A new year 2016, and I sure hope it is a good one, 2015 was full of some not so good surprises, so hopefully we will have none of that this year!

First of all a big thank-you to all of the you that purchased art at the Sebastian River Fine Art and Music festival this past weekend. After the violent weather we had on Friday, Saturday was picture perfect but Saturday night and early Sunday morning proved to be even worse weather with many artists arriving Sunday morning to find their tents no longer standing, some in the river, and artwork destroyed. I was very lucky, but of course, we had prepared by securing the tent and taking all the gourds home Saturday night,

Today was another rainy and gray day but great for testing my new “Woodburning buddy”, a fan and filter to eliminate smoke while using my Colwood wood burner.  It really worked great, very little smoke odor and kept the smoke away from me. Definitely a good purchase.  Here is what I did today-

Inside the gourd where the stem was attached it looked like the center of a flower so I painted some petals and created a flower, a surprise when the gourd is opened.  Love doing that, finishing the inside of a gourd to me, is so important.  Many gourd artists don’t spend as much time finishing the inside, something I always do to complete it.