Growing Pains (ugh!)

Another wedding brought a request from my daughter to create something to add to their gift.  It was last minute so it didn't leave me a lot of time, but I finally declared it finished and sent it off.

But I'm not really happy with it.  I can find a thousand things wrong with it.  But I'm going to post it just because I think it's all part of the learning process.  As Kathy Millici taught us, "Each time I practice, I get better and better."  Which means I need to do a lot of practicing.

On a brighter note, we finally have a hummingbird coming to our feeder!  Yay!  She is still too shy to get a good picture (I have to take it from the upstairs window right now, and it's pretty far away), but everytime I see her I get so excited!  Here's my best picture of her so far.

Happy last-week-of-summer!

Fun with flourishes!

While at IAMPETH, I took a class with Kathy Millici of 24 Karat Design Studios on flourishing.  It was such a great class -- she really helped break down the whole process into understandable steps.  First she talked about visually pleasing angles for the flourishes and then she led us through a practice where we first just lettered a name without any ascenders or decenders.  Then we used tracing paper on top of it and a pencil to work on flourishes that would fit well together.  And here all along I thought that if I got good enough, I could just whip off flourishes without even thinking about them.  (Well, OK, I know that Kathy can do that, but how nice that I can work on the process at a slower pace!)

Over the week-end I was invited to a bridal shower, so I put my new-found flourishing skills to good use.  I took a few pictures as I went along, but they won't post the right way on this blog, so below is the finished product.  It just fit into a small square opening in a lovely collage frame that they can use for their wedding pictures.  It's not perfect by any means, but I really like the way it turned out.  (I forgot to take a pic of it in the frame -- next time!)