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. 

Friday Faces

  Hi everyone. Happy Friday to you. Today I'll be joining  Nicole for Friday Face Off  and Gillena for Friday Lunch Break.

  Nicole has made today faces showing emotion day. I'll admit I haven't done a lot of art lately (the gardens and then my reading has been calling me), but one thing I try to keep up with is my daily journal and my quick sketch drawings. These should count because I am making them myself. Anyhow, I went back and took a few snapshots of some of the faces with emotion. Some of these aren't bad, and some are a bit cartoon-ish, but as I’ve  mentioned before, I don't spend tons of time on any of my journal drawings.   I've included faces I've drawn both recently and back in the last year or so.

    Have a great rest of your Friday and start to your weekend!

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.