Matty's Blue Seas Bistro lll

Christmas and Easter are my two favorite times of the year, especially for swapping.  Unfortunately, I have had to cut back on swaps this last year because I am not able to display the swaps like I want.  Rotating them out into various scenes and vignettes isn't working very well.   So, I dug through my stash of shadow boxes and small printers boxes to see what I could come up with.  This is my next project and as soon as they are done, I post some pictures. 

These next pictures are the last showing some of the accessories I made for the Bistro.  The first one is of the palm tree that I really lucked out on.

This is Pampas grass and can be found just about anywhere here in Florida.  The stem is hollow like a reed and the plumes are very fragile and "whispy" like (if whispy is a word).  I cut off a 5" section from the middle and painted it gray and hi-lighted it with a darker gray.  After that, I took some silk flower leaves, cut them to shape, glued to florist wire and put the end into the center of the reed.  Here is what I came up with.  It's not the best photo in the world, but hopefully you'll get the idea.  I  had hoped to be able to preserve the plume but it is so fragile that anything I sprayed it with just made it stick together.

These last two picture show the food I made.  The sushi is different quilling paper rolled into a tight coil while the caviar is sand mixed with either dark blue or dark orange paint.  The raw oysters are real tiny clam shells with a little gray varigated fimo for the oysters.  The clam chowder and pies are all fimo.  But I didn't bake any of the fimo-wasn't going to try and pry it out of the shell or bottle caps just to bake it.

Well, that's it for the Bistro.  I hope you enjoyed it.  Now I'm off to work on some shadow boxes.

As a last note, I want to apologize for not welcoming several new followers.  Along with quite a few other bloggers, we have had trouble with our Followers gadget.  I did get a reply from Google saying they were aware of the problem and are going to fix it.  Soon I hope!

Til next time!