Random Recent Friday Faces

   Hi everyone. Happy first Friday in July. Today I'm joining Nicole for  Friday Face Off and Gillena for Friday Lunch Break. I found some recent faces in my photos and thought I would share them today.

   My husband came across this fun sock monkey while cleaning some bins in the garage. He was a gift that a teaching friend made back when I was pregnant with my daughter  34 years ago. I threw him in the washing machine, and I must say he looks pretty good. The last time I saw my daughter, I returned him to his rightful owner.

   A few weeks back the dock needed to go into the water at my mother-in-law's house. Here's 3 of the 4 guys who were putting it in. From left to right is my sister-in-law's husband, their son-in-law and then my husband. The fourth guy was my son-in-law who was doing the on-land part. I also can't forget Mr. Pete's face. He was waiting  impatiently for them to finish and put the steps in so he could go swimming.

  Tomorrow is the July 4th Independence Day holiday as you might know. Tomorrow's plan is to rebuild the deck that connects into this dock, and these 4 guys will be back to work again.

   While having an off-work moment, my husband looked my way. I was lucky and captured a good photo.

   Also a few weeks back some friends our ours were up in our area from their home in North Carolina. We all met up for dinner at a restaurant in Manchester (New Hampshire) and posed for a photo. I've known my friend for 48 years, longer than I've ever known my husband. It's too bad she and her husband  moved south (although they love it down there) because the 4 of us really meshed, and I miss having them around.

   I can't forget my favorite canine faces either.

 For several weeks my husband's boat sat in the back yard while he cleaned it. He loves his boat, and he babies it.  Now it is back at the marina , not in the water, but we park it in a field at the marina for the summer. We put it in and then pull it out of the ocean every time we go to use it, which is not any trouble at all. Paying to leave the boating in the field is considerably less than paying for a slip or a mooring, and a lot of people do that.

   The dogs also love going for boat rides. Here's Maddie in HER seat on our first fishing trip of the season.

    My next photo is from ice cream Sunday. It's tough when you have an ice cream window only 5 minutes from the house. We decided several years ago that if we made a plan to go on Sundays, then the temptation to go other days wasn't so much because you know Sunday isn't that far off.

    This cone is a small sized one, so I would hate to see how big a large is. 

    The pups also enjoy car rides a lot. Especially on ice cream Sundays. 

   Maddie doesn't like cones, so Pete gets the end of my husband's cone. I always get my  ice cream in a cup so it doesn't end up all over my shirt, and Maddie gets to lick out the cup instead.

   Wishing everyone a wonderful start to the weekend. And if you are celebrating July 4th, I hope you have a super holiday too. 

  

Bumblebees and Second Looks

    Hi everyone. Happy July 2! Yesterday the crazy heat arrived to New Hampshire. 😧 I'm going to miss the beautiful weather we'd been having. 

    I have a few things to share on my post including stopping by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for Second on the Second. I also want to mention the last couple of days were busy, so I am once again going to apologize if I missed  any of your blog posts. 

   OK, I promise not to hyper focus on bees every post,😏,  but the other day David over at Travels with Birds made an important point in a comment on one of my recent honeybee posts. Since many of you enjoy a bit of bee info, I thought I would take a moment to share the general gist. (And then I won't keep going on about bees...well maybe I won't. )😉

    Honey bees do help with pollination, and they are important, however, sometimes people get so wrapped up  thinking honeybees can save our food supply that they forget about native bees. Native bees are the various species really in trouble. In fact, some of our foods cannot be pollinated by honey bees. Take tomatoes.

   OK, these are milkweed plants, not tomatoes, but you can see one native species of bumblebees.

    Honey bees evolved in Europe and Asia, and some foods, like tomatoes, that evolved in North or South America, evolved without the help of honey bees. Their flowers are not accessible to honeybees because the 2 species didn't evolve together and honeybees can't get to the pollen. The only ones that can do this are native pollinators. As native bees disappear, so might those foods they pollinate. Therefore it is important to  not to do big whole lawn sprays for insects ( all insects  breath the same way, so if you spray say for mosquitoes, it can effect bees) and to remember wild bees need habitat to live in.  I'm not trying to be the bee patrol, just passing on some information. 😁

  Today's main topic of my post is for Second on the Second  over at Altered Book Lovers Blog. I want to share some fabric art that I posted back in 2015 to go along with Halle's fabrictrim/sewing themed challenge this month at AJJ. . Here's my original post. More Quilting.

   I had a large piece of canvas that I painted, and then I did some stitching on it. Here's a few close ups.

    I'm still looking if I can find  any other photos for you to show the finished piece. It might be still folded up in a box under my sewing table because I know I never backed it, at least not yet. (Even though it's been a lot of years...too many actually.😒)

  I'll keep looking and add in a photo if I can find one.  

  With that in mind, I hope you have a super day!

It's July

   Hi everyone. I don't know what happened to June, but happy July to you.

   Before I get too far into my post,  happy Canada Day to my friends north of the border. 🍁

   Thank you Matilde for hosting over at Art Journal Journey last month. And thank you everyone who shared some Houses and Buildings. It was fun to see all the various houses and buildings people created. I can see it was a very creative month.

   But since it's now July it's time for a new challenge and a new host. This month I want to welcome Halle back. She's been with us for several summers now, and we love having you. Halle always has a great theme related to sewing ❤, and you can see some of her fantastic quilting and art pieces over at her blog Halle's Hobbies.

   This month Halle's theme is Fabric, Lace and Trims, Oh My!

   My first page is all paper and rubber stamps, but I do have some sewn pages coming as the month goes on. 

   I started with an 8x8 (inch) sheet of sewing themed paper. It had a pink vibe, so I painted my journal page pink, and once that dried, I attached my page. I then rubbed just a bit of the paint on the edge of the paper to soften it and make it look more part of the overall page. 

   I added a few stamped images to it including the bottom scissors, the snaps and the purple-ish pattern piece. Then I used my old Martha Stewart button paper punch and made the 3 buttons you see on the bottom left near the scissors. The other buttons were already printed the paper. 

  The top partial butterfly was on some scrap paper. I fussy cut it and added it. Then I had some butterfly washi tape that I added to continue the butterfly theme. To finish my page I added some paper lace on the left side, and I stamped the quote from an old Hero Arts sewing set.

  I hope you're excited about Halle's theme and will join us over at Art Journal Journey. Please remember we are an art journaling challenge, and we accept any type of art journaling, but we do not accept CARDS, ATCs, TAGS, etc. 

  Also just a reminder that we may not be able to comment on a link that goes to social media., so please be aware if you link up through social media you will most likely not hear from us.

  I hope you have a super start to the new month, and I', looking forward to seeing some sewing journaling  for Halle's challenge. 

   

T Stands for Another Play

    Hi everyone.  Happy new week to you. And hello  to everyone who  stops by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog   blog for our weekend T Day meet ups.

   Last week was a nice balance of busy days and not so busy days. Of course a couple of rainy/cloudy days didn't hurt with that. 😉  My husband finally finished getting his boat ready for the season, so one day we went out and went fishing (and ha ha, guess who caught most of the fish; my poor hubby was kind of sad it wasn't him 😁). It was also time for a second play at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine.

    You might remember from my T Day post a few weeks back that this year some friends and I bought a 3 show season pass to the theater. Last time we went to see a show about The Temptations (click on the link if you're curious about that play post). This time we went to see a classic that I had never seen either on the stage or  the film version. 

Again, no photos are allowed during the show so I borrowed a few from the playhouse's website.

    What a fabulous show. An usher told us during intermission that 3 of the actors, including Dolly, were Tony Award winners from Broadway and also that the costumes came from a Broadway production of this play. I'm not really up on Tony Award winners, but I can say that the whole cast was amazing. Here's some photos.

   You can see there was a lot of singing and dancing. Plus the sets were amazing. I'm always very interested in how they make sets. I know very little about how a stage is set up and how they are managed so maybe that's why I'm always curious about that.

    You might remember that last play post I mentioned how they have these  glasses that you buy with your first drink and then if you bring them back you only then have to buy your drink, not the glass also. Here's my ticket for T this week since I brought my glass back with me.  This time I had some prosecco, and I'm inside the theater in my seat. The lights made a lot of glare, and my phone couldn't quite decide if I was taking a photo of my glass or the curtain backdrop.  But anyhow, here's my drink.

And here's a clearer view of that intro background that we saw before the play began.

   We don't have tickets for the next play, although we have talked about getting them because we've had such a good time at these first 2 shows. Our final season ticket is not until early September when the play will be The Producers, which I have seen years ago in Boston. It's by Mel Brooks, and I remember laughing non-stop. I am looking forward to that show.

   I hope everyone has a great T day and week ahead. And for those of you in Canada who don't stop by frequently, have a great Canada Day, and for those of you in the US, have a wonderful July 4th holiday.

Sunday Art -Mish Mash

    Hi everyone. I hope you're having  a great weekend. It's already the last weekend of June, which doesn't seem at all possible, does it?

   Thanks everyone for your bee questions and comments.  When I open the hives I do use a smokers, but I don’t suit up.  I do suit up when I put in a new batch of bees because then you get so many flying around all confused.  New bee packages contain 10,000-12,000 bees, and they all have to leave the package and get into the hive so there's a lot of bees in motion at once.

 

   But usually when I go into the hive I don’t get all that many that fly out. Most of them stay inside the hive doing their job and some of them are off looking for pollen and nectar. Those bees are so busy they just ignore you.  It’s just those few guard bees you have to be aware of. However, if you stay calm, you can usually just ignore them, or if they are really bugging me, I have a brush with soft bristles that I use to move bees inside the hive (when and if I need to move them), and I can also use that tool to brush the bees off of me. 

  And not to bore anyone with more bee photos or to give anyone the heebie jeebies, but the wild milkweed growing in my garden is now starting to flower and is attracting all kinds of bees, including my honeybees.

  And  for some reason (which I can't figure out), my new bees would rather enter the hive by going under the outer cover as you can see here

rather than going in and out the main hive entrance like the old hive does. Hmmmm.

   Today I am joining Nicole for her Sunday in the Art Room (SITAR) and also Gillena for her Sunday Smiles.  I'm going to start off this art part of my post with my final page for Matilde's Houses and Buildings challenge at Art Journal Journey. Matilde's challenge runs through this Tuesday.

    This page is part of a homemade journal that I used some music sheets in. Then I created this page on top of the sheet.

     I used a small piece of textured paper for the house itself, and I also used a TH die cut yellow house block to create the roof. There is some of the yellow pieces underneath the textured paper.  I outlined these with a Sharpie. Then I added a die cut butterfly on the roof. The window, flowers and snal are all punch out and/or fussy cut images from 49 and Market. The little white planting pot the flowers are in was a scrap on my table. It's actually from a Greek column die that I had used at some point. 

     The gentleman is also is TH die cut that's been sitting on my work table (the die has 3 of these men and I used the other 2 at some point). Then to finish my page  I used a TH quote rubber-stamp and added a few small flat yellow beads. 

   In this next photo you can see the whole page within the journal.

   And finally, a few views of all the milkweed and also the beehives. This is my wild garden area, and other than a tiny bit of fall and very early spring quick clean up, I don't do anything here. I just let nature take its own course, and occasionally someone gives me some plants and I might add them here because this area gets a lot of sun.

    That's all for today. Have a great rest of your weekend and start to the new week.

The Art of Bee Keeping

 Hi everyone. I hope everyone had a great past week. Other than the morning I spent waiting on hold to talk to someone from the IRS for far too long (the tax people for those of you who aren't familiar with American taxes) and then they cut me off and told me to call back (let's just say I wasn't happy at that point), it  was  a good week for me. Today I am joining Nicole for Friday Face Off  and also Gillena for Friday Lunch Break.

   I also want to apologize if I didn't get by your blog. My last 2 posts were scheduled, and the days got quite busy, so I'm behind. 😖 But today I should (hopefully) be able to watch up. 🤞

   The other morning I did a bee hive check, and I know some of you are interested in them, so if that's you, here's some insect faces for you today.

    Above, you can see how successful the new hive is doing. Not just those on the top, but if you look down between the wooden frames,  you can see all the bees that are there also. 

 The next photo is when I first took the top off the hive. Since these bees are new to the hive, they don't have a huge store of honey to eat, so I put in one of these sugar/pollen patties that you can see. It's about 12 inches/about 30.5 cm square, and usually takes the bees several months to go through. (They go through it quicker in the winter when there is nothing in bloom than they do when there's things in bloom.) However, with no honey store these bees emptied that package in just over 2 weeks.

  My other hive, which was new last spring and made it through the winter, is going crazy making those odd shaped combs from where I left out  3 frames.  You can see the honey glistening in many of the cavities. That honey will be covered as you can see in the bottom left of this next photo. It's the white bumpy part.

   Later in the summer I will remove this comb and take the honey, although with all the work they've done, it does seem kind of mean, doesn't it? 

    This crazy comb is in the smaller upper box.  The next box down is filled with honey that the bees get to keep, and then the bottom box is filled with eggs and brood. This hive probably has in the ball park of 75,000 bees in it.

   This older hives of bees are NOT very interested in me when I open up the hive.  I do use a smoker and smoke them (it covers up their alarm pheromones to keep them from attacking), but very very few of them check me out. They just go about their business.  The new hive however is much more curious about me when I open the hive.  They buzz around me checking me out. 

   However, I haven't been stung for a couple of  years. And when I have been stung, it's been my own fault doing something dumb. The only thing you must do when you open the hive is be totally calm and not rushed. You'd be surprised how relaxing it can be  to open a hive full of stinging and buzzing insects and just to focus on them. 😏

   Some of you probably don't even want to read this post. Grin. I get it. 

   Have a great Friday and start to your weekend.