My BFF has a big birthday coming up in a few days.  I picked up a little present for her last month while we were on vacation, which I intended to mail to her with a hand-painted birthday card.  

Here's the kind of crap that foils my best-laid plans:

I started the birthday card two weekends ago.  On the front, I painted a pushcart full of flowers.  Instead of sketching a side view of the cart, I drew it angled a little toward the viewer.  At this angle, the wheel is no longer a perfect circle to a viewer, it's an oval.  I must have spent two hours trying to get the wheel right.  At some point, I said ENOUGH! and started to paint.  Long story short, the painting sucked.  I intend(ed) to re-do it.

A few days later, another idea sprang to mind.

My BFF likes birds, and she likes coffee.  I could paint some birds around a coffee mug.  I have a sublimation printer, sublimation paper, and a heat-press machine with a mug attachment.  It's on.

I went right to work painting birds.  I did two paintings - one that was a bunch of little multi-colored birds on a limb, and one that was 3 big, fat bluebirds singing their heads off - and asked The Husband which style he liked better.  He liked the bluebirds.

I took the bluebird painting to the scanner.  I'd painted it on 9" x 12" paper.  Well, guess what?  My scanner bed is slightly smaller than that. One or both birds would lose a piece of its tail if I trimmed it to fit.  

Last weekend, I cut the bluebird painting apart and used the pieces as gift tags for my granddaughters' birthday presents.  They thought their tags were so cool.

That was a week ago.  

Yesterday, I did another bluebird painting.  I wasn't happy with some parts of it, tried to alter it, and made it worse.  Meanwhile, I discovered that the scanner on my sublimation printer was actually slightly larger than the scanner on my other printer (which I'd tried to use to scan the original bluebirds).  The original bluebirds would fit on the sublimation printer scanner!

Oh, wait . . . I cut them up, didn't I?

*sigh*

The birthday is this week.

In about an hour, when Nanny leaves for church, I'm going to the garden to plant a few more tomatoes and do a little weeding and/or fertilizing.  I bought another pound of purple hull pea seeds that I might plant in the remaining grassy strip, if I have the energy to do it.

Then I'm going to come home, take a shower, stir up a fruity drink, and paint bluebirds.

One.

More.

Time.