The Rest of the Charleston Garden Photos I Started Sharing Last Week

   Hi everyone.  Can you believe it's the last day of April? This past month flew by. Now that winter is gone, could we slow down things just a little big? (grin)  I'm not around much during the day today (Thursday) with a couple of appointments, so I probably won't get to stop by your blog until later this evening or tomorrow.

  I thought today I would finish the photos I started in last Thursday's post. All these photos are from when I visited Margnolia  Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina a couple of weeks ago. Here's that first post if you missed it and are interested in it: Magnolia Part 1.

  I will also be linking  up this post to Nicole's Friday Face Off and Gillena's  Friday Lunch Break    because tomorrow is the first of the new month which means I will need to  share a new page for Art Journal Journey. I have some  faces at the end of this post. 

   So let's go back to the garden.😀

  After the American Civil War when the slaves were finally freed and rice farming wasn't as advantageous, the family who owned this property needed a find a way to keep their 400 acre plantation. In the late 1800's they planted azaleas and other flowering trees and created the garden. They then  opened it up to tourists who originally would arrive by boat from the Lesley River.  I found this old postcard online and  thought it was an interesting view to the story of this garden.

   Here's the Lesley River  along the gardens now. I like to imagine what it was like when this  waterway was the main transportation route because the road (which is obviously now paved and well traveled) at that time was a dirt track through the woods. 

     Now the house and grounds are  open to the public. I had hoped (besides seeing blooming azaleas) that I could also get a house tour on the day we visited, but those were all full. In retrospect that was OK because we still managed to spend a full afternoon just walking around and enjoying the grounds. 

   I think it would be grand to have a long driveway with such a wonderful oak ceiling and leafy tunnel. Of course  in New Hampshire it would be bare branches half of the year and during winter storms branches would break and block the way so I guess it's best to leave it for the south.

There are several trails to walk, and the one we were on came out through these moss covered beauties.

The Spanish Moss is so cool.👍

      You can see another passe azalea😞 in the photo above. If I ever get back to this area, I hope the azalea's will then be in bloom. 

     Then we had a glance of the house and the more cultivated gardens around the house. Those gardens were pretty, but not as fun as the wild walk I shared last week. But I bet a couple of weeks earlier they would have been gorgeous when the azaleas were blooming.

   Even though I never made it into the house, I did enjoy checking out this wide veranda. 

And I got a few funky/weird photos when I peaked in through the windows.

  The other cool thing up around the house were the peacocks that roamed around. Here's my face for Friday Face Off. This handsome guy was sitting in the cool shade of a small table area. We had stopped at the snack bar to get a cold drink since it was 95 degrees F/35 degrees C and when we sat down we noticed him.

   This other guy was shuffling around with his huge gorgeous train. It must be quite the burden for these birds to drag around their big tales. All just to impress the ladies.

     I was quite interested in the arrangement of the tail feathers.I didn't realize the visible eyes lined up down the middle when the tail was opened. I aso spotted some tucked into the side, but they were not so visible.

  For some reason when I see peacocks I think of Flannery O'Connor's short stories. If you aren't familiar with her, she was a mid-twentieth century southern (US) writer who was very interested in birds. She thought of  male peacocks as the king of birds, which with  their gorgeous colors and that tail was an apt description. She mentions birds in her stories, but her stories are not about birds.

  Hope you enjoyed your visit to Magnolia Plantation and Garden. When I post my next trip post it will be to  visit Congaree National Park which is a couple hours inland from Charleston. Until then, have a super day.

Wrapping Up AJJ for April

   Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week to you. April is quickly wrapping up, isn't it? 

   Today I want to share my final page for Gilena's Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They? challenge over at Art Journal Journey. It was a fun challenge, and I still have lots of tree ideas I never got around to creating pages for. (Just saying, you may see a few more trees coming up in the future. 😉)

   Thank  you Gillena for hosting. I hope you had fun, and we'd love if you decided to join us again sometime. And thank you everyone who joined in with some really lovely trees.  It was a fun topic, wasn't it?

  Here's my final April page. The plaid paper background went over a page I attempted that was a disaster.  I thought the blue on the paper made it feel a bit like the sky. I stamped the green leaves using an AALL& Create leaf image.

   I feel like I cheated on the rest of the page because I used some fussy cut and some punched out images (mostly from 49 and Market) to finish.  Except for the quote which is stamped.

   And that's it for me today. Wishing everyone a great rest of April. 

Numbers

    Hi everyone. As I say every other week, it's Tuesday, and time for a new challenge at Try It on Tuesday.

    Thank you Tracey for being our guest designer last challenge. It's great you were able to join us. Also a big thank you to everyone who joined our Make Your Own Background challenge. I love backgrounds, and so I really enjoyed seeing how different people went about it.

    For our latest challenge, we want you to include NUMBERS.

    I made a hodgepodge page that used up some elements that were sitting on my work table.  I started by painting my page some bright green and yellow. Then I grabbed this partially done tag (well the top was painted green and had a few odds and ends on it) and added that to my page. To continue my page, I took those same bright background colors and colored in the bottom of the tag.

   I then grabbed lots of items from my scrap bin as well as  a few "postage style stamps" from a  49 and Market roll. Before I finished layering ephemera, I took a brick stencil and some white paint and added a bit of stenciling. My page felt too vertical and it needed something to not make it feel like it was going to slide off the top or bottom of the page, but the stenciled bricks fixed that. After my stencil paint dried, I went back and continued to add a few more bits and pieces. 

   I finished the page with some very old rub on numbers from Making Memories (remember them?) and also added the sunshine quote and another small tag that said bright.

   There's so many ways to use numbers, so check out how the other design team members added numbers to their art. 

  I hope you like numbers and will join us at Try It On Tuesday with some numbered art. As always, this challenge runs for the next 2 weeks. 

T Stands for In The Yard (Mostly) This Early Spring

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

   Last week we had a stretch of some cold weather along with some wind. One day it was cold enough for winter jackets. 😒 Besides a couple of walks and getting together with a friend one afternoon, I spent much of my week working outside in the yard. I wanted/want to get some things finished before the black flies come out and drive me back into the house. 😬

     I know spring in my area arrives slower than many people's. There's no leaves on the trees yet. But I do finally have quite a few spring blooms like a few small hyacinths.

    And lots of daffodils. 

 This morning (Monday) I finished my big spring raking projects. I had hoped to finish this up sooner, but with all the wind last week, it would have been a losing proposition to even try to clean up the leaves. 🍃

    I'm enjoying a neat almost empty flower garden because it won't be long until it's full of returning perennials. 

   Elsewhere in the yard both of my rhubarb plants have popped up.

   My lawn also needs some TLC. This year I'm filling in some of the bare spots with some lawn clover.  I've been putting it down in small batches, 

 and you can see my early batches have started to sprout.

   Some onions that didn't sprout by last fall and were left in the ground have sprouted too.

   I also planted some early season seeds. I have kale, arugula rocket and some garden peas. They are all coming up. 😏

    My other latest project is doing a bit of bark mulching. Only a couple of gardens, the ones right along the house,  get mulched. This is my rose garden, and every day the little tiny leaf buds and now little tiny leaves are getting bigger.

    One of the best signs all year is when the green house down the road announces their opening day.

    My husband has also been busy putting up a new deck railing on the back deck. 

    He's not done yet because he ran out of the clips you need for construction. He ordered some and they should be here this week. He's got it half done, so hopefully next weekend the weather will cooperate and he'll get it finished.

If you look carefully at the hole of my bluebird house, you can just make out Mama's head. 

 And I need a drink for tea. The other morning my husband and I went out to run a few errands; he needed some screws, and I needed the bark mulch. When I got home it was going to be bark mulch spreading time, so to keep me from getting hungry during the job, I took the hubby out for a late breakfast/early lunch first.  We stopped at our local favorite hole in the wall breakfast and lunch place. You can see our diet Pepsi's . 

   I had a cheese omelet, some baked beans and a grilled English muffin that tasted great but looked like pancakes. 

  I still have a few more yard chores to get done before the rain arrives later in the week. We need rain though. The weather people on the news keep telling us we're still in a drought from last summer.   It doesn't seem possible with the snow we had this winter, but since it is pretty dry,   lets hope the forecast for rain actually produces rain  and not just light drops and lots of grey skies.

   Sorry for the long post. Have a super T day and week ahead.

Sunday

  Hi everyone. I hope you've been having a lovely weekend. Our weather has finally warmed back up a bit after a pretty cold past week. We had some nights with temperatures below freezing. Hurrah for today though when it feels more like spring again.

   Today I am joining Nicole for her Sunday in the Art Room (canceled for today), and I'm also joining Gillena for 2 challenges.  I'll be linking  up to her  Sunday Smiles and also over to Art Journal Journey. Gillena is hosting this month and her theme is Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They? 

   I was inspired to make today's page after watching a gorgeous sunset a few weeks ago. With the  sun setting behind the trees, those trees were solid black. I used this older tree stamp and black ink several times on my journal page. I then went over the images with a black Sharpie because I wanted the trees to be bolder.  

    I first colored the sky with watercolors, but then I wanted bolder colors, especially for the orange part,  so I also added some orange liquid ink to a wet paper towel and rubbed that on the page.  To make the grass I used watercolor paints  and  markers as  well as a green  Stabilo pencil. The birds are a stamp from the same set as the trees. The quote is from the same set.  I tried something just a bit different for the quote because I stamped it on color paper and then gently tore the edges away. I had hoped the pink would blend in more with the pink of the sky, but I still like how it works.

     Friday night's sky was fairly pretty, although not the  boldest colors like the view that inspired today's page. But the sun before it set created some interesting light through the evening clouds.

    And even though last week didn't feel much like spring, it's mating season for the wild turkeys. This Tom was strutting his stuff around the lawn one morning. 

     (Excuse the photos because if I stepped outside the show would have been over so I needed to snap these through the window.)

And here's the lady he was hoping to impress. I'm not sure if he did or not.

    Earlier in the week I noticed him in the woods also all puffed up and trying to impress some lady. He was just far enough off that when I looked at first I thought it might be a bear in the woods. These turkeys get pretty large when they puff up like that, especially from a distance.

     Later he came back just to scrounge up some ground scraps from the bird feeder. The show was over by then.

   That's all for me today. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and start to the new week.