A Few Photos from My Weekend Away

   Hi everyone. Happy Thursday to you.

  You may have read how last weekend my husband and I took a quick little get-away.  My travel intro post is here if you're interested in a trip overview.  Basically, we caught a plane Friday morning and flew to Charleston, South Carolina. The timing worked out perfectly because it was only a 2 hour flight, so we had Friday afternoon, all day Saturday and all day Sunday to explore. We caught an early morning flight home Monday. 

  If you read my intro post, you might remember me mentioning that I have visited Charleston once before. That was 3 years ago when I went with a friend. This time my husband and I did some things I hadn't done before, except for one.

    The only place I wanted to revisit was Magnolia Plantation. They have a large very wild style garden with paths that twist around ponds and through shady southern woodlands. When I visited with my friend, it was early May and I had just missed the azalea blooms. This time I hoped to see them because I remembered there were so many azalea bushes in this wild style garden. 

   When we arrived we went from an April New Hampshire heat wave (about 70 degrees F/ 21 degrees C) to a real heatwave (95 degrees F/35 degrees C).  This had been going on for a while also, so the azaleas had bloomed a bit early. 😞 There were only a few blooms left.

   Most of the bushes looked like the one in the next photo.

  Oh well, we still had a nice walk around the gardens. You can never go wrong with a walk around a beautiful garden. ❤

  Plus, there was some wildlife in the gardens too.

   In fact, we saw several alligators. All the ones we saw were quite small compared to the ones I saw when I visited with my friend.  If there were still big ones there, perhaps they were trying to stay cool in the afternoon heat.

    We also saw this juvenile white ibis eating in one of the ponds. 

    There is something quite interesting about the trunk bases of cypress trees. 

   The water in some of these little ponds was covered in small weeds. With the heat and humidity, this walk felt almost jungle-like. It certainly felt like I was in the South and not in New Hampshire anymore.

   I have another post of photos from my visit to Magnolia. The next post will be a little of an area a little more cultivated. I'll share more soon. 

   

Roots

      Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week to you. And Happy Earth Day too. 🌏

     If you stop by Elizabeth's blog, Altered Book Lover, be sure to wish her a happy birthday. 🎂 Happy birthday my friend. 

    Today I am sharing a page I made for Gillena's Tree Are Awesome, Aren't They? challenge.  This challenge is perfect for Earth Day, isn't it? 🌎

     It was really difficult to get today's page to photograph correctly so you could see the details. For one thing, my journal at this point did not want to lie flat. 😒

   If you can't tell what this page is about, the quote gives it all away. The background is made with ink pads, acrylic paints, liquid ink, water color paints and even a bit of watercolor pencil. Who knew making soil was so complicated? Ha ha. I even used markers and drew in the little tunnel that some little unidentifiable animal is hiding in. 

    OK I should have taken a photo of both of the actual roots before I cut them out, but in the below photo you can see one of the roots.

   This page was an experimental background page I had made with paints, and then I used some liquid acrylic and dropped it down the page. I did this months ago, and funny how it moved itself out of a paper pile so I would see it now. Of course it didn't move itself, but suddenly it was on top of a pile of backgrounds and immediately I thought the brown drips looked like roots.

   I fussy cut these and then glued them down in my journal and worked on creating the background soil around them. I'm not sure the page needed the base of the tree  trunk and the little bit of ground and sky that I added at the very top. Here's an earlier version of the page before I finished making the soil have the right color and depth. I cropped this one to get rid of the top. You can definitely see the roots better here.

   I actually found the quote  in my plant stamp bin, and so maybe that is where I got the idea for roots. It's a great quote. The stamp is from Unity Rubber Stamps.

   I tried stamping the quote  directly with black ink on the page, but it didn't really show up. To fix that I stamped it on some acetate and fussy it cut it. This acetate had a frosted look  to it,  which is why it looks so white on the page. 

   On my trip last weekend we visited Congaree National Park in South Carolina. I'll share more about our interesting walk and the park in another post, but I did see a few cool roots that fit with today's art journal.

   I'm not sure what's going on with these roots on the right... and even with the tree on the left.

   but it looks like it's growing over the other trees exposed roots.

   The walk also took us through a few stands of cypress trees. Those little nubs you see are called cypress knees. They grow off the roots and help stabilize the tree and, when this ground is flooded with water (which it was not when we were there) they might also help get oxygen to the roots.

   More to come about this weekend-get-away once I get a bit more organized. 

   That's all for me right now. Have a super rest of your day. 

T Stands for I'm Back Home

     Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. And hello to everyone who stops by for T at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog.

     This past weekend my husband and I took off on an adventure. Originally we had scheduled my daughter to dog and house sit for a week. We had to book her in back in December because she has to do some traveling around Massachusetts for her job, and some parts of Massachusetts are just too far for her to travel to and get back to our house without leaving the dogs for way too many hours. The reason we had to schedule so early is she needed to be able to leave her calendar clear.

  However, due to several different reasons, we decided to just head out for a long weekend instead of a week. A weekend isn't a whole lot of time, so after deciding we didn't want to go on a semi-local road trip, we concluded that wherever we went we wanted a short and direct flight. We also decided we were not going to fly out of Logan International Airport in Boston because that's a whole other level of time consumption. We have a couple budget airlines that only fly 2 days a week in other local airports, so we decided to try out Breeze from Manchester (NH) and fly to Charleston, South Carolina. (We liked flying Breeze. We’d fly them again!) They fly this route on Fridays and Mondays, so that made it perfect for a weekend get away.

   I went to Charleston 3 years ago, and I really liked the city. When I went then I was with a friend, and she and I did things my husband has no interest in. So even though I didn't go to a new place, I did a lot of new things and just did some more exploring. We also took a little road trip out of the city and visited a new (to both the hubby and myself) national park. 

  I haven't  had a chance to go through most of my photos yet,  since I'm posting this Monday  evening. We had an early morning flight that left Charleston this morning at 7 AM. We watched the sun rise as the plane taxied to the runway.

    It was a very early morning since we needed to get to the airport around 5 AM. We had received a text from the airline that they expected long security lines and so we took their advice. Luckily it's only around a 2 hour flight, and once we got into Manchester we stopped for breakfast (whoops, forgot to take a photo)  and then were still home before noon. After we unloaded the car the hubby and I both took  nice long naps. 😉

  

   Whoops, Google decided to publish this when I hit save, so hopefully no one will read this until I am finished with it. 😉 And if you get here and the post ends, please refresh to get the whole post.

   Anyhow, I need a drink for T day, and I did remember to snap a photo of a cup of tea I had on the plane this morning while I was reading my latest mystery.

     And here is my drink for T day this week.

    That's it for me. I'll have more trip photos in some later posts. Have a super T day and start to this new week.

  

  

 

Sort of Mid-Week Art and Other Things

    Hi everyone. Happy Thursday. I hope your week is going well. We've had some wet weather, but luckily (or not so luckily for the drought we still have from last year) it hasn't been all day rains. And in between showers, it's been warm and beautiful outside.  I've been trying to get a bit of outside chores done, which is something I always get excited to do in spring. If only that excitement would last all season...grin, but once it gets hot, I would rather look at the gardens than do all this big spring cleaning. 😏

    Today I am joining Gillena for Her Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They? challenge at Art Journal Journey. 

   I started this page on some white watercolor paper. I fussy cut the tree, the bottom bird and the leaves (all one image) from a paper shopping bag I received from the local bird store when I went to get a seed tube. I used matte medium to glue it down. 

   I then took an old chickadee stamp (from Stamp in the Hand) and stamped it first directly onto my page, and then onto some brown paper-bag paper. I fussy cut it and added it to my page covering up the first stamped image. I used a white paint pen to highlight the white spot around the head.

    I used a green paint pen to color over the leaves on the trees since they were originally the same brown as the trunk. Then I took a stencil and some light blue paint and added some spots of texture and color on the background. I decided the page was still too white so I took some yellow watercolor paint and added it to brighten up the sky.

   The 3 flying birds came from an older Hero Arts stamp set. The Birds of a feather quote came from the same Stamp in the Hand set as the chickadee did. I am not sure who made the paper that I fussy cut the word fly high from.

   Then I finished my page by adding a feather I found in my yard and outlined the Birds of a Feather quote.

   And speaking of birds, I've had a pine warbler visiting my bird feeder lately. You can also see the seed tube he/she is sitting on that came in the paper bag I used on my page today. 

And the grackles are back too. I like how I caught  this motion in this next photo.

And once again, the turkeys are back.

   That's all for me today.  And just an FYI- I won't be around for the weekend ahead starting tomorrow, so I won't be joining  any Friday or Sunday challenges as I usually do.  Have a great rest of your week and weekend ahead plus start to the new week. I'll be back in the blogosphere next week-either Monday or Tuesday. 

A Quick Page

    Hi everyone. Happy mid-week to you. Today I have a short post; I'm just sharing a page I made for Gillena's Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They? challenge at Art Journal Journey

   I used various punch out and fussy cut images from Ciao Bella, Stamperia and 49 and Market to make this page. I haven't had tons of art time lately since I've been busy doing some outside chores or walking. After our long winter, it's so nice to be outside. 👍

   The background started with my cleaning off a brush with some deep green paint. Then I used a couple of shades of green ink pads to give the rest of the page some color. The ledger background is part of this Dina Wakely journal.

   You can see the tree trunk lying on the ground and the twisty tree on the left hand side. Plus it looks like there's a branch holding the herbs (mostly herbs) along the top and the wood that came  from a tree to make the readers chair. And of course, even the paper in the book is made from trees.

   I finally used a TH stamp to stamp the quote.

   And that's all for me today. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

Time for Another New Challenge

   Hi everyone.  It's Tuesday and time once again for a new challenge at Try It on Tuesday. Boy the last 2 weeks flew by.

   Thank you Jenn for hosting, and thank you to everyone who joined in. It was fun to see so many cute pieces of art. ❤

     This time for our latest challenge we ask that you  MAKE YOUR OWN BACKGROUND. There's so many ways you can go with this one. 

   To make my background I started with  a page in my journal where I had used up some left over paints and cleaned off my brush. You can see some light pink. and some light green. Then I used a stencil and some stencil pastes that more or less matched   the light pink and the light green paints, and I also used some stencil paste that was a deeper more puplish-pink color to cover my page.

   I varied the stencil pastes at different places on the stencil. You can see the light pink at the top, the darker purplish-pink at the bottom and some light green in between. Once dried, I took some light green Versafine Claire in and gave parts of the page a quick rub with it just to make background a bit more grungy, which is just the way I like it.

    I then took some pink printed paper and stuck a black framed sticker down on it. This is one of those peel and stick stickers that only gives you the outline of your image. I then took scissors  fussy cut around the sticker.

    I used markers and paint pens to color the inside of the sticker. I also took some old very tiny stamps (remember Wordsworth Rubber Stamps?) and added some words to my image. 

     I glued my image down, then I die cut the bumble bee image. I used matte medium to attach her, and once dried, I used paint pens to color her in.  And that's my page. I thought I would share this one because there is so much homemade background to it.

   Don't forget to check out the other designer's art for some ideas too. As I already mentioned, there are so many ways you can approach a make your own background.

   I love making backgrounds, so I'm excited to hopefully get some new ideas. I hope you're excited about this challenge too, and I'm looking forwards to seeing your art over at Try It on Tuesday in the next 2 weeks.

T Stands for Winter to Spring

      Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. And hello to everyone who stops by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for T day.

    Last week I started some of my spring chores like taking out some warm weather clothes from the deep recesses of the closet and putting the heavy winter ones away in their place.  I even started  a bit of yard clean up. 😏

    Other than this past Tuesday which was the day we got an inch of snow, 

we had some beautiful weather last week. It felt like spring-finally! ❤❤❤❤❤

    The door even came off the screen porch and we brought a few chairs outside. Of course, in our one-day little snow event they didn't look very inviting. 😒

  It didn't take long for most of the snow to melt, and hopefully that is it for winter weather.  Last week I went out walking several times. One day I went with friends and then we grabbed lunch but of course I forgot to take any photos. 😉A couple of times I went up to my mother-in-law's home and walked the dogs.

  The previous time I had been there ( to my mother-in-law's home) was 3 weeks before, and the lake looked like this.

    Last Monday I went walking and it looked like this.

   The water still looks cold, but at least the ice is gone.  😏

  Besides the usual spring clean up around my now empty mother-in-law's home, part of this tree came down. I think the rest needs to be taken down too.  It is the one is missing a lot of bark to the right of the lamppost.

    When I went back later in the week (after the little snow event we had) I decided to walk the snowmobile trail because it gets more sun than the road. There were still a few slightly snowy, slightly muddy parts on the road, but I only hit one snow patch on the trail. 

   It was a lovely walk because I didn't meet a single person. I really enjoyed some peaceful time with only some birds singing and the wind slightly  rustling the dried ash leaves still dangling from their branches. 

   At home we have more signs of spring too.  The crocuses are starting to bloom and

lilies and irises are popping up.

   I decided to give a quick rake to this wildflower garden because I do have some daffodils growing there, and last year I never cleaned it out.  It scared Mama Bluebird out of her nest for a few minutes.  I saw her watching me from a nearby tree, and as soon as I walked away, she flew back in. It's not a good photo, but you can just see the base of the bluebird house at the top of the white post.  I also know it's not a great raking job, but in another month or so the plants will have filled in this whole area and I didn't want to keep Mama Bluebird from her nesting business for  too long.

    If you didn't see yesterday's post, the bees' winter enclosure is down, and the bees are living their best bee lives. 

   The other event we always wait for is when the local ice cream window opens up for the season. 😀

  I didn't get a sundae, but for our Sunday lunch the hubby and I each got a dish of ice cream. ❤

   I need a drink for T day this week. Last Friday night the hubby and I had a shopping date night. 😉 We went over to Costco in Maine to get a few things, and we ended up having dinner there too. I had a slice of pizza, and you can see my cup with my Diet Coke in it.

 Plus the spring peepers (a type of frog) are peeping me to sleep at night now, and there are more birds coming back. After the way this past winter went, I had  a very exciting week.

   How about you? Have a super start to the new week and Happy T day too.