opinion.  So I washed all of them off and it’s literally back to the drawing board.

But the good thing is, they were easy to paint, in that you keep turning the table top to paint the next and you get into a therapeutic rhythm and before you know it, you’ve completed the circuit.

OK, so because I believe we throw away too many clothes and the planet is choking under the weight of all this waste fibre, I decided to alter and up cycle my clothes.  I find this a very satisfying thing to do, because it saves so much money.  So I’ve sorted out four pairs of trousers, a pair of shorts and a blouse.  

On top of that, I’ve taken on a project that is not going to last forever but it’s going to be intense for a while.  Basically I took over a derelict piece of land.  I walk past this strip of land many times and about 6 weeks ago I was appalled at the state of it.  So having successfully created a wild flower meadow at the front of my parent’s house, by simply throwing mixed wild bird seed at it every Saturday, I realised that if you want to stuff lots of flowers in, you really need a bit of wheat in there too, as you need it to fix the nitrogen.  In organic gardening you always stick in your nitrogen fixers in what they call companion planting.

I did that in my own garden and hence I now have a jungle that I have to hack back now and again.  

Can I say, I know that as I work on this derelict patch of land people are looking at me thinking I will regret what I’ve started, because the soil is so poor and it’s not even flat.  But what they don’t realise is that with organic gardening, you can turn barren soil into a good growing medium in next to no time.  Forget lugging home sack after sack of compost….all you need is a good compost heap from which to make compost tonic and add volcanic ash and wood shavings and you can grow what you like in next to no time.

Oh well I have to go because ‘Always Hungry’ has announced his tummy is rumbling…