I'll Open My Door for You

 Hi everyone. I am in total disbelief it is December of 2021 already. I don't know where this year has gone. But it is a new month, and it is the month of December at that.

With the new month beginning, it's time for a new challenge at Art Journal Journey

First let me once again thank both Chris for hosting and everyone who joined in during November for the All Kinds of Weather challenge at AJJ. It was a lot of fun, and there was so many wonderful weather related pieces.

This month we welcome the talented  and lovely Valerie, who you probably know from the blog Bastelmania,  as our new host. Her challenge is

When One Door Opens Another One Closes

Please stop by the Art Journal Journey web page to read more about what Valerie says about this challenge. 

My first piece for the month is here.

I started by spraying paint on some water color paper. Once dry I attached a bit of scrap printed tissue paper. 

I did some searching for the couple of door stamps I have, and this was the only one I found in my bin. (I later found the other in in another bin.) I like this door a lot but I'm not sure it is the most welcoming.

However since it was the one I had, I stamped and used embossing powder on the image. After I heat set the embossing powder, I fussy cut it out, colored in the door and the frame, and then attached it to my page.

I knew I wanted the big welcome word on my page, so  after adding the images, I used big letter stickers to form the word welcome. Of course you are welcome to join us at AJJ.  Then I added the phrase come in with some smaller stickers from from stash. 

I went with a tropical feel. The palm tree, parrot and butterfly are all cut out of a piece of scrapbooking paper I had in my stash. Finally I gave the page a big of texture by underlining the "come in" words with some stitching.

I hope we get to see you at Art Journal Journey this month with some inspirational door  ART JOURNAL PAGES. Any size page is accepted but please, only art journal pages! No cards, tags, ATC's or dimensional art please. If you have a journal page and card on your post, you may link up, but if you have only cards, and I am sure they are lovely,  there are plenty of challenges to link those up to only Art Journal Journey is not one of them.

Thanks for visiting my page today too. 

Happy new month to you!

T Stands for the Holiday Weekend

Hi everyone. Happy new week everyone.

It is time again for another T day over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog .  It is also now Hanukkah so let me wish all of you who celebrate a wonderful holiday of lights.  And lastly, since it is the final day of November, I want to thank Leah for hosting another wonderful month of Art Every Day Month.

My last piece of art for this monthly share over at AEDM Day 30! are the  mittens I first posted back on Day 6 of the month.  They are now finished and ready to wear. 

Here's the front.

And the back before I blocked them.

I hope everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving had a wonderful day. My husband and I went to my sister-in-laws over in Maine. Here's a group photo, minus my husband who was the photographer. That's me on the left  front  scrunched up (so my sister in law wouldn't be block by my head) with the scarf. 

The man at the head of the table is my SIL's husband Dave. He is a professional chef and baker so the meal was quite delicious.  He not only roasted one turkey but smoked a turkey too. 

My ticket to T this was this drink which was not wine, but a festive pomegranate sangria that Ally, the girl in the grey near the head of the table made. It was quite delicious.

It was a relaxing and fun holiday weekend. Besides eating too much for Thanksgiving, my husband and I went out early on Friday to cut our Christmas tree before the rain started. 

Not cheap by any means, (buying a fresh tree is still a tad but more),  but it is always fun to go find and then chop a tree. Plus the tree farm  is located in my town and it is always good to help support a local small business.

Here's my husband with the tree once we'd picked it out and before we'd chopped it down.

We had just paid for our tree and put it in the back of his truck when it started to rain.  Since the rain was supposed to, and did, turn to snow later in the day, we put the tree in our garage until Sunday and then wrapped up the weekend by putting it up. 

The other weekend project was to finish winterizing the bees.

You might remember I wrapped them in an insulated waterproof blanket. I also put an insulated hive box on the top under the cover. You can see the insulated bee blanket (it is the black layer), and the insulated winter hive box is the yellow box on top.

We wrapped the base and lower boxes with some landscape fabric and then went and picked up some hay bales. The bee blanket and insulated hive box should be good, but they don't insulate the open space under the hive. That's what the  hay bales should do. Now, I just have to keep my fingers crossed that all is well in the hive and wait for warm weather next spring before I find out how they fared. 

 I left the hive openings uncovered, so the bees are able come out on a warm day.  

It was a low key but nice weekend. And as usual, it flew right by. Next up, Christmas.  Unless time slows down, it will be here before we know it.

I'll  have some more California photos to share with you next week for T.  

Have a great week and a happy T day too.

 

Just About the End of November

 Hi everyone. Happy new week to you.

Today I want to share my last journal page for Chris's All Kinds of Weather challenge at Art Journal Journey. Thanks Chris for being such a great host. I really enjoyed this challenge, especially since  weather is something that is often on our minds.  I had a lot of fun making pages about all kinds of atmospheric conditions.

Since the end of November definitely chills down here in New Hampshire, and since we are now in "snow" season,  I thought I would share this wintry page.

I started off with a Gelli print that had a lot of white space and also also some blue leaves on it. The leaves weren't really clear, and the blue was dark, so it had me thinking winter.

I added this lady I cut out of a recycled fashion magazine. I changed her face (mainly because I tried to paint over the first one and that didn't work), and I gave her a big flounce of blowing pink hair.  I stamped the snowflake in several shades of blue around the background and then I used some tiny word stamps and stamped those randomly around my page. 

I am also linking up to Art Every Day Month, day 29. Only one more  day to go. Didn't we just start this challenge?

And I don't know about you, but after some cold weather, I want to see something a little warmer. Here's a few more photos from our California trip.

These were taken in Joshua Tree National Park, about 2 hours east of Los Angeles in the desert. 

I'll share some more views and more of the park later in the week. 

Hope your week starts off in a good way.

Rainy Day Art

Hi everyone. Happy Sunday.

.

Today I want to share another page for Chris' All Kinds of Weather challenge at Art Journal Journey. I am also linking up to day 28 of AEDM.

I started my page by die cutting several umbrellas in different colors of origami paper. I laid them on my page and then stenciled the raindrops around them. I then lifted the umbrellas up to let the page dry.  Using the last couple of drops of paint on a paper towel, I rubbed the background so it wouldn't be so white. Once everything was dry, I attached the umbrellas and also outlined them with a black pen.

The girl is an AALL & Create Janet Klein stamp. She was stamped on white paper, colored and then fussy cut. I finished my page by stamping this ancient quote rubber stamp that I think is from the pre-Ranger days of Stamper's Anonymous ( before they starting making Tim Holtz and other stamps), but I am not positive. 

We had some rain the Friday that turned to snow. The first snow this season. We only had about a 1/2 inch (1 cm), but it still made the ground white.  Winter is here though.

It looks cold and was cold. And there you have  the latest New Hampshire weather.

Let me share a few more photos from our trip to the Channel Islands National Park. (Back when it was a more balmy sixty degrees F or 15.5 degrees C. Smile )

I want you to meet my new friend, Mr. Raven. He landed on the dock railing near where we were sitting as we waited for  the boat. He and I had a little conversation. I had to apologize to him as I had nothing to feed him, but he didn't believe me. He did like how I told him how handsome he was.

And he did love to be the center of attention and have his photo taken too.

While he and I were chatting, I noticed he had a little side conversation going on with his friend who was flying. I suppose if I fed him then his buddy would have joined us also. What a  guy!

I know ravens and crows aren't the most exciting birds to see, but I rather like them. They are smart and clever, and are certainly not timid. 

Have a great end to your weekend! 

 

Walking at the Channel Islands National Park

 Happy weekend everyone. I know some people here in the US have a long weekend because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but I hope, no matter where you are, you are enjoying your weekend.

I thought today for Art Every Day Month over at Leah's blog I would share some photos from the walk my husband and I took while visiting Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands National Park.

I'll start off with these morning glories which were blooming all over the island. At least I think they are morning glories.

We walked with a small group of people and with the park's volunteer naturalist. He was, like me, a somewhat recently retired science teacher with 36 years of teaching. As he taught  environmental science for many years, he had a lot of information about the islands to share with us. Since he taught high school, he also had a great style explaining. Of course I am partial to that way of explaining things since I'd taught high school science for a long time too. (smile)

We started off at "base camp" which was one of the original ranch stations when the island was not a national park. At that time it was privately owned, and the whole island was one giant ranch with lots of sheep and pigs. When the Park Service took over the islands they worked on restoring them back to their natural, pre-ranch state. That took many years to accomplish, but they are more or less restored there now, except for all the eucalyptus trees that the ranch family planted.

The base where we started off was near where the boat docked and was fairly flat. There was no place to go but up however, as most of the island is flat, but flat on top of some steep sided hills.

This was the start of the climbing. Not terrible, but it surprised me how steep it was as we walked. 

Our group arrived at this first plateau where we could have a view of the ocean. We had one small hill left to climb up on our trail after that. You can see that hill going to the right.

You can see our guide on the top of the hill behind  him my husband. The hubby and I were the first of the visitors to reach him up at the top, which made me feel good. Everyone in our group did make it up the climb; some of them just took a while.

It was worth it because the view at the top was spectacular.

There was a nice set of rock benches on top where, once our official tour wrapped up, we could sit and each our lunch, enjoy the sun and the view.

Then we walked back.  Here I am, with a view of Anacapa Island (one of the other islands in the park)  in the distance.

Here (below) you can see the beach area. We are still up on the hill top and it was quite a ways down.

Another thing you could do on the island was take a day kayaking trip. That would have been fun, but 1) we didn't come dressed for that and 2) it was $150 a person, so with 2 of us that would have been  expensive.

Here is the satellite ranch house we reached at the end of the hike (back where we started).

It was a beautiful day. Not too hot nor not too cold with a nice breeze. 

That's all for me. I hope you enjoyed the views today. 

Thanks for visiting! And enjoy the weekend!