Painting Paper and Then Cutting "Viewpoints"

AFTER stamping this paper, front and back, Thursday night and Friday morning, I was so pleased with the color combinations I didn't think I would do a thing with them, except maybe inscribe them with a poem throughout.
Then this morning I began arranging them and I wanted to see some of the blue contrasted against the orange and so I got an Exacto knife and began cutting slices of them away. Then I thought, why not cut and bend back a few sections so I can save pieces and see various colors against each other. Then I thought why not keep cutting and see more and more color combinations!?! Voila! Turns out the stamped papers weren't so very precious after all.
So then I started cutting up practically brand-new New Yorkers, which haven't even been read (like that's going to happen any time soon!) and using some of the illustrations to look at through "viewpoints."
Tell me if you can think of things that are more pleasurable than scissors and paste? Well, OK, there's other things, but therapeutic? Oh, my, yes!
Outside the Mister was chopping weeds and I was trying not to feel guilty and I did a pretty good job of it. The Solomon's Seal is shooting from the ground, growing inches in a day. I cannot wait to see the white pendulous bells hanging from its branches.
Remember the brand new gel pens I said I found at Office Depot? Well, I started doodling - inspired I think by Fairy Shoes and Other Things "Arthur Rackham trees." Or another blog? I can't find it now. The blogger was talking about a field in England where certain purple flowers grow, sprouting in fields from the blood of Danes lost in battle. (Wait! I'll google it!) Found this:

The Knights Flower (M. Il-Warda tal-Kavallier) is the name given to the fruit of a wild creeping plant commonly believed to grow between May and September, within Fort St Angelo, and nowhere else. According to tradition, this plant sprang out of the blood shed by the knights in defence of the fort during the Great Siege of 1565. The fruit resembles the eight-pointed cross of the Order of St John, but two of its points on one side are slightly tilted at an angle with their opposite points.

Since classical times there have been numerous metamorphosis stories relating how human beings were transformed into trees. In the story of Polydorus in Virgils Aeneid (Book III, lines 22-68) the tree grows out of the heros tomb. An old French chronicle relates how sweet-smelling roses grew out of the corpses of the fallen Christians, but briars and thorns out of those of the Saracens. (Oh my goodness - my comment on this.)

The flower on the blog looked something like a trillium, but dark purple with a taller stem. Sorry, I don't know whose it was. Well, that's what I get for wandering without leaving bread crumbs - femminismo