Mom's Birthday Present

Happy Birthday to my Mom!

I've been working on this canvas for about 5 days now, and after a consultation with my muse, this is what I came up with and here's how I did it.

I started out with a 9x12 canvas and painted it my favorite colors, orange, yellow and hot pink. No rhyme or reason to the color placement, I was just being "free". I'm really practicing at being "free" with my art. Ok, so after the paint dried, I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with it. So I went blurfing. You know what blurfing is, right? It's BLog sURFING. I started with my favorite point, The Land of Lost Luggage. Julie had an entry there and it mentioned another blog with a lot of tutorials/techniques, so of course I went there. It's called ArtsyMama. Oh. My. Gawd! Calm down, Debbie. Breathe. Ok, I'm better now. On there, I found instructions for making ribbon flowers, so I thought I'd try that. I got out my wire ribbon and just played with it, being careful not to be perfect. So I made the flowers you see here.

Then I wanted to put something fun in the middle of the flowers and I thought since it was for Mom, I'd put pictures, but which ones? I went back on my hard drive and found the old, old (ok, not THAT old!) pictures of me, my sister and then one of our parents. I resized the pictures in PhotoShop Elements into a 3/4" circle, cut them out and glued them to buttons. BTW, I'm the one on the upper right and my sister is in the middle. I attached the buttons to the silk flowers with hot glue. Then I got some of the cool measuring tape ribbon I got up at the Fabric Barn in Long Beach. (That place is FABulous!) I took a scrap of white fencing and hot glued it to the bottom. The fence is not flat. It is wavy. Not all parts are glued down. It bows in and out. Get it? I had a tough time with the leaves, but my muse directed me to this final product and I love it. I added wire around the leaf areas for something 3D, and then strung the words on the same wire and hot glued it down. Oh, and I drew a thin black line around the edge.

That's it. I thought this was really fun to do, so I'm sure I'll be doing more.