Back to Work
Although I really like to do craft work I have never been very proficient --probably because I am uncoordinated and kack-handed. Fine work has always been completely beyond me.
 But if I concentrate I can manage some things. Right now I am trying to finish a project I started last year to make a treasure chest shaped box to house some very old hand made nails, and I'm also working on a combination 3D and Photography project to display some of my zoo pictures.

These two old nails where found when excavating beside our cellar when we lived in Oshawa Ontario in the 1960's.The box has some of the brass sheet attached and the next step is to finish gluing and decorating the brass around the lid and body of the box.

Below is the frame I have made by gluing a number of book covers together. I have started painting it with black gesso. Next I am going to iron some iron-on binding onto a piece of cloth that I have in my stash. I will use the cloth, blue with a black pattern, on one side of the the frame and use paper and paint on the other side to be the backgrounds for mounting the photos.

This sort of project will be very familiar to scrapbooking people and those who make artist books, but it is new and challenging for me. I will report on progress from time to time.

DEEP IN THE EARTH OUR ANCESTORS PAINTED!

I don't know what was better-- the movie The Cave of Forgotten Dreams -- or my exploration of the Chauvet Cave on the internet.
The cave, first explored in 1994, is in the Ardèche valley region of France.
There is some dispute over the age of the drawings. Carbon dating isn't as accurate as we might be lead to believe. They might range from 32,000 BC to much more recent. Does it matter?
More than 400 painted or engraved animalsare found in the extensive cave.And these are well illustrated in the links below. 
On one of the sites I found a youtube link which gave a beautiful tour of the most impressive of the Chauvet cave art. On another is an interactive map of the cave which allows you to see features of the limestone structure of the cave as well as the art work, remains of cave bears, and human footprints.

www.donsmaps.com/chauvetcave.html
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/september-2011/article/revisiting-the-chauvet-cave 
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2001/08/01/html/ft_20010801.6.html
www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/

This is a cave bear skull that has been placed on a rock in the distant past.

  The animals these Palaeolithic people painted included bison, aurachs, mammoths, lions and leopards, horses, bears, rhinoceros with long wicked horns. 


most of these pictures are courtesy Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license