Do What You Love

Happy Thursday everyone. The cold has returned here to New Hampshire. Many of you in other parts of the US know what I am talking about, even though some places are a lot colder than we are. January isn't ending with any hint that spring, is it?

It's also been a long week (It isn't Friday yet?), but I knew it would be like that. Getting used to my new classes and the change in routine always takes a little adjustment. But no complaints. My classes right now are looking pretty good and my first day worries have come to nothing. Smile. And both yesterday and today we have a 2 hour delay. It was nice to sleep a little bit later.

So today I am sharing a tag I made for Tag Tuesday and their new challenge of Hearts-Hearts-Hearts! You might wonder why there are so many postage stamps on this tag, and that is because I started this tag for the last challenge and ran out of time so I never finished it.  But I turned it into a hearts tag because it has so many things on it I love- birds/nature, music, travel and of course art. And I must say I really like hearts too.

Stay warm wherever you are- or cool if you are lucky enough to be someplace warm. 

 Thanks for visiting.

This Week's Calendar Page

 Hi everyone. Can you believe it is just about the end of January?  Time is flying. (Which by the way is also the latest challenge at Try It On Tuesday and you still have time to join us.) 

And even though the month flew, I must say I am ready for spring which is still a long way off in my world. So this week's  page in my calendar journal was a pink background  to start with so I ran with that and decided to go tropical.  Tropical is a good fix for the mid-winter cold and snowy weather.

I stenciled the flamingos on the page and colored them with markers. I also stenciled the red grids. The flowers are hand painted and the leaves are all stamped., as is the escape word. 

And because of the little squares in the grid and the circles in the background, I am linking up this one last page with Alison's challenge at Art Journal Journey. Thanks Alison for such a fun challenge.

I'm waking up to some fresh snow this morning. 

Guess I'll spend the day dreaming of escape.

Hope you have a fantastic day!

T Stands for a Relaxing Sunday

Hi everyone. T Day has rolled around again and so it is time to share our drink related photos over at Bleubeard and Elizabeth's blog.  It's always fun to see what everyone has been up to!

This past weekend my daughter came home. We were very busy all day Saturday, and it was nice to relax at home on Sunday with a fun project.

I had recently bought a puzzle. I thought it would be a fun thing to have one going during these cold winter months.

 My husband made me this fantastic puzzle board out of plywood and some trim wood many years ago. I haven't done a puzzle for awhile so I dug it out of storage and wiped the dust off.

My daughter and I spent A cloudy Sunday afternoon having intense puzzle building time together.

Puzzle concentration requires a bit of sugar so when my husband took off to go to the grocery store we requested he bring us home a bag of peanut M and M's.   And a little caffeine doesn't hurt either. 

 We got a lot done on the puzzle but finally we hit the animal noses. All these black pieces look so similar.

It was fascinating to see how our puzzle making styles differed. I like to put a pile of pieces that I believe go  together first and then do all the connecting. My daughter likes to work piece by piece. I guess we make a good puzzle team because I would dig out the pieces and then she would assemble them.
Of course this is as far as we got and now she is back at her apartment on the other side of the state. Guess I can use my own style to finish it.
Hope everyone has a great T day.

Kinnichiwa

Another Sunday night here in New Hampshire. This weekend was busy with my daughter home, and Saturday we took a trip down to visit my Mom which is a little over 2 hours in each direction. It was a good visit and we ran some errands on the way home which all worked out even though when we got home we realized our basement deep freezer had stopped working. Ugh! A few things that were still frozen  we packed into cooler bags and put outside in the cold, but most of the rest of the contents were thawed and other than what we kept to eat the next couple of days, had to be thrown out.  It's couldn't have been off too many days because I had just put a couple of things into it last weekend and it was working then.

So even though I had no art time this weekend, I have been on a creative roll, and one of the projects I am working on is finishing up my Japan travel journal from last spring. This year's school trip is going to be a huge group with over 20 kids compared to the 8 that went with us last year. I wish I could go again but I also understand why they want to open it up to other staff members.

 I made a paper collage on the cover as you can see. I am not sure if it is finished yet or not, but it looks a little unfinished yet to me. I guess it depends if I get inspired to do anything else.

Here's a few other pages I recently made and also a few older pages that I don't think I showed you. 

 Don't you love my inky fingers in this photo?

 This next page may or may not be done. I found these fussy cut elements in a magazine I brought home and I really think they are super graphics. I don't know what they say, but hopefully nothing horrible.

Time is flying with January ending this week, and that's the current challenge at Try It On Tuesday You still have lots of time to participate so think about joining us.

Hope everyone had a fantastic weekend and has a great start to the new week.

Advice for New Year-My Calendar Page Theme

Hi everyone It's been a warm and wet Thursday here. Lots of rain and melting snow. BUT the bad news about that is the ground is still frozen so there's some water in my basement and for some reason,people have forgotten how to drive in the rain so I had major traffic issues on my way to work and then again on my way home. New classes started today and  one of my classes might be a bit challenging. Time will tell once I get to know them better. Oh what a day!

My calendar page ended up looking a little too busy, but it is what it is. I decided rather than covering it with gesso and starting from scratch I would leave it.

Last week I showed you this week's page because I wanted to use it at Moo Mania before the challenge ended, so now you get to see last week's page. 

Maybe next week I will get back on track. Smile.

You might see some little diamonds in the background and the stars which are all geometric shapes so I am going to link up another page to Alison's challenge at Art Journal Journey

Tomorrow is Friday and this week has flown by and I think my daughter will be home for the weekend. That is good news.

Hope all is well with you!

Vintage Again Today

Hi everyone. Today is my mid-semester workday at school so I have no kids in class. I have a load of things to do to switch over to new classes which start up tomorrow so it will be a busy day. But wow, that means it is second half of the school year!

And today our temperatures will be almost 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than they were Monday so that is a very good thing. We should be up near freezing (32 degree F or 0 degree C). It' still chilly this morning but at least it's not windy and brutally cold.

So I guess this Wednesday is starting off pretty good.

Last weekend I had lots of art time as it was too cold to leave the house. My work table is in the coldest room in the house (we don't heat the upstairs) and I had to run my electric heater to work, but even so, I still managed to make a few things and start a few more things.  One journal I was working on quite a bit was my newest vintage journal.  Here's a page.

I love this vintage horse and dog piece, and that TH gentleman looks like he belong with the horse.  The lace printed paper looks good with the overall brown color of the page. I added some silver tape (which I rubbed some brown ink on to make it look a little older) as well as some embellishments. A few of these were gifted to me by Astrid. They work really well on this page so thanks! I turned the top round piece into a abstract award as it reminded me of an unusual red ribbon trophy, and then I stamped the quote.

Since there are lots of shapes on this page, I am going to link up to Alison's fun Geometric Shape challenge at Art Journal Journey.

Time has gotten away from me so it's time for me to post and get rolling off to work.

Thanks for visiting!

Time Flies

Hi everyone. 

Today I have some exciting news to share with you. A couple of weeks ago I received an unexpected email asking if I would like to join the design team over at  Try It On Tuesday  My answer was "Of course I would love to be a part of the team. It sounds like so much fun."
I want to send a HUGE thank you to the ladies who are members of the Try It On Tuesday design team for asking me. I feel quite honored to be a part of such a talented group!
Our new challenge starts today. For the next two weeks  we'd love you to join us for our newest challenge:
Time Flies

My page today is all about my wish for spring to arrive.  Lately I have been watching a lot of garden shows on Netflix, and they have gotten me  thinking about what new things I want to do in my gardens this spring. The first flowers to bloom in my gardens are crocuses, so I chose that to be the flower on my page.

The background is made of lots of sheets of printed paper (which you can just barely see in the bottom left). It was sprayed with blue and gold liquid ink. The clock and the wings were die cut. The patience word is made from stickers and the time is flying is a stamped image. I drew, painted and fussy cut the flowers, except for the sparkly purple flower which didn't need to be painted. And finally I added some paint at the bottom of the page.

I hope you join us in the next 2 weeks before time flies and this challenge over. 

And once again, thank you TIOT ladies for inviting me to join.

A Tag and Some T Day Snow

Hi everyone. Hope everyone had a nice weekend. We had snow and sleet but luckily the big snow we were suppose to get Sunday started to fizzle by the time it reached us. Today (Monday) it is bitterly cold with temperatures right around 0 degrees F/ -17 degrees C. I am glad it is the Martin Luther King  holiday so I don't have to go out in the cold and wind for work. I guess  I won't escape it tomorrow morning though, but luckily it is suppose to warm up a bit tomorrow afternoon.

 Today I have a tag to share with you.

I decided it was time to finished off my Japan travel journal from last year. I only had a couple of things to attach and then the front and back cover to do something with. But since I had my Japan trip ephemera  out I got inspired to make an Asian themed  tag for  Tag Tuesday and their latest theme of postage, postmarks and mail.

So along with some Asian lettering stamped images, a bit of origami paper and some cute little Japanese lady stickers,. I added some stamps I was gifted while on my trip last April.

And since Tuesday is just about here as I write this, I will share my T Day drink post with you. Tuesday is a good day to share your drink photo(s) over at Bleubeard and Elizabeth's blog.

I have 2 photos for you today. 

This first one is from around 11:30 on Sunday morning. It was still lightly snowing at that point.

This is the 500ml, 16.9 fluid ounce bottle of Diet Coke I was slowly drinking all day.

And then this second photo is from  a little later in the day just before the hubby shoveled off the back deck.

Have a happy t day ladies. And to everyone, hope you day is a lot less cold and wintery.

   

Vintage

Hope everyone is having a good weekend. It is Saturday evening and our big snow/ice event has begun.

 OK, that is not a very impressive photo is it? But you can see there's a few flakes coming down and we have a dusting.

By the time I get up in the morning there is suppose to be a lot more. They say it is going to really get going sometimes between 10PM and the wee hours of the morning. The cupboards and refrigerator are full,  the woodstove is already on to get rid of the chill in the house and I'm in my comfy pjs which I plan on being the outfit for the weekend. (Well maybe not this pair for the whole rest of the weekend. Smile.)

I started a new  journal so I can play with some vintage style pages. Here's the first version of the cover. 

 I decided I wanted to try something new so I used my finger to rub a bit of liquid glue onto spots and then added some gold leaf. Instead of really loading on the glue I kept glueing in little spots so that I would get bits of gold. I wanted it to look like it had been well loved for many years.

But of course once you add something shiny you get those photo reflections like at the top of the page.  The bottom of the page shows you much more clearly what it looks like. The top looks a little blobby.

And in the time it took me to write this post, I noticed the snow had gotten heavier. (Most of the snow you see is out by the garden is the old crusty stuff we have had on the ground for awhile now.)

Enjoy the end of your weekend.

Keeping Warm and Dry

Happy weekend everyone. It's a long weekend for me  as it is the Martin Luther King holiday on Monday. It should be fairly quiet though since Sunday we have a huge snowstorm in the forecast (up to 24 inches or 60 cm) and then Monday it is going to be bitterly cold. Some of you might already have this weather as it moves east across the US.  I am hoping for lots of art time and probably some reading next to the woodstove. Sounds like some perfect January  hibernation.

And hopefully not too much shoveling. Smile.

So today's page took me about 4 months to finish, but I finally did. I think I needed to step away from it, and am I glad I did as I like it much better now than when I first worked on it. 

And all I needed to do to finish it was add the hearts. But they pull together the page for me.

A cup of hot tea always warms you in the cold.

I am going to link this page to Try It On Tuesday and their Something Old, Something New challenge.  It works because I added something new, the hearts, to a page I had made.

And I am also linking up to Art Journal Journey and Alison's Geometric Shapes challenge. You can see all the squares, and even though hearts aren't classic geometry, they are a definite shape.

Hope you enjoy your weekend and that it will be a little warmer or at least not as snowy as it will be  here in New Hampshire.

Cool Colors

Hi everyone. Moo Mania's latest challenge is cold and frosty colors, and other than that pink dress I think this page works. 

As you can see it is next week's calendar page in my calendar journal, but I guess it isn't so bad to be looking ahead. 

I began by painting my page with 2 shades of blue paint. Once dry, I used some blue and white napkin scraps to add a bit of detail. Notice I left the geometric shapes on the edge? I liked the black and white border and they also help this page work for Art Journal Journey and Alison's Geometric Shapes challenge. 

The quote is all about time, and so I liked this lady waving goodbye to old habits. She is a stamped B Line Design image.
I finished off the page with some postage stamps my my stamp stash, a few postmark rubber stamped images as well as a few other bits out of my "scrap pile".
Not much else new here. Just keeping my eye on the weather and the potential for a big snowstorm coming this weekend. Before that I am wrapping up the semester at school. Finals begin this Friday.
Hope all your week is going well.
And thanks for visiting.

T Stands for Lots of Birthdays

Hello T Gang ladies and any other visitors. It is Tuesday again (and already). Time for T.

Stop by  Bleubeard and Elizabeth's blog and join as we share our drink related photos.

Last weekend seemed to be a birthday celebration weekend for me. No, it was not my birthday.

On Friday after work we had a little get together for one of my colleagues who turned 50 at New Years. Our  group hadn't gotten together outside of work for quite some time, so it was fun to have a chance to chat and socialize. 

In this restaurant where we met was a specialty tequila bar. And you might know I like a good margarita. So even though they were twice as costly as most Mexican places charge, I ordered one. So did 3 of my other co-workers. And oh my goodness, it was horrible! The worse margarita I have ever had. My co-workers had the same thoughts too.  I certainly won't order one if I ever go back there, but I don't think I will be rushing back.

And then on Saturday we had my Mother-in-law's 85th birthday. She isn't doing all that well, so my sister-in-law (with whom my MIL lives with now) had the whole immediate family over for lunch.

I was most surprised when my sister-in-law asked if I would make the birthday cake. Her husband is a professional pastry chef, and I just assumed he would make the cake. But he didn't have time, so she asked me. 

I felt a little bit like I had to make it special.

And it came out really good too. It was devil's food filled with a white chocolate espresso ganache and with a vanilla buttercream. (No calories in this cake either-ha-ha!)

I got the 2 thumbs up from the pastry chef.

And it was a good time to take some family photos too. You can see my husband and I were getting ready for Sunday's football game as we were wearing out team shirts. (And you can tell it was a really cold day with my big sweater under my football shirt.)

And then there was a photo of the granddaughters (except one who was away at college) and their beaus.

And of course since it is T Day  I need to show you my drink. Back when I went to Vermont in early December I had tried a drink called a holiday daiquiri. Well my brother-in-law the pastry chef managed to replicate the drink and so I had one.

Way better than margarita!

Wishing you all a happy T day!

And thanks for visiting.

Circles and Lines

Hi everyone. Hope you are having (or had) a nice weekend. Here in New Hampshire we've had a bit of cold  weather but lots of sunshine. I have eaten too many pieces of birthday cake . Saturday my mother-in-law turned 85 and there was a family party for her. It's also been an American football game watching weekend as  it is playoff time (as Elizabeth mentioned yesterday) and so the hubby and I have been watching a few of the games.

But I do have this modern page for Alison's Geometric Shapes challenge over at Art Journal Journey.  

This page began when I added the left over edges of a round sticker and I stuck that down onto a sheet of paper that I had cleaned a dirty paintbrush on. You can see the large round circle towards the top center of the page where I put that sticker "trash". 

Then I painted the page with some light green Martha Stewart paint. To make the circles, I took a piece of pipe insulation foam (the pipe would slide inside of this) and painted the round end which I used  as a stamp. Then I added a bunch of paper tape to make "lines". Finally I grabbed a few bits off my work table and added them to finish off the page.

I am also going to join up to Dianella Rogell's Think Monday challenge which is tape this week. This year she is opening up her challenges to more than ATCs.

That's all for me today.  Thanks for visiting. 

Warmth

Hi everyone. Here in my world the cold has arrived. The real cold with some strong Arctic wind blowing too.  Brrr. I wish I didn't have to go out this morning into the cold and could sit home and watch garden shows on Netflix. But I am tough and I can handle this January winter blast. (smile)

So to make the cold a little more bearable, I have this warm journal page for today. I made a bright yellow background and stamped some circles with a point in each, this vintage parakeet photo (from a Flow magazine), a puzzle piece, and lots of lines to make letters and numbers (and underline those numbers too).

And with  all these geometric shapes  I am going to link up to Alison's challenge at Art Journal Journey

And it's Friday. This was a long week at work for me, but that always happens at the end of the quarter. One more week to go and then we'll reach the halfway point of the school year. And even if this week was long, the school year is flying by.

Hope you had a good week and an even better weekend.

2018 Calendar Wrap Up

Hi everyone. Yesterday I had some awful snow driving on my way to work and that had turned into rain by the time I got to work. At home we got 3 inches of snow and at work we got none. This had been the story this winter, tricky morning drives. But here's something that has never happened to me in this crazy winter driving. I have a bridge over a narrow strait between where a river goes into a bay that I have to cross, and as I drove onto the bridge it was snowing heavily and as I exited the bridge on the other side it was raining. And it isn't really a very long bridge.
 Today I have some of my "doodles" from my drawing journal, starting with the December calendar that is in the front of the book.
And here's a few of my favorite drawing pages from both November and December.

It was a successful year doing my drawing journal. I didn't necessarily get to it every day, but I would go back in fill something in.  I had some days where I had some new ideas for journal pages, but other days where I just did the same thing, or at least what felt like I was doing the same thing.
I did get myself another journal for 2019. I am hoping some new ideas will come to me as I go along, and I am using this year's journal as more of a general journal and not just a drawing journal. But I do hope to continue drawing because the more I do, the more confidence I get. And confidence seems to be half the ability.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed your visit.