Random colours from the week!

Olive family at Duso's at Granville Island Public Market 

Mr Dragon fruit punctuates dessert!

My lovely heathers got dusted in snow this week!

snow falling on the brick work

:)

The things you learn...

:)

Today's Colour is PINK!

It's anti-bullying day. At school we showed up in pink shirts. It was also our class photo day and sports team photo day.
We made pink shirts to wear around our necks. Here are some of them:

A t-shirt pin. Pink is punk, bullying is bund (it means STOP in Hindi) 

Pink Monkey, or PM for short, has become our class mascot. Here he is during independent literacy time.

PM made his own pink t-shirt necklace.

You can read more about Pink day here. And here's a fun flash mob done in my town, just up the street.

Sacred Ground- Finding Colour in Life

Our Sacred Ground art journalling group met in the last week or so. We used collage and the theme of Finding Colour in Life. Here are the pages! If you want to take a closer look, you can click on each photo and it will enlarge a bit more.

I really enjoyed creating this page!  The continuous line drawing of myself and my daughter is symbolic of the twists and turns that life has been. The amazingly beautiful colours of the florals, sunset and rainbow - those represent the surprising joys that have intertwined with the unexpected twists and turns!  Trees...I love trees!...and the city line of Vancouver remind me of God's strength and creativity. The journey of "finding colour in life" has been like finding hidden treasure, unexpected and refreshing.
S.R.

 I had no visual plan when I started, it is interesting now to examine the images and “read” what is (apparently) colourful in my life. For example, the two Romanian women represent friendship/kindred spirits. The chair and coffee cup is “alone time”. The framed small Japanese flower is trusting  my own perspective. The open blue door is discovery, adventure, trying something new. The train is travel. The woman reading National Geographic is “incongruity”.
J. M.W.G.

Whenever I think of colour, I think of flowers. Their fresh and vibrant colours take my breath away. I wanted to have lots of flowers on my page and unusual combinations. I used paint chips, circle cutter, scraps of paper and leftover negative die cuts. I used large letter stamps with acrylic ink for the title and distress ink for the background.
S.J.S.J.

Thank you, friends- for sharing your pages in this post and for adding colour to my life!

Colour in my Bowl at Supper

Thank you, Mandy, for making us this amazing bouillabaisse!

Good food, great company- a colourful evening!

Even the discards were beautiful!

St Valentine's Colour: collage #7 of 2011

Here are some colours of the day:

some cards I made

sugar free turtles!

Colour in the Waiting Room

I really don't enjoy going to doctor's appointments. I worry, I fear, I hope the efforts I've made will show good results. I wonder if recent stress will continue to affect my blood sugars. I've spent the last 31 years and a bit going to doctor's appointments every few months, sometimes with real fear and dread of what they would pronounce. I dreaded the commands of what I should be doing, how I should be living, how I should be eating, exercising, managing... Never acknowledging how challenging it must be to continually be responsible, to never have a vacation from this chronic disease. Rarely asking me what I was feeling.

I'm so thankful it's not like that anymore. I have been blessed with gifted and caring specialists who treat me as a whole person instead of just treating my diabetes.

I still waited in the waiting room today, on a rainy grey day, hating having to be there. Then I looked up and saw this on the wall across the room from me:

What a wonderful display! Colourful interpretations of a rocky shore. I so needed to see that right at that moment.

I thought about how if I was the interior designer of a medical waiting room, I would fill it with art. Maybe huge photographs of the beach mounted on the wall. The sand, the rocks, the seaweed, the froth of the waves on the shore. These are what help soothe my fears and worries. I actually started seeing the photographs, in a series of three on the wall.

So after 30 years of focussing on preventing blindness, kidney disease, and circulatory issues in the feet, now my doctor and I will change our focus to preventing heart disease. Even though my LDL levels are at normal for the average person, the levels are much stricter for those with diabetes. Which means my bad cholesterol levels are elevated and I will begin to take a third medication to help me manage the cholesterol and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Hello, Crestor. Not thrilled to welcome you in to my life. But thankful you are there, nonetheless.

Now, let me go find some sand and beach stones to photograph. I am sure they are stunningly beautiful in the rain and the grey.

collage #6 of 2011- instead of sighs

from God Save the People- byStephen Schwartz Godspell

So I was on the treadmill at the gym...thinking about Egypt and the chaos going on there this week. This song came on my ipod and I started imagining it as a collage page. Inspiration comes in unexpected places sometimes.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Chinese New Year is very colourful! 

I was looking at the colours around me 

as we celebrated by eating out as a family. 

Hello, Rabbit!

The Double-Header!

One of the blouses I wear at this time. This means "blessings".

This one is a beautiful jacket.

Happy New Year!