Taking Care of Our Fine Feathered Friends

We are a bird loving family and enjoy taking care of these sweet little feathered friends in the colder months, knowing that there isn't a lot of food for them to find.

We have lots of little plastic dishes of seed tied to the back railing on the deck and some on the front porch railing. We also have bird feeders around the yard. My son put these together...a log with giant holes (made with a very large drill bit), filled with peanut butter and seed. The nails serve as perches. 

Another way we feed them is to cut bread into small squares, fry it in lard and sprinkle with quick oats....They seem to gobble this right up. I used to watch my mom do this all the time during our very cold winters in NY...She would throw it on top of the snow and those that decided not to fly south for the winter got some warm nourishment.

We have one of our log feeders in the front...

 and a couple hanging off our deck. This is where we have the small dishes attached to the railing and we see a lot of birds eating from them....

so we hope they'll be brave enough to come to this log feeder. 

We also read somewhere that certain birds love oranges and apples so we hooked them onto several trees....

high enough for them to feel safe.

We've seen them nibbling at it...

They are so much fun to watch and we have such a variety of beautiful birds....It's also heartwarming to know we're helping them get through a cold winter. 

Fabric and Images

I have this small piece of wonderful fabric...great imagery.... so I scanned it and put it in Photoshop Elements to see if it could be manipulated into something interesting for a silkscreen. I'm not sure of the copyright laws on scanning fabric even though you can use the fabric itself for commercial purposes....

so I will be careful to change the image considerably or just use it on my own personal art...not for sale. It was just a fun thing to try...I do love Photoshop Elements and the many different options and filters for manipulation of an image.

This was a filter "find the edges" which is one I use a lot...closest to the original image only in line form.

I don't remember this one but don't think it would make a good screen.

This is just the image itself turned into a black and white print....I would remove the "dust" before making it into a screen.

I think this was "wind" as it moved the image around...

And this filter was "twirl" and a great candidate for a screen as the image is completely changed and interesting.

Til Next Time....