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So. A better warm-up, a better ride, a better score (59.74) – it is so nice when work pays off!

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Rain settled over our head this morning and never exactly moved off – like a conveyor belt the clouds kept coming and kept dropping rain. Which we need, but I am hoping it will clear out, or move away from our heads, tomorrow. I was persuaded I needed to ride in the dressage show tomorrow. I had thought I was helping and watching and generally being useful, but a space opened up, and I said yes, thank you.

I'll report tomorrow how things went. I'm hoping for dry in the weather department, and over 60% in the score department.

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Two circles as promised, plus opening ceremonies for the Olympics.

On my way home I stopped at the fabric store to look for black thread, and I was ambushed by a stack of greens. see?

How doth the little busy bee – improve each shining hour? Mostly my shining hours were spent driving around today.

Of course, depending on what counts for a classical education in your house, you may instead recognize the parody of this in Alice in Wonderland:

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

I spent a long morning taking friends to the airport, and arranging a series of bells and signals for their return. Since we can't park curbside and wait for people to arrive on account of how we might blow the place up from frustration, we had to arrange other… arrangements.

The afternoon was completely engulfed in a horse scrimage, but it culminated in a FABULOUS riding lesson, utterly fabulous, thank you. I love Verne; with his prompting and under his eagle eye I feel so competent, and so worthy, and the red horse comes off as such a rock star!

And now, because there is serious weather headed this way, I am turning off the computer so its little innards will not fry when the lightning comes.

Two circles tomorrow.

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A circle, and a blue jay. I am delighted with the blue jay, and the hawk from Monday, and the thought of the crow who is coming next.

I've also been contemplating what I'll be working on in August. I think I'm going to start up an indigo vat, and see what kind of lovely blue things I can make.

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Both Kate and I wanted the Queen Anne's Lace printed on the silk organza to be a beautiful overlay on the same thing printed on a more opaque layer, and it just isn't quite. I think part of the reason is that my pleasure in the print of the flower is all the detail that is visible, and the stitching and organza layer do not combine to leave the detail clear. Which is a bummer.

That is why I experiment – because sometimes things really don't quite work. Even though I think they should.

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a circle, and one of three birds done – more later

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Another day that started out lovely and cool, but got hot later. Red Kate came by and we tried walking, but with my hip and her knee and the hot, we decided to turn around sooner rather than later.

It was a day of plotzing on the couch. Aerin did it first, I tried it before Kate convinced me to walk, Al accomplished it while we were walking, and Alice, pushed off the couch, wound up flopped onto the computer bench and an adjacent chair.

This was one of my favorite of today's prints. I'm finding what I can and can't roll paint over; feathers are a disaster, they stick to things and get wet and stuck togehter, the back of Queen Anne's Lace on the other hand, is brilliant. It is stiff enough that it holds a shape and bears up under a coat of paint, and can be pressed on without giving up the ghost.

The wubbly squishiness of the gelatin continues to please me immensely.

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or maybe more like smoosh – feathers are such a great idea for this process, but they do attach themselves to the brayer as you roll paint over them…

More on this later. I have to make two smaller bird pieces to go with the feather pieces to go to the gallery at the end of next week. One blue jay, to go with the feathers, one red tail, to go with that feather, and then maybe a pair with a crow and a crow feather.

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Yesterday's circle with two overlapping colors and images; a fern and some parts of Queen Anne's Lace.