Painted hands, painted nails

Why is it that despite wearing rubber gloves I still get paint all over my hands and nails?  Answer: because I'm stupid enough to take off the gloves when washing the plates, brushes and rollers.

Sewing has gone out of the window recently as I've had the urge to create lino blocks.    I love stylized plants and lowers and recently bought Angie Lewin's book "Plants and Places".   It gave me the source and inspiration to create lino blocks of stylized grasse.   First I tried my hand at drawing a sun, and clover and plantains and carving out a negative block.  However, when I printed it out I thought there was too much paint and not enough detail.

So I tried to create a positive lino block by stamping the negative block onto another piece of lino and removed all the blue ink.   It took me much longer than I anticipated but I like the effect.  Some of the plant details got lost in the cutting as I found it too difficult to leave tiny spikey bits without cutting off the tips.

This piece started off as seed heads with a view to making something for the EG's 'Sewing a Golden Seam' challeng.  Or alternatively as an overstamp for one of the pieces of screen printed fabrics I did at Summer School.  Not sure now I've finished it what I'll actually do with it - any ideas?

I actually did this lino cut some time back but have only just printed it out onto fabric.  I think it would make a good book cover or ......?  Alternatively I could mount the block onto a canvas and use it as wall art.

Not sure why Blogger has turned these photos and I don't know of anyway to turn them the right way round now that they've been uploaded.

I've also been playing with Paintshop Pro and Photoshop but the PSP ones are on my laptop so I'll show them another time.   I've been concentrating on using adjustment layers together with 'effects' to see what can be done.  This one was a soft light adjustment, rainbow gradient that I created and reduced the opacity to 50% and gave it a soft plastic filter. 

This one was uses a photo a rose, gradient filter and a photo of Fountains Abby as a displacement map

 Got lost in this one and am not sure what steps I took.   Apart from framing two layers and using the buttonise filter on both together with dropped shadows.   I was aiming for one of those plaster plaques effects that were all the rage many years ago.   I know I overlayed two gradients and a  photo of lupins up against the shed in our back garden.  Apart from that sorry not sure what I did.  It was getting late and I was watching a film at the same time.

As for the state of our kitchen, it is all finished, clean and shiney (well almost shiney) and I can now get to the front door without feeling like I've just climbed Everest.  Living room is the next one to tackle but I've seen the price of wallpaper so I'm going to do the cheap and cheerful and test out the steam cleaner on the walls.   If it looks okay well it'll do another year, if not Keith will have to open his wallet and let the moths out.