Linda's Magic Workshop - Linda Britt Design

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is located in Arizona and Utah and covers 91,696 acres.   It’s a place where you can almost feel time stand still and peace envelop you.   The large and varied rock formations were formed by erosion and range from 100 ft to 1500 ft tall.   Many of the formations have been given names – Elephant Butte, Camel Butte, The Three Sisters, Totem Pole and more.  Camel Butte (Can you see him?)  Tourism is big business here.   “The View” is a beautiful new hotel and every room has a view of the monuments.   We saw more rental RV’s than we could count.   And well over half the visitors were from other countries.   I was most interested in seeing the rock formations, the striations and faces of the rocks, the light and shadow as the sun moved across the sky.   The colors and textures made me want to get clay out and model while I observed the changes.    I have no doubt that this ...

  Canyonlands is a wilderness of rock.   It is vast and sculptural and colorful.   It is fascinating to see the various rock formations, canyons, and mountains that make up the expanse of this National Park. There are three areas, Island in the Sky, The Maze, and the Needles.   The Maze and the Needles were a little too remote and needed a 4 wheel drive, lots of water and supplies.   We explored the Island in the Sky.   From the broad mesa, you can see views spread before you that stretch for a hundred miles in front of you and 1200 miles beneath you.   Views abound that take your breath away and are difficult to comprehend.     Rain is scarce but it is spring/summer and when we rounded a corner we had to stop and look.   There below the very tall rock formation were a lovely variety of wildflowers blooming.   What a sight! Yellow and purple wildflowers Quite the View! Lizards find rock shelves where they can...

As most of you know, my Tuesday blogs for a few weeks will be about my trip to several Utah monuments and parks.   Friday blogs usually have something to do with jewelry and creativity.   I always take a sketch pad and camera with me on trips.   So many things I see spark an idea for a piece of jewelry I want to make.   This trip was no different and one of the ideas I had after seeing the magnificent rock formations was to combine the vertical slabs of rock with the angled layers.   Since I’ve been taking several polymer clay classes, I decided that would be the medium.   Rock colors (copper, black, white, gold) mixed with some metallic mica powder and pepper represents the minerals.   I made some canes that combined the colors and that I could flatten for the long vertical rock formations.   For those of you who don’t know what a polymer clay cane is, picture a long cylinder of clay that has a design running through it.   You slice...

Good friends called to say they were going to travel to Kenya and Tanzania.   They knew that Peter and I had gone a few years ago and wondered if we had any advice.   Of course we do!   I told them I would look through my journals and send things that might be interesting. What fun I had going through my journals!   We spent 10 days on a tour mostly in Tanzania with http://www.africa-adventure.com/ .   The best part was having our own guide, Firozdin Rafiq . We could stop and take photos and watch wildlife anywhere we wanted and he was extremely knowledgeable about birds to elephants and inbetween.  (He has a fb page).    I think I came home with over 700 really good photos not counting the ones I trashed.   We were interested in everything! Because we were going in a small plane between Kenya and Tanzania, we were allowed a total of 35 pounds each.   That included the camera, lenses, binoculars and clothes.     I came across...