Catching Up - Again

February was a busy, short month. I spent most of it off-line and with my mom in Florida. She's getting older, and every so often, I need to trek down to see how things are going with her. I was hoping for a sunny, warm break from the New England winter, but Florida was in the middle of a cold snap. In spite of the 40-50 degree weather, I persisted in pretending it was warmer and wore tees and sandals. I think the locals thought I was nuts; I probably am......




I finally finished the bright yellow socks from yarn my friends Margo and Nina gave me last spring. I have never been so slow on a sock project before. The yellow yarn is really, really bright and has stripes of red, pink, mint, blue, and taupe.








While I was away, my new paint brushes, inks, and ink stone arrived from China. Today, I played around with them and did a couple of easy test pieces to see how the brushes behaved. The first one is a very brief sketch of a mountain, the second is a few stalks of bamboo to test the various sizes and two types of inks. I have not finished that piece yet. Notice my new "chop" in red at the bottom? That was a treat my son and daughter-in-law-to-be (as of March 9th!) threw in the box for fun.












In this last picture, I was fiddling around with some leftover watercolors and some new rubber stamps. I rather liked the results.