Very, Very Sad.

I stopped at a store on the way home from work.

They were starting to put out their Christmas displays and merchandise.

I enjoy the holiday season as much as the rest of the world, but I don't want to see Christmas (aka "Holiday" to be politically correct) decorations in early September. I don't want to see them in September at all.

Sad. So sad. It makes me not want to shop at all.

(Except that I did get a nice pair of shoes in the store next door.)

Merry Freakin' Christmas!

Color in front of my face

It's a grey Sunday morning as I sit in a suburb of Detroit. I was just watching the yellow finches out the window chowing down on the seeds in the sunflowers (having their breakfast) and I saw a beautiful orange bird. I looked it up in my bird book and it's a Baltimore Oriole - what it is doing so far west, I don't know. I think that Ernesto might have blown it off it's tracks and it's now hiding in our trumpet vine plant. That's cool - the plant is orange and green, the bird is orange and black. It reminded me of a post that I saw on Robin Atkins blog (http://beadlust.blogspot.com) the other day about color templates/palettes in pictures. I took a picture of the trumpet vine the other day, and now need to get a close-up of the flower to see if I can re-create the same colors in a piece that I have in the back of my head. What colors exactly are in the flower and how many shades of green turning to black do I have to work with.

I was so intrigued by what I read on Robin's blog, that I ordered Margie Deeb's book "The Beader's Guide to Color " right away. http://www.margiedeeb.com/html/product.php?productid=168&type=2

Here's another picture of the same trumpet vine - taken this morning. I went through the picture and pulled the colors that you see on the left side of the picture. When I look at the vine from my bedroom window, I see more orange in the flower than I do the pink, which is interesting, because in a close-up the pink is the more dominant color.

Now, if that oriole would just come back so I could take his picture.....

Peterborough Petroglyphs - Ontario, Canada

I've been working on this piece since just before vacation. It's a t-shirt that I bought in 2004 from the Peterborough Petrogylphs. I never wore the shirt, but one day decided that it would be cool as a beaded piece. I cut out the shirt, and ironed fusible interfacing to the back for stability. Using mostly size 11 seed beads, I am doing mostly circles for adding texture to the piece. There are a few places were I have been working in 15 seed beads to get the detail of the man in the sky in the center and I'll add a few more to get the details of the carvings in the stone. I have enlarged them (as you can see in the pencil in the lower portion of the piece). I have three colors of blue for the sky, and an assortment of greens for the forest.