Iridescent Ice Heart

Hi Everyone.

Happy Wednesday night.  I hope you are all having a great week so far.

I have a couple of things for you tonight.  Firstly, I found a new challenge site.  Tiffany Guam has started a challenge on Sundays.  I saw this challenge this last Sunday  and thought… ah…. mmmm… that might make a nice and clean valentine card.  I wanted to make a heart card and really focus on just the heart.  Of course, I had to bling it up a little…. and Lou and I are the opposites of each other… so I thought… one blingy side to the heart and one matt side…. anyway – this is what I came up with

I used Cherry Cobbler and Very Vanilla card stock.  The heart was punched for the XL Heart Punch.  I then used the negative space from the punched heart to sponge a heart on the envelope. 

I used Versamark on one side of the heart and some Iridescent Ice embossing powder and my heat gun.  Voila – a heart with two distinctly different halves… that make up one heart!  Quite appropriate I thought 🙂

I loved the card and was really inspired by the sketch.

Now…. You might remember me asking everyone what they were doing for Valentine.  Linda left us this comment letting us know what she was planning. 

I'm going to my book club, spending the night with good friends generating great conversation. This month we're each 'selling' a book that we've read in the past month.

I then asked which book Linda would be "selling".  Here was Linda's response:

I'm 'selling' "An Inconvenient Elephant" by Judy Reene Singer, given to me by my daughter and son-in-law for Christmas. I spent two years in Thailand and fell in love with elephants there. There were two that sometimes camped with their mahouts (caretakers) in the field across from my apartment. Since there was no more teak logging work for the elephants, their mahouts would often bring them into the cities and take them around to outdoor restaurants. They would sell you sugar cane to feed to the animals.

I haven't read the book – but need to go check it out.  It got me to thinking though…. I am thrilled that logging was stopped in Thailand, but it did leave many, many elephants and their mahouts without jobs and without a purpose.  This struck a chord with me several years ago when I read an article about how these magnificent animals who, without a "job", were now being abused or put into circuses.  You can read a little introduction to the story of the painting elephants right here.  Right here…. you can see a painting by one of those elephants

Couple of things about this painting….

• it's in our dining room and, one a bright summer day, when the sun is lowering in the sky, the sun shines through our kitchen into the dining room and hits this painting.  It in turn lights up the entire dining room with a wonderful happy glow.  It wasn't intended that way, it just happened that way.   Also, I can see this painting from my desk and it makes me happy.  
• When we went to have it framed, I insisited it be framed in glass.  The woman at the art shop kept insisting it should go in a frame.  I told her that the Elephant had gone off the paper and I for sure wasn't going to frame it if she had gone off the paper… yep… she thought I was nuts.  She would not believe that it was painted by an elephant.

So, Linda, thank you for reminding me of my painting and for giving me an excuse to showcase it!

Prayers tonight for Rose, Adelle, Germaine.  For those affected by the floods – more floods coming – and fires in Oz.

Have a fabulous Thursday everyone.

Hugs

Jaydee

P.S. Linda – please could you send me your snail mail address to [email protected] – I have a little something I want to send you