Spring Views

   Hi everyone. It's Friday again. Today I am joining Nicole  for Friday Face Off and also Gillena for Friday Lunch Break.  

   Today I have some recent photos to share, Many of them are signs of spring. When you live where you have a longer winter (and that was especially true this year), these little signs of a new season are very exciting. 😏 Especially since it was just yesterday the last of snow in my yard disappeared!

   Let me start with the face of the almost full moon. During the actual full moon  we had lots of clouds and even some light rain so the moon wasn't visible.

   I always know the weather is about to change for the better once the phoebes arrive.My husband thinks I'm nuts but when I hear their scratchy call "Phoebe" I get excited. They arrived in my area on Monday (3/30), and since they are insect eaters, there must be enough food for them to come back. (Although I have seen them grab some meal worms from the bird feeder.)

Plus Mommy bluebird was bringing grass and twigs to the bluebird house to build herself a nest.

       I moved some dried leaves out of a growing bag where I planted some rhubarb last spring and look, it's sprouting.

Some of the tree buds are getting big.

   Plus the bees are out. Hurrah ❤👍😀 The hive made it through a really tough and cold winter. I have been slowly unwrapping the hive so the bees  can adjust to the still cooler spring temperatures, but I think if the weather stays as it is or even gets warmer by next weekend the winter coverings will be put away.

    Plus there's some green peeking out in the gardens.

   You can tell it's still early spring because the temperatures in the greenhouse have been all over the place. The high is at the top, the low at the bottom. I can open the vent to help cool off the high, but there is no heater to warm up the cold. If the nights stay a bit warmer I should be able to start some plants very very soon. 

    I can't wait for that. 😏

   Wishing everyone a great start to the weekend.

Second on the Second-Glass Flowers

   Hi everyone. I hope April has started off well for you. I'd also like to wish a happy start to Passover to those who celebrate.  Since it is April 2, I'll be joining Bleubeard and Elizabeth for  Second on the Second .

  It's been several years since I visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's not a huge museum, but it's one of my favorites. One of the permanent exhibits they have there is a room filled with glass flowers.  I should say it's a room filled with glass botany, even though it is often called  the glass flowers exhibit.

   Theses glass plants were made by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, a father and son  Czech team who worked for over 50 years from the late 1800's until early 1936, just a few years before the son passed. Between the 2 of them they made over 4,000 botanically correct glass plants and plant parts. They are really amazing because they look like real plants.

  For Second on the Second today I thought I would share some photos from blog posts in 2018 (the last time I visited) and 2016. I need to see if any of my friends want to go back for another visit to the museum because these really are amazing art pieces, and I'd love to go back again and see not only the glass botany pieces, but also the rest of museum. 

   These above photos are from my original post from May 2018 which you can find here: Glass Botany.

    Here's a few more views from June of 2016 when I posted Glass Flowers  and also a few more views from May of 2016 when I posted  Off on an Adventure.

    I thought these glass botanical pieces were perfect to share today since our new challenge at Art Journal Journey is Gillena's theme Trees are Awesome, Aren't They?

    This is a journal page I made back in  2016 where you can see a photo of both of the glass flower creators as well as Leopold's wife (who is also Rudolph's mother). 

    That's all for me today. I hope everyone is having a wonderful start to the new month. 

  

It's April!

   Hi everyone. Happy new month to you. It's April. Wow. I feel like the last 3 months have kind of blended together into winter, so I'm excited for a new month when it might actually be spring. 😏

   The new month means a new challenge over at Art Journal Journey. First let me thank Chris and her Spring Forward challenge. I had a lot of fun making pages and seeing everyone's too. Thank you everyone who joined in, bringing a little bit of spring into  a month where winter was trying to hold on as long as possible. (I know that might not be true for all of you, but it was true here in New Hampshire where I live.)

  For this new month we admins want to welcome a new AJJ host. Gillena is a first time host with us at Art Journal Journey. Gillena is the talented artist behind the blog Lunch Break where she shares some of her  digital art including Sunday Post Cards and some digital art journal pages. Thanks for joining us as host here at AJJ Gillena.

   This month Gillena chose the theme Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They?

   I'm excited to look at trees in different viewpoints this month, and for my first journal page I went with some simple basic trees. To create them I used some acrylic paint, and to outline the different treetops from each other I used a black Stabilo pencil with some water to smear it around a bit. I also used a brown Stabilo pencil to give the trunks some details. I painted the sky and the grass.

   On the left and right tree I added a bit of texture by using some Stampendous Fran-tage  green fragments.  I'd never used  Fran-tage before, but I found a bottle marked down and they looked interesting. Since the colored pieces made me think of leaves, I picked up a jar. I tried them out here. I really like the texture they add, and they work especially well on the  left hand tree because I think they do look a lot like individual leaves.

     Here's a photo of what these Fran-tages are, although they must be an older item (as I believe Stampendous is no longer in business), and the only photo I could find online is some yellow ones. 

     On the center tree I took some pink metallic-paper flower trim and snipped the flowers apart. After I added the sitting girl (an Art by Marlene punch out), I created a bouquet for her hands with the same flowers. I added a few hand drawn leaves to her bouquet. She'd been holding a heart originally. 

     I also took some snipped flowers and some of the other bits that otherwise would be trash (from when I snapped the flower border apart) and put them on the grass part of this piece to look like petals that had fallen. 

   To wrap up my page I added half a silver metallic sun above the tree tops. I had painted it yellow and then partially sanded it because I thought it looked too blobby otherwise.

   Finally I stamped  some words ( hello and sunshine)  and a quote all from a couple of different Paper Artsy sets. 

   And I must mention the dreaded rules. Please remember we are an art journaling blog. You should have an art journal page to join us. And please, no cards, tags, ATC's, or other art forms unless they are part of a journal page. However, we do accept any type of art journaling whether you use paint, pencils, a computer, cloth, paper, photos, stamps, etc. 

   I  should also mention that your link ups should be through blogs and not social media. I know a lot of you make fantastic pages and share them on social media, but for us to comment we need to be able to link into that social media, and none of us belong to every social media page there is. 

   I hope you all are as excited as we are to welcome Gillena, and I am looking forward to only making tree inspired art but seeing a lot of trees this month. 

A New Challenge and Wrapping up a March Challenge

     Hi everyone. It's Tuesday, and time for another new challenge at Try It On Tuesday,

     Thank you everyone who joined our Spring challenge. Winter has been hanging around in my area this year (I don't know if it will ever end 😉), so seeing all the spring art linked up made me happy. If the weather can't be spring, at least I can see signs of it on my computer.  And also thank you Sarah for being our guest designer.

   Our new challenge should also be fun. This time we want you to Make It Cute.

   I made a journal page with some printed paper background as well as a paper frame that I thought worked with it.  Then I added that adorable little kitty. All those images are either from 49 and Market or Stamperia.  I die cut the butterfly from some printed paper, and I die cut the lilac on some white paper and used markers and ink pads to color it.  I also used some sparkle ribbon and some white cloth trim. Finally I stamped  the quote using one from a TH quote stamp set.

   There's so many ways to do cute, so be sure to check out the other design team members pieces.  And as always, you have 2 weeks to link up and join us for this challenge, no matter what type of art you create. 

   Today is also the last day for Chris's Spring Forward challenge at Art Journal Journey since tomorrow April begins along with a new challenge. I'll be linking  up to Chris' challenge with this page also. Thank you Chris for hosting. It's been a fun way to have some spring during a not so spring-like month.

    I'm looking forward to all the cute pieces over at Try It on Tuesday, and I hope to see you there.

T Stands for A Weekend Excursion

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

  This past weekend my husband, myself and even the 2 dogs-although they just went along for the ride- packed up the car and took a road trip down to coastal Connecticut, specifically the area around Niantic. I had a family event to attend, which I'll share a bit about later in the post.

  For those of you who live outside of the US and who are not  familiar with New England, here's a map.

    The upper red-orange state is New Hampshire (NH) where I live, and the lower red orange state is Connecticut (CT) where we traveled to.

  We decided since we were traveling 3+ hours away to a place we really hadn't been before, we might as well stay over night and see a few new things  at the same time. That worked out great except my husband wanted to visit the Submarine Museum (Submarine Force) in Groton  and for some reason it was closed until further notice. 

   I took this photo from a parking area above the museum, and although it's not a great photo, it's looking down onto part of the museum and the USS Nautilus, the first US nuclear sub which is now decommissioned and  part of the museum.

  Otherwise we had a great trip. Here's a few photos I snapped while we were out and about.

    The breakfast wasn't anything, but I do recommend this hotel if you're ever for any reason staying in the area. And if you won't ever be,  enjoy the sunset view in this photo.

    It's still too early for all the pleasure boats to be  in their boat slips. In fact, both days the wind was cold, and the temperature was only in the 40's (around 4-6 degrees C).

   Saturday night we went into New London to meet up with my brother, his wife, my niece and her husband for dinner.  We went to this fantastic restaurant called Tony D's. From the outside it wasn't much, but inside it was a cozy  place. (Sorry no photos.) My meal was amazing. I had lobster ravioli that was their special for the night and along with some water I had a glass of Merlot. 

     There was so much food as it came with some delicious focaccia and a dinner salad too.

    My niece and her husband live down in this area of Connecticut, but the funny thing is my brother now lives only 35 miles away from me over in Maine. I haven't seen him since he got married last March.  It's a shame  we don't visit more since we don't live all that far apart. (I used to drive 35 miles every work day each way when I was teaching so an occasional trip to his house would not be a big deal.) 

    While in  New London for dinner Saturday night we had to park in the street, and I noticed these 4 old buildings across the street. They caught my eye, and so I looked up what they were about. They were built in between the years 1835-1845, and this area was known as Whale Oil Row. They were once homes of the whaling upper class. That history also explains the mural that was next to where we parked.

    We also visited a nice beach  late afternoon on Saturday, but it was a bit too chilly to spend much time outside. 

    At dinner Saturday night I was told about this interesting used book store. Of course, Sunday,  I wanted to go. It's actually 4 stores but I only made it to 2 of them. I had a lot of fun browsing. This store (photo below) contained art, history, architecture, biography and teen books.

   The annex in the back of this lot was full of fiction. It was also very crowded. Here's one small section. The aisles weren't exactly straight  and there were also books tucked into every available corner. That is to say, there were a lot of books. 😉

    It was good to see people buying books though. Of course these were all used and reasonably priced. 

    This used book store was spread out in 4 locations. There were 2 shops where we stopped; there was another one  downtown and another one  further out of downtown. Sadly the downtown location, where I didn't get to, is where the mystery, gardening, nature, craft and cookbooks were. In another way, it was probably good for my wallet that I didn't get there because those are the genres I am most likely to buy. 😉

      However, I still managed to pick up a few books. 😏 (Plus one more that was not in pile because I had started reading it. Grin.)

    OK you've seen snippets of the trip except for the reason why we went.  That reason was this fun celebration Saturday afternoon.

    My niece is expecting, and we'll have a new member of our bigger family in May. 👍

    Here's my second drink for T Day. I'll be popping this cork once I hear the good news from my brother.

   And before I sign off,  if you ever stop by Mary's blog Dark Thoughts, her daughter's lupus is attacking her heart. She  has 40% heart failure. Someone has started a Go Fund Me page for her, so here's the link if you are interested: Go Fund Me Page.

   That's all for me today. Wishing everyone a happy T day and a great week ahead. 

I've Been on Another Owl Hunt

    Hi everyone. Happy Friday. Today I am joining Nicole at Friday Face Off and Gillena at her Friday Lunch Break.

   Last Monday I shared some photos of the Long Eared Owl I saw last week. (Link is here Going On Another Owl Hunt.) My friend Deb was hoping to see the Long Eared Owl after I shared my photos with her, so the other day she and I went off  on another  owl hunt. It was one of those days when all the birds seemed to be hiding, at least at the state reservation where the owls were to be found.

   We did see one owl, but as you can see in this next photo, he/she has great camouflage. The owl almost looks like the tree trunk. Thankfully there was a birder there with better spotting skills than either of us had and who pointed him out to us.

    But at least Deb, who had never seen a wild owl before, did spot him.  After the owl event we decided to head on down to the Parker River National Wildlife Preserve which is only about 15 minutes away from Salisbury State Reservation. The wildlife preserve is out on Plum Island, and you might remember  the very snowy photos I showed when Deb and I visited there earlier this year. (Here is that link if you're interested: Snowy Nature Reserve.)

    Being at the shore, the snow is all gone there, and we decided to stop at the main headquarters to see if there was anything special we should know about. There wasn't, but they did have this fun drawing out in front of the building. There are faces here for Friday Face Off.

   I can't say it was the best birding day, but even so it was really nice to be outside, see what we saw, and also get a little walk in too. Mostly we saw Canada geese and seagulls. It seemed like there were 1000’s of each (although not in my photos) species, but probably I am exaggerating abit.

    At the end of the road, we parked and went walking. 

    There were a couple of swans in the salt pan lake located near the tower. Unfortunately the path was chained off and had signs that said area closed. I couldn't get close enough to see the bills so whether these are Mute Swanson or Trumpeter swans I can't really tell. But I did learn the difference between the 2.

   Afterwards we walked a relatively short boardwalk trail. It was just over a mile (1.6 km) loop.

At one point the boardwalk was over a very wet area, probably wetter than normal with the spring melt. I thought the view through the water looked interesting.

   A side trail said it took us out to a marsh view. However, the view was blocked by some invasive growth.

  This Phragmites has taken over a lot of the wetlands in the overall general area. It forms these thick stands of tall reed grass which chokes out the native plants. It did make for some interesting photos, but that doesn't mean it's a great plant to have growing in the area.

    I don't know if these native cattails stand a chance.

   When we got back to the parking lot, there was a small group of people who had spotted a Woodcock .

   It was hard to photograph him because he was  nestled in some brush, plus there were some tall people who made it hard for this short person (me) to get a good view. This was the best photo I snapped, but he's there. Even if this photo has a lot to desire. 😐

  Afterwards we headed out as the afternoon was getting on.  I'll finish this post with one last photo.

  More geese. 😏

I'm away this weekend for a  family event, so have a great next few days and start to the new week.