Derrick seems to be a lot better than he was on Saturday.  Adrian came back on Saturday from visiting in a state as close to despair as I think I’ve ever seen him.  Derrick had been fed through his nose tube, but had reacted and been sick which had thrown the tube out.  Worse than that, he had severe pain in his abdomen, to the point where he could hardly speak and Adrian spent much of the simply time holding his hand. We both went on Sunday and he was a different man.  Still not right, but feeling much better, and (keeping everything crossable crossed here) continuing to improve.  The hospital have told us that if they can get him stable and get the C-Diff under control,  they will move him to our local hospital which will be a lot easier for visiting.

Basil still doesn’t like going to the toilet in the snow – here he is dashing back in again.  Even though it’s blurry, I really love this photo as it’s caught his movement and it captures a certain something about him.

He’s still eating, albeit tiny portions compared to what he used to eat.

I never did get the melt pot switched on the other night.  Isn’t it strange how you set off with one intention in mind and something completely different happens.  I have been wanting to play with the German scrap birds we got in before Christmas and for a while I have thought they would look good painted with Golden’s fluid acrylics.  The paint is very transparent, so a little paint would let the gold shine through.

I painted the bird with Phthalo Green (Blue Shade) and Phthalo Blue (Green Shade).  Yeah, I know, the colour names are just mad.  I don’t know why they didn’t just call them bluey-green and greeny-blue, but I guess that wouldn’t have been as clever as coming up with a chemical name that starts with four consonants.  Anyway, regardless of the names, these are two very intense, er, well bluey-green and greeny-blue colours and together they give you  gorgeous deep toned turquoises, but at the same time, they are quite transparent.

Anyway, over the gold German Scrap they went and did indeed give me the rich glowing colour I was after.  I hunted around for something to put my bird on and came across a pair of chipboard jotter covers that I’d painted with the same colours and covered with a sheet of paper from the Graphicus Guild paper pack.

We had generated some strips of scrap paper at work from a printing project and Adrian came up with the idea of making a shopping list style book with these skinny left over pieces.  The colour of my covers was perfect – too close a match for the bird to show up, so I needed a contrast.  I found it in the form of a tag which had previously been coloured with some combination of Glimmer Mists (I’m guessing from the moulin rouge set).  I stamped some flowers from the Grungy Brocade stamp set using Ranger Clover pigment ink and embossed with holographic embossing powder.  I looked at the bird and decided he needed a little rub down to let some of the gold show through.  Then I wanted him sparkly, so he got a coating of the holographic embossing powder as well and I love how it turned out.

This is the sheet that the bird came from

I can see some interesting possibilities for those butterflies with this technique.

Now, maybe I’ll get that melt pot switched on …