All About Flowers Today

I want to say thank you to those of you who have sent such encouraging comments via my blog and personal emails. Blogging isn't as good as face-to-face relations, but in our fast-paced society, it's starting to feel personal.

I've been -- well, all over the place lately. In my blockprinting class, I'm focused on chine-colle prints, like the previous post. But at home it's a different story. Today I'm posting a couple flowers I photographed then passed through a filter in Photoshop Elements. They aren't altered much, really, just enough to make them more artsy.

About the first image, the pink rose: We grow these curly, almost neon-pink-and-orange rose bushes in our back yard which no one can see but us, and I'd bet Joe's not looking much, so that leaves me and the cat. But I really do like them. The black dots came from the filter. The image below it is a Japanese Plum tree twig from the tree in our yard.

This is one of those California ice plant flowers that open at sunrise and close at sunset. This one was just about to open up. I say "California ice plant" because my husband never heard of ice plants until he moved to California. It grows all over the neighborhoods where I grew up, near the south bay beaches, especially around the Playa del Rey dunes. I vividly remember seeing ice plant on my walks to school and the beach as a kid, and outside my old Playa del Rey condo.