13 weeks! One quarter of a year!

Its already 13 weeks since I started this blog. I'm thrilled that I've managed to stick to both the creative process and the journalling!! Its not unusual for me to shift focus to other projects, interests or fascinations to the detriment of what I've started.. So kudos to me for still going strong.

I had bought, with the help of my cousin Annemarie in Holland, some DVD on Holland history and geography for my mom's birthday. We thought watching stuff that she was familiar with would keep her interest a little longer. Unfortunately, DVDs are not universal, so when we got them they would not play through our equipment. Thank god for Mark, our computer guru who was able, with some challenges, to transfer them to a format that will play. Got them yesterday. It was hard to find out what was on the DVD's when I bought them through a Dutch site, BOL.com, (somewhat like Amazon), so the first one we sat down to view was all of 12 minutes with English voice over. Another one seems to have no voice over at all, just a camera going through various canals!! Not too thrilling. The 3rd one is about Historic Leiden, the city mom grew up in and lived until she married my dad. Completely old black and white films and stills from the 1930 to 1970. Some voice over that was in Dutch that was clear; other stuff from what looked like newsreels from the 40's was very rapid fire announcer type voice over that was hard to follow. Mom was quite intrigued and it did hold her attention, though she did not seem to recognize anything from the streets, canals and events shown.

I recognized places from when I was about 3 or 4 and was staying at my grandma's place above the Jamin candy store 2 of my aunts ran. I think this was one of the many times my mom was anemic and was in a sanitorium and I was left in Leiden. I caught whooping cough so I was laid up for sometime, and my uncle and aunts (un-married at the time) were living at home and taking turns entertaining the first grandchild!! I remembered being  taught how to tell time, and played at being princess Mariska! I also remember on Friday mornings the famers would drive their sheep, pigs and cattle to the market past grandma's house. I can still recall the smell. I slept in the front room upstairs. I always remembered the room being huge, until I went back to Holland when I was 11, going on 12. The room, in fact the whole 2 story apartment, seemed to be a whole lot smaller than I remembered.

Well on to the creative stuff! This week, I worked a a couple more small acrylic paintings using hand carved stamps and finished with gloss gel . The stamp is carved out of an eraser in the shape of a stylized leaf.

As well I did a larger abstract that seems to have sea horses in the patterns that evolved from the tissue paper surface when I added layers of very diluted acrylic paint.