SECRET # 6: USING WHAT YOU'VE GOT

 
Well, we finally got the AC Guys out of our house early yesterday afternoon. It's an amazing thing -- to open your front door and feel cool air on your face as you enter -- is it not, after two weeks without? The Well Guys come tomorrow, to see if they can figure out why ours quit pumping a few months ago, and once we've got our Plan B water system up and running again, we'll have to figure out who to call about the clog in the line to our rain tank, which caused us to waste all the beautiful water streaming off our garage roof during the last two big storms.

In the meantime, I'm taking advantage of this wee little window of opportunity to do another lesson in my 21 Secrets art class! This one is called Flower Power, and is taught by another Aussie artist, Ro Bruhn. Wondering where I got that amazing paper whose texture peeks through the colors of my flowers? Well, I got it here:

We're recycling old security envelopes -- the kind your bills come in! Sketching and coloring the flowers on the inside of the envelopes is just step one. Next we will embellish them with doodles, then cut them out and use them in our art journals or other projects. If you follow the link above to Ro's blog, you will see examples of that in some of her own journals.  My only problem is finding interesting envelopes. My hubby pays most of our bills on line, so just about the only ones we get in the mail these days are all the hospital bills. It seems almost all American hospitals use boring, blue check security envelopes. Which is why, when I stumbled across that box of small envelopes with an interesting black and white pattern, I almost went berserk!

Did you know that different countries tend to use different security envelopes, while some, like Australia, use a wide variety of colors and patterns? So, if you happen to get mail from other places, check the insides of those envelopes before tossing them in the trash. And, if they contain anything other than blue plaids and checks, save them for me!