Linda's Magic Workshop - Linda Britt Design

The beach at Aptos CA Peter and I just returned from a quick 4 day trip to Aptos CA near Monterey CA to pick up a beautiful blue harpsichord he bought on E-bay.  Early keyboard instruments are a love of Peter’s and we both are learning to play. Our Flemish Moermans 1583 Hubbard Copy Harpsichord It’s been a long time since I’ve been in that area and I knew there were two things I wanted to do. One was to take a walk to the beach and the other was to have dinner at Shadowbrook Restaurant in Capitola. I still remember the first meal I had there 30 years ago! When we arrived in Aptos, we got the chance to walk to the beach from the seller’s home.  Walking through the forest to the beach offered so much texture and color that I thought I would share that walk with you.  I’ve always found the beach and the sand to be calming.  In fact, I could spend hours watching it.  Red-breasted Sapsucker was working on his tree!  Those are his holes for hiding food! All k

Last week I started sharing my vision of a book for my friend, Michelle, who helped me press and collect the flowers from our 2008 trip to Ecuador.  My next step was to visit my neighbor who is a talented bookbinder.  I took my finished pages (at least I thought so at the time) and hoped he would have some suggestions for putting the book together. We discussed making an accordion of folded paper to hold each page or making a box to hold the loose pages.  I took home two books on bookmaking to read and experiment.  One of the requirements I had was to make sure I could open the pages fully without damaging the dried flora.  That presented challenges of protecting the flowers and I used a translucent paper to cover the dried flower cut smaller that the floral page.  It would be easy to lift the translucent cover to see the actual flower. Somewhere about this time I realized that I had 2 different widths of pages.  That would never do!  To solve that issue I ma

Once in a while I clean off a shelf in my studio and find things I put aside for inspiration or a project.  This week I found the pressed flowers from the trip to Ecuador.  They were stacked between construction paper in a folder and are in pretty good condition.  There were even moth wings we collected. In between other projects (like using older clays in jewelry and making soup and jerky), I decided to take pictures of the  pressed flowers for a photo book and research how to mount them.   I want to give a book to my friend, Michelle, who helped me collect the flowers as a memory of our trip.  Michelle and her husband, Chan, went to Ecuador with Peter and me in 2008.  I remember Michelle asking what I ever did with the pressed flowers and my answer was ‘nothing’.  Guess it is time to do ‘something’.  Today I set up the camera on a tripod outside in natural light and started shooting.  Next was editing the photos and deciding the book layout.  I’m almost done with the