Projects

My Mom arrived on the 6th of July. I'd been to the Rugby match the day before, so Jenny and I had stayed over at her aunt and uncle's house. That meant I didn't have to leave at a quarter past early to collect Mom. Yeay! Got her and we all traipsed back to Essex. Mom and I both really needed a nap, so we had a brief sleep. Well . . . I had a brief kip. Mom slept for a couple hours. She was good and jetlagged. When she got up we started planning our two projects.

The first project is what my Dad termed The Great Wall of China in Colchester. My office has been in desperate need of a spruce-up since I moved in. I painted the walls white originally, and haven't done anything with them since. So Mom and I discussed what we'd do with it. We decided on an Oriental Theme. Something of a cross between China and Japan. The design is a Chinese/Japanese woman who stands slightly to the left of the centre of the wall. To the right of the centre, and up a bit, is a Dragon. We decided the mythology behind it is that the woman is Mother Nature, and she's bringing in Spring. The Dragon is bringing the warmth of spring with his firy breath. There's a band of flowers flowing between Mother Nature and the Dragon, which, when breathed on, change into butterflies. There are different Oriental Medalian designs in each courner, and the colours fade from a dark teal in the upper right, to a dark red/pink in the lower left. It's a marvelous murial. Took us a whole week of solid work. Well . . . when I say 'us' I really mean 'Mom'. But it looks fabulous!

The second project was a scrapbook of the Morocco photos for my Grandma's Birthday. In fact, this took us the full time Grandma was here to complete. I finished the last page at 3.00 in the morning the day she was due to leave my house! But we got all the photos aranged on the pages for the actual birth day (25 July). We worked very hard at it till Grandma arrived (15th) and then after that we worked every evening on it, and any day we weren't doing anything else. It was exhausting, but we made it in the nick of time. We were up till 3 or so on the morning of the 25th to get it all done, then back at work on it by 10.00. The only things that weren't done when we wrapped it up were the titles/words on the second half of the book. Actually, the words usually take more time to do than arranging the photos does! It turned out to be totally worth it, though! Not only did the book turn out lovely, Grandma was absolutely wild about it. When we gave it to her, she sat and looked at it for over an hour! And the first thing she wanted to do when she got back that afternoon? Look at it some more. That usually means we done good :) I took it home that night and continued to work on the words. As I said before, it took me right up to the very last night to finish. Looked pretty spectacular when it was done, though!