Marmalade and Art

I think I post about Marmalade every year, but in February the knobbly, very ugly and very sour Seville oranges appear in the local grocery store for a short time, and as soon as I see them, I feel compelled to make marmalade. I think it's in my blood, as Mum made marmalade every year.
I have a vivid memory of Mum trusting me to stir the marmalade while she had to go out for half an hour, and of course as a 13 year old I had better things to do, and when she came home, there was a distinct aroma of burnt marmalade.... I was in BIG trouble. Perhaps my annual venture into marmalade making is to atone for my past mistake.

Squeezing out the juice, removing the membranes and the seeds, and cutting up the orange and lemon peel gets harder work every year, and then standing at the stove stirring and stirring, and getting hotter and hotter.....

 .... but the result is totally worth it. These 9 jars contain 8 Seville oranges, 2 lemons, 1 navel orange, some filtered water and approximately 3kg of white sugar. Enough for a few gifts and to last me a year of breakfasts. And there's even some left over for tomorrow's toast. Mum would be so proud of me.

This week our Art Group were invited to exhibit 40 paintings at the Community Centre in the nearby town of  Ajax. The art will hang in the main entrance hall. We delivered our paintings and the art curator arranged them along the walls to be hung. Some were arranged by size and some by subject and some by colour. These three are on the main entrance wall, the middle picture is a delightful image of an old cement plant... soon to be demolished.... painted by my art friend V. Love that picture!

And at the Art Group session last week, we experimented with intuitive paintings. This involved setting blobs of runny watercolor on wet paper and squishing the colours together with crumpled tissue paper, or wax paper, or even using saran wrap, and letting it dry.

I used some bubble wrap and some netting from an onion bag to create different textures.

Then when it's dry, taking the covering off gently and seeing images in the interesting patterns left.

That was the hard part! I couldn't see much, no matter which way up I held the paper, but other people saw fish and a turtle and flowers.... I'm still waiting for the turtle to reveal itself to me!

Oh well, I can always cut them up to make pretty bookmarks!