In the Spotlight + Mini-Challenge... Di Hasthorpe

Hi! I'm Di Hasthorpe and it's my pleasure to host the mini-challenge this month and to tell you a little more about myself.

I'm 61, married 40 years, with one son. I'm a retired primary school teacher and while teaching, had strong interests in Gifted Education (Masters Degree) , music ( band, choir and dance) and art/craft (both within the school and at district level). My interests in Art changed often with what I wanted to teach students and were quite varied according to the age of the students in the class. Over the years I taught copper enamelling, macrame, pottery, batik, and string art... just to name a few. 

My current interests are also quite varied and now that my husband has also retired, these are able to be indulged in more often.

As a family we love to travel whenever we can; if not for a holiday, then at least explore the district we live in as well as others close to us. This gives us quite a number of beautiful places to relax, take photos or go for walks.

Photography is a family interest and I travel just about everywhere with my camera these days... you never know when you may need it. I've become fairly adept at taking photos out of the car window while driving along (I'm the passenger!) My favorite types of photos are based on scenery, flowers, wildlife and skies... usually sunsets.

A sunset shot taken from my front garden. 

My blog, My Tawny Inspirations is named after

my favorite visitors to our garden: Tawny Frogmouths.

A family of tawnies. There were 5, two years ago.

You can see 4 here, the 5th was on another branch. 

I also enjoy cooking (which has had major experimentation phases since I was diagnosed with coeliacs) and experimenting with Australian native plants.

Art/craft interests include: painting (watercolour and acrylics), sketching, zentangling, quilling, parchment craft, cardmaking, scrapbooking and off the page projects. The list is growing and there are still some arts I want to play with... silk painting and glass mosaics for a start!

At school I always tried to tie art into all of my subjects. Display of these became an issue... but hey! a room just doesn't have walls! there's also the ceiling!! It was always possible to know which rooms I had been in because there were always hooks screwed into the ceiling and architraves ready for hanging things.

One of my favourites was to make mobiles. This can be done so easily with photos as well, for an unusual display. 

A water-inspired mobile done for an earlier challenge.

As you can probably gather by now, my Mini-challenge is "HANG IT".... any medium, anything that can be hung... off people, posts, ceilings, walls, key rings, mailboxes... the list could be endless.

For your inspiration I've made a suncatcher. This was made from a spiral of stainless steel wire, recycled packaging coloured with permanent markers and alcohol inks, crystal beads and braid.

Complete suncatcher.

Close-up of a section of the suncatcher. 

Pop on over to my blog: http://mytawnyinspirations.blogspot.com.au/ to see some more close-ups and details on how this was made.

You will have a week for this mini-challenge and I look forward to seeing what you come up with and visiting your blogs to leave a little love.

Cheers, Di 

** A NOTE: This challenge has been extended to June 12

to give more time to play along

with Di's Wonderfully Dimensional Challenge**

An InLinkz Link-up