Wrapping Up March

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday to you. It's almost the weekend too. I hope you get to do something you enjoy this weekend.

And can you believe we're at the end of March? This month can feel like one of the longest months, but it seemed to fly by for me. (But as I wrote yesterday, the start of the month does seem like it was quite a while ago.) I must say it's been one of the most wintery Marches I remember in several years. Yesterday we were back to winter feeling temperatures, but today we are supposed to warm back up. I guess I can also say that March is one of the most fickle months too.

I'm back today with my final journal page for Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey. I really had fun making journal pages  wherever my fancy took me, and with our ongoing wintery weather, I made a lot of art during March. ❤

I'm getting ready for a short  trip to visit a friend, so my journal page today has a  travel theme. Vintage style travel that is.  I only wish I was going to see the pyramids right now; that would be really  adventurous. I am excited to go visit my friend down in North Carolina though, and even more excited we're taking a roadtrip for a few days to visit some places where I haven't been.

My Egypt page started with some inking and stamping my background paper. I just love this stamped image that looks like someone writing and doing a lot of crossing out. The map and the photo of the people on the camels came off of a piece of artist paper in the middle of an old Somerset Studio magazine. I also chopped up a couple of mummy sarcophagus playing cards for some other images. I used a die I have had for a very very long time but never opened to die cut the ankh and Horus the falcon. (And it was good to finally use it.)

Thank you Valerie for hosting and letting us play as we wanted this past month. As always, you are a wonderful host. And you inspired us all also.  And thank you everyone who joined us at Art Journal Journey. It was fun to see everyone's personal art inspirations and to see some artists who don't stop by as frequently.

And since there are some faces on my page, I am linking up to Nicole's  Friday Face Off. And since it is Friday, I am also linking up to Gillena's  Friday Art Lunch Break.

Have a great start to your weekend.

Primary Colors

 Hi everyone.

Today I am posting a page for Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at  Art Journal Journey. This challenge ends tomorrow, because it will already be the last day of March. Wow. This month has flown by, although  the beginning of March seems like a long time ago.

This is also my page for Rain's Art and Dinner Date. Rain's theme this week is primary colors. I'm really not fond of these colors when they are all together  without any other color (or black or white) to break them up, although each individually and when used in various tones and shades are great. You can see various shades of the 3 primary colors on today's page. Scattered around  are some reds, some blues and some yellows. 

I bought a roll of the new color chart tissue paper by Tim Holtz, and I was giving it a try on this page. I added an old photo (also another TH item), a piece of acetate, some art bits cut out of an old magazine page as well as a few stickers to title my page. I used a blue gelato watercolor crayon around the edge to finish off the page also.

I love the idea of art camp, and I must say I wish I was going to one this summer. I bet these ladies had lots of fun creating and sharing ideas.

For food this week, let me share the Victoria sponge cake I made last  weekend.

I actually wanted to try out this King Arthur Flour yellow cake mix. I was wondering how much easier it would be than making a cake from scratch. I knew it was a good tasting mix because  once I was at an event where someone had made cupcakes from it, but sometimes I wonder if mixes are really all that much easier than making from scratch.

 (Sorry for the shadow lines in the photos but it was raining, and I had all the kitchen lights on.)

I still needed to add butter, oil, milk and eggs, but I decided using the mix was a bit quicker and made fewer dirty utensils than making a cake from scratch. 

Since I didn't have room to store the cake in the refrigerator, I modified the Victoria sponge and  filled the center  with only jelly. Then I sprinkled powdered sugar on the top. I had a squirt can of  whipped cream that I used for the whipped cream when I served the cake.

Not fancy but still very yummy.  Maybe not quite so good as having some cream in the middle between the layers. And I liked how the mix tasted too. More like a homemade cake than some of the big name mixes.

That's all for me today. Have a great rest of your week.

Contrasts

Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. 

Today I have a journal page where the background really doesn't match the images I added at the bottom. That's why I call it contrasts.

The background is made using leftover paint. You know when you squeeze more out of the tube than you needed and you don't want to waste it? Over time the background was filled in with assorted leftover paints, and then I had lots of this brown paint that I made the cross circles with.

I wasn't sure where to go with this, and then  decided to use an old book page and cut out some random circular items. I glued them down and then outlined them with not leftover black paint.

And I finished off my page with a few random images from piles around my work table. To me the images I added tell the story of an art collector who was tall and beautiful. She decided to make more of her life than just being a socialite so she collected flower paintings and with her money, opened a museum of them. 

Although this is maybe not my most favorite page I've ever made, I still like how it came out. It was a good exercise in trying to figure out what to put with my very modern (and maybe messy) background.

Yesterday  for T Day I mentioned how I had taken another beach walk on Saturday, so let me share a few photos .

Here's my favorite.

Mr. Pete was as happy as a clam at high tide. And Maddie suddenly showed an interest in collecting clam shells, picking  up a shell and carrying it along for the walk. I never got a photo of the shell in her mouth, but here she is smelling a clam on laying in the sand.

Have a great middle of your week. And thanks for visiting my blog too.

T Stands for Ending the Hiatus

 Hi everyone. It's once again time for T. Boy did last week fly as I am sure this one will too.

This past Saturday we expected some mid-afternoon precipitation. Luckily the weather turned out to be just a dusting of snow and mostly a mix of sleet and rain because the weather people were predicting we could have 2-4 inches of snow. I'm so happy they were wrong.

In the morning, the hubby and I put the dogs in the car and headed off to the beach. It was a bit chilly, but it was a really nice morning for a beach walk.

On the way home we ran a few errands, and then, since it was lunchtime, we decided to stop for something to eat.

Those of you who have visited my blog on T days for awhile might remember that one place I really enjoyed eating was this hole in the wall restaurant near my house called the Farmer's Kitchen. It's a really small place, with low ceilings and a lot of tables. And for breakfast there is always a line waiting outside no matter what the weather.  During covid, we didn't really feel this was where we wanted to be, so we haven't eaten there since before the pandemic began.

On our way home  from the beach and errands on Saturday the hubby and I talked about what we wanted for lunch. I really wanted breakfast foods. My husband wanted to get closer to home just in case the weather came in early plus he had a few chores at home he wanted to do.  We suspected that the Farmer's Kitchen wouldn't be as crowded since the breakfast crowd was past and on weekends the lunch crowd never usually seemed as big. 

(FYI-the Farmer's Kitchen is open from 5 AM until 2 in the afternoon except on Sundays when they close at noon. Breakfast is served all day and lunch starts at 11.)

Once we made the decision to stop there, I started thinking about their homemade hash and their blueberry pancakes. I was a bit worried that my memories would make them tastier than they really were. Afterall, we hadn't eaten there for 3 years.

I was going to order pancakes with a side of hash, but then I saw that the Uncle Cricket's breakfast was only $1 more. In the Uncle Crickets breakfast there are 2 eggs, hash, homefries (with me adding peppers and onions) and 2 pancakes. I had them add blueberries to my pancakes too. I especially like that they add the little native blueberries to their pancakes, and a lot of them too.

Warning if you're hungry you may not want to continue reading-smile.

You can see my and my husband's Diet Pepsi that we had to drink.  This is my link to  Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for T this week.

Plate 1 is my 2 eggs that are draped over my hash and the  home fries are in the back.

Plate 2 is my 2 pancakes which would have been a big enough meal in itself.

This is way more food than I ever remember getting, even though the servings pre-covid were big.

I ate the pancakes and some of the hash, as well as 1 egg. I was then ready to be rolled out to the car. I'm sure all that food explains why my afternoon energy level was so low too. Smile.

But the good news is called a take out box, and so I had another yummy  lunch on Sunday. 😀

And the other bit of good news is that the food tasted just as yummy as  I remember it being 3 years ago when I last ate there. I am glad some things, mainly the food at the Farmer's Kitchen, hasn't changed since covid became a part of our lives.

Have a great T day and week ahead.

Weekend Post

 Hi everyone. Happy Saturday or Sunday to you, depending when you see this post. It is Saturday afternoon in my spot on the planet, and we're due for some unsettled weather.  It is raw and grey outside. In fact a few minutes ago it was snowing; now it has stopped, and I hope it stays that way. ☝

I'm in a lazy Saturday afternoon mode. I have lost my ambition, but I did have a busy morning. Since I am relaxing on the couch,  let me take the time to share another journal page for Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey

Met Sam and Felicia. They are 2   modern artists who lived back  in  the early 1900s. You could say they were ahead of their time when it comes to creating art and living a bit of a bohemian lifestyle, much to the dismay of their very reserved and conventional parents.

My page today is in honor of Sam and Felicia, my fictional artists. I started my page by using some watercolor paints and painting circles and rings around the circles. Once dry, I outlined them with a black Sharpie. I still had a white background, so I used a light pink gelato and a wet brush to spread a bit of color around the background.

After that I wasn't sure what to do, so my page sat for a week. Then I decided it needed an acetate image of some kind. When I hit my stash the first thing I found was these 8x11 page sized maps. I had made these for a lab back when I taught school, and every time I did the lab the kids would use and then return the acetate maps. When I retired I figured my replacement wouldn't be using them since none of us had been doing this particular lab for several years. Because of that I brought the stack home with me. It was better than tossing them out. 

I glued the map down on my watercolor paper, and then, once the glue dried and so I knew the acetate wouldn't peel off, I  rough circle stitched around each of the painted circles. The stitching went through both the acetate and the watercolor paper.  Then I was able to finish my page by adding a strip of green tape, Sam and Felicia's photo (from TH) and a stamped on paper and then glued down the quote.

Here's a couple of photos I took of the snow melt yesterday. Now that the snow has started falling again this afternoon, (and it's coming down quite hard right now),  hopefully this area won't be all white again. 😢

That's all for  me in this post. I just need to decide  whether to spend the rest of my afternoon  watching a movie or reading, both which could lead me to taking a nap.

Enjoy your weekend.

Random Photos

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday.  

Today I have some random photos to share.  It's been a fairly quiet week so my photos aren't very exciting. There are a few faces in my photos to share  for Nicole's  Friday Face Off .  I am also linking up to Gillena's Friday Art Lunch Break . I hope you don't mind snow photos because it's still around where I live so that's mostly what  I've photographed. We have had  spring-like weather all week though, so there's a lot of melt going on. In fact, in some spots we're down to bare ground. 😀

Above is the snow gauge after the big storm a week and a half ago. And below is the snow gauge on this past Tuesday, a week after the storm.

As the snow is melting, it is forming some interesting patterns. I found this snowy lace one day. 

And these half melted ice crystals were glistening in the sun.

One place that never melts quickly is my backyard. I have never figured out why that is because it gets quite a bit of sun. My front yard which has lots of trees and is on the north side (shade side) of the house is really getting bare. I'm thinking the trees are pulling in lots of water and helping the snow to melt.

 

This year one of the tough things is that back when we went to Florida in January we had snow and then rain and then cold weather. That means underneath the most recent snow is this layer of ice that we haven't been able to remove.  Here's a photo of my husband trying to clean off some snow to get to his workshop last weekend. He hadn't been able to get through the frozen snow-ice until now. You can see what I mean by lots of snow on the ground still.

I'm glad Miss Maddie decided to lay on this piece of ice instead of in the mud around it.

And yesterday afternoon when it was raining I looked out the window and caught these 2 wild turkeys at my bird feeder.

Have you had enough of snow photos? (Me too.) Here's another face for you. This time it's avian and from one of my trips down to the beach to walk.

OK, there was still some snow at the beach when I took these  first 3 photos. But this week when I went for a walk the snow was gone.

In this next photo I've been trying to decide if those are seals or a lot of seagulls on the rocks. The colors look like seagulls but some of them look like they are lounging in that way seals do. I wish I had my big camera with me because this was a much as my phone could zoom in.

And you might remember my birthday roses. They are looking a little worse for wear right now, but in another way, I like the look. They have that vintage feel and almost look like paper .

And finally, this morning's sunrise was pretty.

That’s all for me today. I hope you do something you love this weekend. And as always, thanks for visiting my blog.

Thursday

Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.

Today I am sharing a page from the junk journal I am working on. The journal is made with brown kraft paper that I simply hand stitched along the spine. For those of you who don't know what a junk journal is, you basically glue down items that you  want to clean up (but you don't have to be cleaning them up). There doesn't have to be a particular theme to your book or pages.

My spread contains some images that came out of a small stack of magazines I decided to recycle. I also used bits from a word find book that I'd bought  last fall , but the puzzles were way too easy.  I wonder if  this word find book was supposed to be for children and was accidentally put in the wrong place at the store.

I also added some items that were laying on my work table,  and I used a paint pen to make the white dots on the craft paper. The little girl is floating in the middle of the right hand page, but it is a junk journal. And the fun part of making a junk journal (besides recycling all those bits and pieces you'd probably throw away) is that you can make your page however you want.

This week Rain's Theme is complementary colors, and since my page is lots of blue and orange, that is a good example of complementary colors. There is also a bit of green and red, 2 other complementary colors. 

I am also linking my page up to Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey.

I also want to add a tag for the newest challenge at Tag Tuesday. Sandie's is hosting this time around, and her challenge is your favorite theme.

One of my favorite themes is nature and another one is travel. One place I love to visit is the American Southwest, which is the inspiration for this tag. Hopefully I haven't shared this one before because I'd made it awhile back. 

And speaking of travel and nature, let me end this already long post with some manatee photos from back when I went to Florida in January. I'd never seen wild manatees before, so it was exciting to see them and check them off of my wildlife/ animal bucket list.

They aren't the most exciting of photos because I wasn't swimming underwater with them.

Since they stay underwater, sometimes all you see is the bump as they swim close to the surface. 

And sometimes they pop their tail out of the water.

And if you enlarge this one, you might see the nose out of the water getting a breath.

This is the canal where we saw the manatees. It's part of the Cape Canaveral wildlife sanctuary.

OK, I'll end this post here. Thanks for making it this far, and have great end of your week.

 

Home

Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week. I'm having a fairly quiet week which means I have lots of time to play. Smile. That means my page for today is just perfect for me.

Today I have a journal page that began with one of those ripped out of an old Somerset Studio magazine artist papers.

I really like the canvas  and lace details on that paper. Yes there is actual cloth on this journal page, the recycled whitish lace that is stitched down slightly crooked under the word HOME that I added. But the house and the fabric details on the top 2/3s of the page are in the paper photo. 

I tore the magazine paper in half, and then put them back together on some watercolor paper to separate the bottom from the top. You can see a bit on the right edge right below the lace and above the frayed fabric.  It is the very narrow white space.

I made the bottom with some washi tape and punched out circles from an old book page. The stamped, colored and fussy cut lady holding the heart and the heart are both items I added, and the key is recycled from another project. 

And I finished off my page with this ancient stamped quote and a bit of paper scrap off my work table. 

I like to think of this svelte lady as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz all grown up.

I am linking this page up to 2 challenges:

This month's Home challenge over at More Than Words and also 

Valerie's Anything Goes over at Art Journal Journey

Hope your week is going well.