Nighttime

    Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday to you. I don't think today will be as wintery cold as yesterday was, but we will see about that when I go out walking this afternoon. We started our woodstove yesterday;  it was that chilly😏. I know some of you probably already have snow... winter has arrived  early this year for so many. 

    Today I want to share a page for Wendy's Moment in Time challenge at Art Journal Journey.

   My moment in time refers back to the quote which is a very old Stampers Anonymous image. 

   I wanted to create a night page without making a solid black background, so I used this small honeycomb stamp and black ink. Then I tried to use some old black rub ons that didn't work well at all, so I used some printed tissue paper from Dina Wakely. I still didn't love my page, so I added some 49 and Market punch out flowers on the left. 

     I thought maybe I needed a border, so I used some white paper and die cut one, but then that was too white. Instead I added more flowers. OK, now my page wasn't too bad, not my favorite ever, but that happens, right? I finished my page by adding the moon and star stickers, adding a couple of crows on the bottom left, and finally  using the quote.

   Last week when we had the full moon the weather person said we could also maybe  see the northern lights, so I went out a couple of times to see if there were any. I had no luck seeing the Aurora Borealis, but I did get a couple of interesting sky photos on my phone.

   The moon was so bright and that made the sky a bit blue. It doesn't really look all much like night, does it? Except of course for the stars.

The com trail is obvious, but I'm not sure what the white blob to the left of it is.

In this next photo it looks like it was morning. I think it was about 8 PM when I snapped this.

And I like this photo of my house. And you can see the house across the street a bit too in the bottom left corner.

    That's all for me today. Keeping this post short since my scheduled one for tomorrow is very long. 😉

Time for a New Challenge

     Hi everyone. Happy Tuesday. It's time again for a new challenge at Try It on Tuesday. The last 2 weeks flew by, and thanks to all of you who joined our Halloween challenge. 

    Now that one holiday is over, it's time to move onto another holiday. This time our challenge has a Christmas theme and we want you to GET READY FOR CHRISTMAS.

   I decided to make some tags to put on a few special gifts. I had so much fun that I ended up making over a dozen tags.  As you probably know, the beauty of tags is that they don't take very long  and you can try out lots of ideas. Here's a few of those that I made. 

   To make these I used various die cuts, inks, stamps, paper, glitter glues, tapes, markers, paints, paint pens, and other ephemera. For the sake of brevity, I'll mention I used several Tim Holtz products, Stickles, some Little B dies, Cornish Heritage Farm dies, and some Hero Arts stamp and dies.

   Here's one of the tags enlarged. I'll also be linking this one up to Tag Along (and ATC's). They’re latest challenge is texture.

   To make this tag, I covered the tag with some swirly green paper, and then I used purple ink along the edges.  I cut out the 3 lightbulbs using an old set of dies from Little B (Christmas Icons set). I glued them down, colored in the base and used silver Stickles glitter glue on them. I drew in the cord, and also outlined the quote which is from a TH stamp set. To finish I added a small piece of velvet ribbon and also some TH washi tape above it.  I like the texture from the velvet ribbon and the Stickles. 

   Don't forget that at Try It on Tuesday our challenge runs for the next 2 weeks. We accept any type of art as long as it relates to the challenge.

   And definitely check out the other design team pieces because I know tags aren't everybody's thing to make.

   I hope you're feeling like Christmas and will join us  at TIOT for this challenge.

   

    

T Stands for Getting Ready for Winter and a Few other Things

    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 . 

   November is definitely here. Like many of you have  already said, this time change has been an adjustment, and I'm missing the evening light. In the last week so many leaves have come down and the colors of October are gone.  Since I live among some mighty oaks and they are always the last to fall, I still have a lot of leaves on the trees right around the house, but they are all brown and not prettily colored. 

   I snapped this photo Saturday afternoon while my husband and I were pulling in all the yard items (chairs, garden ornaments, a cold frame from my garden, the pots I plant with annuals on my back deck) into the screen porch. The plastic also went on the screen porch  and now it's all closed up for the winter.

    The bees also have been winterized so hopefully they can get through the long cold months ahead.

   I stuffed the hive with bee fondant so they would have food, and then I wrapped the hive in 2 bee jackets. One slides down over the hive, and the other one covers the back and sides. The second one only covers that area because that is the usual wind direction and it works as an extra windbreak.

    Then I stuff some garbage bags with leaves and shove them underneath the hive so they won't lose any heat or get any winds blowing in from below. I actually reused the partially decomposed oak leaf bags from last year because they are easier to stuff in the space than those with the freshly raked leaves. It's not pretty, but it works.

   Since our temperatures can get down below zero degrees F or -17 degrees C, sometimes for weeks, we also need to put up a physical  windbreak around the bees.  We ran out of time on Saturday, and it rained Sunday, so that is still on the to do list.

  Otherwise I spent some time this past week cleaning up my art space around squeezing in some art. I also took a trip out to King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont to pick up a few items I wanted for my Christmas baking. It's about  a 2 hour drive each way, but it's a fairly easy one. It was also a good way to cheer myself up regarding the dark, and the fact that last week was the 3 year anniversary of my Mom's death.

   When I go I usually get a chai tea for the drive home. That's my ticket to T this week.

  I also had a very bad lunch. 😉 They make the best rye flour brownies, so I got one of those to go too.

   That's it for me this week. Wishing everyone a happy T day and start to the new week.

  

Sunday Art

   Hi everyone. Happy Sunday to you. I hope you're having a lovely weekend.

   Today I want to share another art journal page for Wendy's Moment in Time challenge at Art Journal Journey. I am also linking a it up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles.

    I started this page quite a while back. Not with this theme, but when I have extra paint left over on my palette I like to randomly paint with it on a blank journal page so I don't waste the paint.  That meant I ended up having this background in my journal which I thought had  potential. I first toned it down a little bit with some watered down white paint. Then I used this old pocket watch shape Tim Holtz die. I cut out the shape twice, the first time in black paper and the second using a piece of acetate.  

    I then used a freebie number strip die I received when I recently bought a few marked down things from Frantic Stamper. ( She's retiring and closing up shop, and although I think some items could be discounted more, she does have some hard to find or no longer made items.)

  I cut the numbers 0-9 twice with white paper. I took the numbers and glued them down randomly on the black paper where the clock face would be. Then I took some white glitter glue (Stickles) and rubbed it lightly over the numbers and the whole inside of the clock face area. After that I took the acetate die cut of the image, snipped off the top and glued the  round clock face down over black and numbered clock face area.

   Finally I used an old set of Technique Tuesday stamps I have. I stamped the big circle words in purple ink, and the tick-tock phrase and the small circle words in black.

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

  

More from My Nova Scotia Road Trip-Joggins-Part 6

  Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you. This weekend we are trying to wrap up some winterizing projects. Are you up to anything fun?

  FYI-My post is a bit long today 😅, so if you're going to read it, get comfy and put up your feet. Maybe even pour yourself a drink. Grin.

  Today I'm taking you back to Nova Scotia where my husband, our 2 dogs and I visited back in September. While staying in Truro, Nova Scotia, we visited a small town called Joggins. We went there because Joggins has a World Heritage Fossil site, and I am totally fascinated by fossils and other things that come out for the ground.  

   Joggins was about an hours drive northwest of Truro,  almost into New Brunswick and as I found while checking it out on my phone, only about a 30 minute drive to the bridge that connects New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island.   You can see on the map below where it is located.

  I know this post might not interest everyone and might not be a place you'd drive out to visit. But if you're interested in looking back at life in pre-human times, fossils are the way to go.

  The red circle in this next photo is the location of where Joggins was located back in the time when the fossils  found at the site were formed.

   The fossils at Joggins take you back to the Carboniferous Period. To put that in a modern reference, this is the time when the plants that formed the world's coal and fossil fuels deposits lived. At that time the area where Joggins is located was below the equator and part of the super-continent Pangea, as was  much of North America and obviously many other places too. And just as another time reference, dinosaurs still haven't evolved yet, so for those of you who like to keep things simple, this was a very long time ago, pre-age of the dinosaurs. 

    It was a hot, wet and  lush time, but the plants growing at that time were not our modern tropical species. In fact the trees were  hollow horsetails; not modern trees that we know. (Our modern trees wouldn't evolve for millions of years.)  In our modern times,  horse tails (Equisetum) are usually fairly short (no more than 5 feet/ 1.5 meters) and could pass for grasses if you didn't know what you were looking for.  Here's a photo  from the internet of modern horsetails. 

But during the Carboniferous, horsetails were the size of  trees, often 60-169 feet/18-49 meters tall. 

    This model  in the museum at Joggins  shows where scientists and fossil explorers have found some of the fossils. Notice this little lizard or salamander inside the example of a fossilized  hollow horsetail.

   This next photo shows an actual fossilized piece from a horsetail tree that was found at the site. It isn't hollow mainly because when it fossilized it was buried in other material which filled in the middle. 

    The museum was quite interesting and a great place to start our visit. It wasn't large, but it explained how  Joggins is located in an area where a lot of coal formed millions of years ago and then was collected over the last few hundred years.  While removing this coal, many fossils were found.

   The museum also housed some really nice fossils and some models of coal aged creatures like giant dragonflies. However, like in most museums, it's hard to get photos of things under glass because you get so much light glare.

   This above photo was a view under some glass flooring. The creature is a model of a giant millipede that was common at that time. 

Above are some fossilized leaves, and below is a fossilized footprint.

And here are some fossilized ferns.

This last view I'm sharing  is really cool because these raindrops dropped into some mud. Then the mud hardened and the raindrops fossilized. 

Here's a few wall signs that explained life both in the Carboniferous and in the "present" at Joggins.

And yes, I did step inside the hollow tree model. 😀

  After we finished in the museum, we went down onto the beach and searched for fossils. It was amazing; there were so many of them. However, you were not allowed to take them, but you could take photos. 

   Here's the beach. As with Burntcoat Head, since we were still in the upper Bay of Fundy, there is a 3 hour window at low tide you can search the beach for fossils. 

  Here's a few fossils I found or saw while taking a little walk. I'm not sure what most of them are, but it was fun to find and see them.

    The black lines on the left and center top are some kind of fossil.

This next one part of a leaf of some sort.

This one is probably the best fossilized leaf I saw.

Here's a couple more but I'm not sure if they are plant or animal.

This edge  of a large rock is the fossilized edge of a horsetail tree .

    This next photo goes back to that millipede model I shared earlier in this post. It was the greenish creature under the glass floor that was in the museum.

   I didn't find this but the man who did was there trying to make a cast of it. He was very excited to share his discovery. What you see is not the actual millipede, but you can see the tracks made while the millipede crawled through the mud with all its tiny legs and dragging its body. Look just to the right of the coin he placed on the rock for reference and you can see all the little feet impressions. 

  

  If this next photo looks just like textured rock, it is. But it's also a huge group of clam shells that somehow got lumped together and then fossilized. They call it clam rock.

   And this final fossil was a bit more obvious (the dark area on this grey rock), even if I am standing a bit away from it. I like how I caught my shadow. 

   And if you aren't into fossils, maybe you like wildflowers. I certainly love them too, and so let me end this post with a few photos also at this park.

   OK, this post is long enough. Especially if you're not into fossils.  😏 Have a super start to your weekend.

Art & Photos from Another Walk

   Hi everyone. Happy end of another week.  This past week was busy even though I didn't have much on my calendar. I've been trying to do a few inside cleaning projects that need to be done. However, I can't say I've managed to get very far into my list. I shouldn't have started  by cleaning up my art space because that seems to have turned into a major project. 😉 (But it is much needed.)

  It's time for Nicole's Friday Face Off and also for Gillena's Friday Lunch Break. I also have a journal page for Wendy's A Moment in Time challenge at Art Journal Journey. On my journal page is my face for Nicole's challenge.

   I used  a maple leaf stamp with red ink, some orange ink and a stencil with blue paint to make the background.  The number square is from some older packaging I've kept to use because it was too nice to toss out. Then I added some leaves and clocks, both images from AALL & Create. I added a small crow from a roll of clear tape and also some string that was sitting on my work table. I'm not sure who made the girl's face because she was loose in my stash (I suspect I cut her out of a sheet of paper) and finally I used a TH quote to finish my page.

 

    I believe the new challenge at Creative Artiste Mixed Media Challenge Blog starts today, and I'll be linking a my page up over there also.

   A couple of weeks ago I was out for an appointment. I decided it was such a lovely day I needed to go walking afterwards. I ended up heading to the Urban Forestry Center in Portsmouth (New Hampshire) since I hadn't walked there in well over (if not longer) a year. 

   The dogs and I had a lovely walk, and I thought I'd share some photos from it today. 

   First here's some relaxing views along the trail. Along one side of the Urban Forestry Center is a salt water marsh and river.

 I also had some fun taking some close up photos.  This white fuzz in this next photo at one time was some blooming asters.

I believe these yellow berries are a form of bittersweet. 

Here are some tiny crab apples.

Any guess who's been this hole?

These attractive red berries are winter berry.

These purple berries are poke weed berries, not elderberry, and are poisonous. .

  That's all for me. Have a great rest of your Friday and start to your weekend.