Cheers for Recycling, Reusing and Repurposing

 Hi everyone. Happy weekend. 

It's the last weekend of the month and almost May 1. It's time for me to share my last page for Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's  Recycle, Reuse and Repurpose challenge over at Art Journal Journey

I'm so glad you picked this topic Elizabeth because I really enjoyed it. This topic allowed me to look at various materials differently. Plus, I've always loved to get the most out of my supplies, especially paper scraps, and I certainly did that. I did some cleaning up too, going through magazines to get images as well as keeping my work table pile from getting too messy. (At least for the moment-smile. And my art room is definitely not very neat right now though.)

Thank you  also for hosting Elizabeth ( and of course Bleubeard too).  Also thank you to everyone who made some inspiring recycled, repurposed or reused item art. 

My spread today is all about lifting glasses to toast this month's theme.

This spread is in my junk journal. I used paper scraps and magazine cut outs. I also punched out some circles from an old book and used bits of a page from an old word search book. I pulled everything together with some washi tape. The red heart was laying on my work table from February, and I used a red paint pen to make all the dots in the background. I did add a few details to the toasting magazine  couple with both a black and white pen.

And while I was recycling, I made another tag using some from recycled scraps.  I wanted to link it up to Pinky's challenge at Tag Tuesday. Pinky's theme is Anything Goes.

Everything on this tag is recycled off my work table except for the Chinese words (I'm not exactly sure what they say) and the waterlily. These were all die cut. And I still need to punch a hole in it too.

I hope everyone has a great end of the month and weekend also. This is the second weekend in a row my daughter will be home for a day, and she has her mind set on going shopping, so you can guess what I will be doing tomorrow when she's here. Smile.

Enjoy your weekend!

Friday Faces

Hi everyone. Happy Friday to you. Can you believe April is just about over? This month went faster than a normal fast month usually goes, but I'll add that I've had a great month.

Today I have some photos to share for Nicole's Friday Face Off  and also for Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

You might remember that last Friday I showed you some faces from a short roadtrip I went on up to Belfast, Maine.   Today's post takes you back to Belfast, but specifically to Tracy's Diner, where we stopped for breakfast Saturday before we started towards home.

The diner had the original area with the counter and a few tables, and then it had a small room off to the side.  We ate in the side room, and the wall murals in this space were absolutely amazing.

It was a little bit crowded since it was breakfast time.  I didn't want to bother people  that were eating, so some of my photos aren't necessarily head on. I think you can get the gist though.

Here's a view of the side room and you can see into the main room too.

I've zoomed in a bit more so you can see the mural.

And here's a few more faces from the diner.

And I don't know why I didn't snap a head on photo when we got up and left the table, but here's my last face from Tracy's Diner.

And there you have it. As the sign on the door said when we left,

and that's what I want to say to each of you who stops by.

Have a great start to your weekend.

Twisted

Hi everyone. Happy Thursday. 

Today Rain's Art and Dinner Date is TWISTED. I thought today I'd share some photos with you on this theme.

The most obvious twist is rope.

As is this yellow waxed thread twisted around the cardboard spool.

Then there's this seaweed on the beach which ended up somewhat twisted around itself when waves washed it onto the shore.

These spiral stairs at the Peabody Essex Museum are twisted too. 

And this past Tuesday, the 25th, was DNA day. It was the day in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick  published their DNA paper ( as well 2 other papers by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin), and the world of biotechnology really took off. Here's a couple of journal pages I made in 2021 that show some DNA with its famous double helical twist.

And finally on the twist theme for today,  I have a new journal page to share. I wanted to use one of Elizabeth's favorite words since she, as well as her sidekick Bleubeard, have been hosting over at Art Journal Journey this month. Since April is wrapping up, here is my penultimate journal spread for her challenge. You probably know the challenge this month is recycle, reuse and repurpose. 

The sentiment  of the quote goes right along with the word twisted.

I used a stencil, a dried out baby wipe and ink pads to create the background.  The images are from an Art by Marlene punch out  booklet.  And finally the quote is recycled from an old magazine page.

Since it's been a cloudy and showery week, I had some inside time. I did a bit of baking and made this lemon poppyseed bundt cake. 

I have this fancy bundt pan, but I haven't  always had great luck with cake coming out in 1 piece. It worked on this cake though, so I was excited that it even looks  pretty. 😀 Would you like a piece?

Have a super day and the rest of your week also.

 

Making a Journal

Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. 

I'm back today with the start of a new project. I've wanted to make a journal to keep track of this year's bees as well as including some bee themed art, and I finally got around to making it.

I am linking this up to Bleaubeard's and Elizabeth's Recycle, Reuse or Repurpose challenge at Art Journal Journey.

It started off with 2 items to recycle. One of those items was this shipping bag.

The other item is the cover of an old book. You can see the back cover on the right in this next photo.  I almost hated to cover it as the plant cell design on it is cool, but then I decided my bee journal would be cooler.  Smile. ( I'm keeping the innards of the book to use on other art.)

When I removed the pages from the old book, I also cut the 2 covers apart. I did this to make covering them easier, and also because I wanted my journal to be thicker than the book happened to be. 

I use a combination of some super sticky red line tape as well as a glue stick to stick the new cover on the old cover.

Once covered, I used some bright yellow paint. The envelope I used was slightly padded so when I painted it it came out with this cool textured effect. 

I then used some tissue paper scraps. I thought this hexagon pattern looked like honeycomb. (Obviously it does.)

To cover up the edges the outer edges of the book, I used some solid black tape. I used cloth book tape for the binding. I could have also used duct tape for the binding, but since I had black book binding tape, I went with that. I also had some metal book corners in my stash, and I decided I would use them here. They'll help keep my black edging tape more securely on the cover over time. 

Here's the outside at this point.

And here's the inside.

Then it was time to make my signatures and bind them to the book.  I made 3 signatures, using white, tan and black papers. 

I used a white marker to mark where I wanted to bind those signatures in the cover, and then I used both my Japanese screw punch (with a small tip) and my awl to make holes for binding.

I also marked those points on my signatures so everything would line up.

As I used my awl and created  my holes in my signatures, I used these little clamps to hold them in place. As you can see I also used my clamps to hold my signatures together once they were punched and before I went to stitch them.

I have a couple of spools of waxed book binder tape that I bought ages ago. Luckily one was yellow which worked perfect with my black and yellow colored book.

And then I stitched in my 3 signatures and also stitched them into the cover.

I didn't like the size of this inner gap between signatures once I got everything sewed together.

I decided to make 2 more small signatures and put them in this space. 

Here's my finished stitched book.

Now I just need to decorate the cover, fill in the inside and do something with all the strings.

I still don't know quite how I want to finish off the outer binding, but it will come to me.

Hopefully in the next few months you'll be seeing lots of bee themed pages.

Thanks for reading this far. Have a great middle of your week too.

 

T Stands for a Spring Garden Tour

Hi everyone. Happy Monday night or Tuesday to you. It's time for another T day already. Where is this month going to? Next week on T day it will already be May.

I hope you like reading about gardens because my T day post isn't very exciting if you don't.

Last week I didn't have anything on my calendar, and I was happy to have a week to get some early yard clean up done. I did a whole lot of raking. I also spread some  bark mulch.  I haven't finished all my gardening for the season because it is still too early to plant things, but I did  finish what I wanted to get done. And I beat the black flies 😀 that come out en masse and make it impossible to do much outside for a couple of weeks. 

Here's what the leave situation was before I raked, even though I do rake in the fall. This garden  actually fills with the most leaves since the winter wind blows them here and they get stuck up against the fence.

Here's my big perennial garden after I raked it. 

It's great to see daffodils in bloom and the other plants coming back up, even if most of them are still really small. It is still April after all, and our growing season hasn't really kicked in yet.

After I raked my rose garden I bark mulched it. I don't mulch most of my gardens, but weeding in the thorny roses is not fun, so I do everything I can to keep those weeds at bay. Maybe this fall we will get the back of the house painted as it really needs it. 

The angel winged dog statue is there because I planted many of the rose bushes in this garden on the day we lost our dog Harley back in 2014. I'm not a sit and grieve person, and I put that sadness into doing something useful. I will always think of Harley when I look at this garden though.

I take my husband's truck to the garden center and have them dumped mulch into it rather than buying it in bags. This year I had enough left over to do this garden too. I also put out my little cement bunnies. By the time the plants grow up you won't even notice the bark mulch here. 

 One of the gardens I am still trying to figure out (after a couple of seasons) is this small shade garden that separates the lawn from the woods behind it. I want it to fill in so it makes a natural fence. I haven't quite got the hang of that yet.

I enjoy a bit of cryptozoology, so last year I bought this garden statue we named Little Cheeks. Actually my daughter named him that because she said he had nice buns-which sadly you can't see in this photo. Once the plants shoot up some more he'll look less like a statue on a base.

This garden had a bit too much shade so one other thing I did last week was cut down some of the small saplings close behind it with a hand saw. I didn't cut any larger trees down, except one pine tree which wasn't even too large, but I had my husband take that one down with the chainsaw. Most of our land is wooded and will stay that way, but every few years you have to cut back a bit of it to keep the trees from overtaking the  open land.

And other than the veggie garden, this next photo shows my last flower garden. I hadn't raked this one when I took this photo, as all the leaves blow right through it. I did rake it afterwards and that helped to clean up some of the winter bird seed you can see on the ground.  This is my bee garden, my newest garden.   The only plants really coming up here right now are my alliums, but there are lots of other plants just popping out of the ground. Most of the plants in this garden are ones I separated or pulled out from overcrowding in other gardens. By summer it will look (I hope) like it just naturally grew there. At least it did that last summer. 

 By next T day my bees will either be in transit or will have arrived. 

Last Friday night I had a visitor to my yard that had the dogs going crazy. Mr. or Mrs. Bear was ambling through looking to see if my bird feeders were still out. I move my feeders closer to the house so it's easier to take them in and out; luckily I had taken them inside for the night. Mr. Bear wasn't moving very fast, and he didn't care about the barking dogs or us in the windows. Either he'd had a run in with the electric fence around the bees already or he remembered it because he didn't go near the beehives. Thank goodness for that because bears can rip your hives right apart going for any honey inside.  There's a lot of honey (like 40 pounds) in my hives from last season. I decided I'd leave it to give this year's bees a head start. 

I never got a photo of the bear this time since it was dark, and I was afraid Maddie was going to bust out the window, but here's an old photo I took maybe 15 years ago. You might have seen this before, but I thought I'd share it again in case you aren't really familiar with black bears and bird feeders.

And that was basically my last week.

Since I need a T day drink, let me share this sign I saw the other day. Those who follow me know that Pop's is one of my favorite places to get food in the summer. They board up the windows, take down the menu and close early September, and so when they open up, I know the good weather is almost here.

You can see the coca-cola signs and the bottom on the opening sign, and that's my drink for T day over at BLeubeard's and Elizabeth's blog .

And that's a long enough post for me. Have a great T day and week ahead. 

Happy Earth Day/Weekend Art

 Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you.

Before I get too far into this post, let me wish Elizabeth a very happy "bearthday".  And Happy Earth Day to everyone  else also.

Today I have another page to share for Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's Recycle, Reuse and Repurpose challenge at Art Journal Journey. My page is one that works for earth day as long as you stay away from all kinds of toxic chemicals, invasive plants , and you recycle all those plastic plant containers most spring plant purchases come in.

I've been trying to do a lot of garden prepping this past week, at least as much as the weather allows. Tomorrow the weather people predict  that we'll have a 100% chance of  rain, but actually it will be really nice to have a lazy day inside. However today I'm heading back out to try to get some more garden chores done. I just love spring and being able to get my hands dirty.  I am having lots of fun and getting lots of exercise so chores may not be the best word for what I'm doing.

Most of the images on this page come from an old kids gardening book. I die cut the flower pot and the flower I put in it (that I then painted). I also used an old trim punch to make the flowers along the bottom., as well as stickers and some scrabble letters (these were cut out of some old magazine pages) to make my quote. My page's background is made with the reading parts from a couple of old book pages, some gesso and some green paint as well as green spray ink. I sprayed that ink into the gesso while it was still wet.

I also have a tag today for the new challenge at Tag Tuesday This time Pinky is hosting and her challenge is Anything Goes.

I made much of my tag using up scraps on my work table. There's a bit of printed paper, some scraps of painted  deli paper, thin paper edging leftovers, and a quote that I had stamped and planned to cut out and use but never did.  I decided to  just add it on as it was.

The piggies and the pink quote are from a set of clear stamps  I recently bought. I just fell in love with the little piggies. Last winter I discovered an art store about 45 minutes away from my house. Luckily for my wallet it's in a direction I don't often go. However I did go by there back in early March when I actually needed something, and  that's when I saw this piggie set that I couldn't resist.

And speaking of art stores, when I was in Belfast last weekend, I discovered this store which was right across the street from the diner where we stopped for  breakfast Saturday morning.

Half the store was fabric and sewing supplies and the other half was art supplies. I told my husband I wanted to go in, and he said "Take your time."

The sun glare made it hard to get a window shot, but I actually really like this photo.

The store opened at 10 AM, and it was like 10:05 when I went in. There were at least 5 or 6 customers already inside. And I can see why. This store had a great collection of interesting supplies. I only snapped one photo because I got too busy browsing, and well, doing a bit  of shopping too.

 This store made the art supply store that is 45 minutes away from me  seem pretty empty.

The funny part of this story is how I mentioned that my husband told me to take my time inside. Ha ha. Take my time as long as it was quick. Around 10:20 he came inside, and I know that because I heard him say  to a clerk "Oh no, my wife is going to be in trouble in here." 

I must have made a face, that was noticed by a woman near me. At this point she turned to me and said, "I drive over an hour to get here. I hope you live close enough that you can back sometime by yourself."

Smile.

I was in heaven, but sadly heaven is a 3 hour drive away.

I did manage to treat myself to a few interesting supplies,  even if I never made it into the half that was the sewing store.

It's a good thing this store is 3 hours away because that is probably just as well for my wallet. Smile.

Enjoy  your weekend.

Some Views and Faces of Belfast, Maine

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday to you.

I'm here today with a post for Nicole's Friday Face Off and also for Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

Some of you might have read back in my T Day post (this past Tuesday) that described how last week I took a more-or-less spontaneous but fun roadtrip up to Belfast, Maine. My husband had business there, and he invited me along for the ride. That ride turned into an overnight visit and a little bit of sightseeing.

We were having gorgeous weather too, so that made the trip even better.

Today let me share some views of Belfast, Maine. Let me start off with some "faces".

A clock face

and whale face

My dog Mr. Pete looking at something out of the car window

The face of a building that was painted in an interesting way

And this wall was being refaced

And here's some little faces in this anniversary poster that really stood out on this brick wall.

And here's a few other photos of Belfast to share. These don't really have faces, but I  thought you might enjoy them. I took these in the early evening while out walking in town along this fantastic rail trail that was there.

And I'm guessing this next building was the old train station along the trail.

I love this tug, but if you notice on the right hand side of the photo there are 2 bridges. The upper one is the main road-Route 1. The lower one is the old road and now part of the rail trail.

That's all for me today. I hope you have a fantastic start to your weekend.