the answers

Thank you everyone for participating. This was fun for me and the results were very interesting. Everyone managed to identify most but the two that were consistently missed were #2 and #4 although Vickie at Nature's Details and Butternut Squash from goddessoftheconfluence did correctly see the clouds in #4. No one saw the prickly pear cactus flower buds in #2. That really surprised me. But then, as I told Hilary of The Smitten Image, I think one of the problems with it, besides not knowing what prickly pear cactus buds look like is that in the picture above it, the white is the positive part of the image whereas in the next one, the black is the positive part of the image.  I think after seeing the first one, the brain is primed to see the white as the positive. Once I pointed that out to her, she could see the image. Steve at Out On The Prairie was closest with his guess of asparagus.

The ones I thought would be hard to discern were the boulders, the clouds, the canoes (which just about everybody saw as some type of boat) and the landscape of the river and canyon wall which most people also saw as some type of landscape involving cliffs and water.

My other thought about these pictures was that if they could not be recognized it would somehow diminish the piece but I've changed my mind about that after all the wonderful comments about the vagueness of some of the images. Memories do get fuzzy.

And the images themselves. Besides my daughter's baby shoe, which has always been one of my most favorite pictures (both shoes are in the actual photograph), all the images are nature oriented, well, except maybe the one with the canoes. So I wonder if the picture of the shoe really fits in with the others. When I was preparing the images (and I had 15 in all), I wasn't really trying to represent any particular memories, well except for maybe the one with the canoes and the one of the river, because I didn't necessarily want the piece to be specific to me, but obviously my love of nature came through.

The 10 of the 15 that I actually printed up and fired that day had mostly to do with selecting the ones I thought would translate best and my favorites. If I hadn't run out of time, if my morning hadn't been so incompetent, I would have done all 15. Alas, that didn't happen.

I'm still not settled on a title. I always had it in mind to be a reliquary but I've thought of it as 'reliquary for a life' or 'reliquary of memories'. Perhaps 'reliquary for a planet'. I sort of like that since most of the images are nature oriented but I think I'd have to take out the shoe and maybe the one of the canoes which means I'd probably want to do some more images for the box. I do have all the supplies and materials I need here and I feel a little more competent in the technique.

So for those of you who don't allow email response to your comments and for those of you who didn't guess at all but loved it anyway, here are the answers.

1. boulders in a lake

2. prickly pear cactus buds (two of them side by side)

3. canoes pulled up on a river bank

4. clouds

5. eggs in a nest

6. oxalis flowers

7. tallow leaf

8. moth

9. landscape view of river and canyon wall

10. toddler shoe