Pressed Flower Art is an age old tradition and worthy to be described as an genuine art form.  Sadly, it is not recognised globally as an art.

An alternative way of creating art from the wild or from our own planted gardens, Pressed Flower Art is as artistic and creative as any other form of art, often taking at least the same amount of time, if not longer to create.

Pressed Flower Art is a medium to create anything from key rings, fridge magnets, bookmarks, greeting cards, desk and wall art, wedding keepsakes, funeral memorial keepsakes, jewelry etc.

Pressed Flower Cards and Framed Art.                        

Flowers From My Garden:

More Framed Art:

 Romancing the Rose. Pressed Flowers and Verse – Success.

The last piece of Framed Art and Verse is dedicated to Heather as she has not only made me ‘breathe easier’ but many others here at Soul Food Cafe.

Her encouragement and support makes you feel like you can accomplish anything.  As I once wrote of her, ’she has many diamonds in her crown’.

My first love of writing is still with me and I now include writing about my love and passion for nature, gardening, herbs and flowers.

More of my writing and Pressed Flower Art can been seen at:

http://seedsgarden.wordpress.com

Here I write about how to Press Flowers and create Pressed Flower Art/cards, Children’s stories and will include Herbs and Herbal Crafts and Gardening soon.

I also now have a website where my creations are available for sale:

http://camelotherbalenterprises.com.au

All images in this article are copyright.  Reproduction of any kind is not permitted.

©T.Seed 2009.

Creative Genius – Writing and Creating

Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper: Gifting the World with Your Words and Stories, and Creating the Time and Energy to Actually Do It

by Sark

Amazon Price: $12.89 (as of 08/27/2008)

Does anyone remember endlessly playing with “Fuzzy Felt”

as a child?

Here is a wonderful wild garden animation made of Fuzzy Felt on

You Tube.  Enjoy!

(copyright Imogen Crest 2008.)

Having only started with web 2.0 over the last 5 months, I am really amazed at what a great resource it is for learning and teaching. A new enthausiasm has returned to both classroom teaching and the students themselves.

Students have really taken to blogging. They love going home at night, taking photos with their digital cameras, returning to school the next day and endless patience can be witnessed with the relatively tedious task of  resizing their photos and renaming them. In our school we have downloaded irfanview from www.irfanview.com This is a freeware program that is just wonderful for editing images and so easy to use. It will allow you to change the brightness and contrast, alter images completely, add titles, create panoramic shots for headers etc and most importantly, rename and resize photos. …….. And lots more.

Students need to be familiar with the needs of audiences and the various outputs that their photos might need to take. Any work on the internet, really needs to be downsized considerably to allow minimum download time. As some of our work is still used for printing, photos are still taken in high resolution form and bmp files. However, students need to rename files to jpg (or gif or tif) when using it in their blogs etc.

Photos can be stored at flikr or photobucket but some of these websites are now blocked at school. Storage space on our file server is now at a premium as more videos, photos, movies etc are being taken, manipulated and worked into digital content.

Online slideshows can add extra pizazz as well. We like www.slide.com as it is an online slideshow presentation that allows images, transitions and music in the final output. Images still speak a 1000 words and students with lower literacy skills can always say what they would like through images and some text. www.smilebox.com is a download that looks really interesting and I am about to try that one with my classes. www.slideshare.com also appears to have value.

Students still really enjoy working with MS Photostory as it is so easy to use, quick to complete and gives them lots of options for motion plus music clips that can be used. These can be saved in email format and then uploaded to an online video website eg teacher tube and then either a link posted or code used to embed on their blog. I am also going to look into animoto. Our students are encouraged to create their own music using Acid 6.0 to avoid all copyright problems. Animoto allows the photos inserted to take on the beat of the music and seems to produce eyecacthing videos that look really professional.

In September, these giant sunflowers turned their faces to soak up the sun, bright yellows and greens. In October, after the first frost, this sunflower field looks a little wild. In another month or two, snow will cover all but the flower heads. Madison. Wisconsin, USA.

photographed by barbara © 2007

As I said in the previous post, my parsley bit the dust, literally.

To read the rest of this essay, please click HERE.

Lori Gloyd (c) 2007

13 10 2007

Students from various levels at LaTrobe Secondary College are working on a collaborative Wall Hanging to depict the story of the Magic Garden.

This is a workshop that was presented at Healesville High School.

After Cora had told the story of the Magic Tree students chose leaves, worked in small groups and considered what magic powers these leaves would have. The inbuilt desire to have a money tree dominated but there were lots of other fascinating suggestions as well.

During the session they created digital images of the tree and wrote short creative writing pieces about the magical powers of their leaves.

They wrote their stories on leaves

and used Microsoft Word. They turned their images into JPG’s and emailed their documents and images ready to be uploaded on to the Healesville Weblog.

In another session they will learn how to publish themselves. During this session it was stimulating to witness problem solving and dogged determination to cross the line and publish.

The metaphor of gardening has often been used to describe the spiritual experience of women.

To read the rest of this essay, click HERE.

Image and text: Lori Gloyd (c) 2007