My Greece Travel Journal

Hi everyone. Happy Friday. I hope everyone has had a great week and will have a nice weekend ahead. Today I am linking up to Gillena's Friday Lunch Break and Nicole's Friday Face Off.

Last week I finished up and bound my Greece travel journal. Some of you already know, but for those who don't, I save lots of scraps from my trip, and when I get home I like to make a journal about my trip. It's not exactly a scrapbook, and I rarely include photos. I try my hand at making scenes; I do a bunch of collage, and there's also some stamping too.

Let me show you my cover and bound journal first.

     I used a blue fat quarter of fabric to cover an old book cover. I cut the cover boards off of the book by removing the spine and pages, then I added the fabric to both cover pieces. After the matte medium dried, I stenciled on some Greek letters, added a die cut of a wreath (to mimic a laurel or olive wreath), and then I added this evil eye applique. I found the applique marked down on a sale rack after I was home from the trip. The back is similar to this front except for there is only the stenciled blue fabric cover. 

I tried something different for the binding this time. It's a little  flexible, but overall I like it. I took some more of the blue fabric, folded it over a few times and added some rigid sewing interfacing to it. All that is sewn together. It's a little shorter than the front and back covers, but I did that on purpose because I thought it would look nice to have the edges of the pages sticking out on the top and bottom. I used some super sticky tape to attach it to the front and back covers, and then I took some blue bookbinding tape (which I bought for this project) to hold it together. If you've never used bookbinding tape it is great stuff. It is very sticky fabric  tape, and it can be used for a book binding by itself.

You can see from the binding that this journal is quite thick. You can also see where I stitched in the signatures of my journal (using wax book binding thread). Then I stitched in this blue and white "bracelet that I got for free in Athens. On one end, where you would tie it around your wrist, I added some beads from my stash.

     Since I am linking up to Nicole's Friday Face Off, let me share some "faces" from this journal. These are mostly snippets of pages and not the whole page. These first few pages include some postcards I bought or snippets of postcards that I cut apart.

On this next page I added this stamped image after I found the rubber stamp in my stash (I forgot I even had it). Of course I had to add him to the book. 

And this bakery bag came from a breakfast treat in Corfu. The owl is from a bookmark I bought.

And more postcard creations.

Here's an image I printed off the internet. I learned about St. Barbara when I visited Meteora.

Does the Starbucks face look familiar to anyone? My daughter wanted one of their mugs that said Greece. This is off the bag it came in.

The tour groups in this next photo were not at the Acropolis when I visited. I cut this photo out of an old book because it worked well.

And finally, a patch I did buy in Athens, but I added the little glass pieces to the eyes.

I still have some Greece photos to share which I will hopefully get back to soon.

Have a super weekend ahead. 

 

This Week Is Quiet But Last Week Wasn't

    Hi everyone. Happy Thursday to you. I am really enjoying a very unscheduled week along with the rain and clouds we've been having.  I'm not really a rainy day person, but it was so dry we needed the moisture. Plus, since I haven't had much on the calendar this week (hurrah for a quiet week), it's great to have some time to do a few art projects, make a blueberry pie with some native blueberries I bought and even get a bit of a cleaning project accomplished. 😀

     During the summer my husband only works until noon on Friday's, so that's our boating/fishing day. Last week we took a break from fishing and invited a friend of mine and her sister out for a cruise. It was an absolutely gorgeous weather day (as tomorrow promises to be), and we went a bit offshore to Star Island, which is a part of the Isles of Shoals. The Isles of Shoals is a small group of islands about 7 miles offshore. Some islands are in the state of Maine, and some are in of New Hampshire.

     Star Island is owned by the Unitarian Universalist Church. It is definitely a  place to escape. Not only does the island run self-growth retreats, but it also runs art, writing, birding and a variety of other classes that are not religiously based. Star Island has a history of being a retreat for some of New England's most famous classic writers back in the mid-1800's when it was not owned by the Unitarian Church, and a famous local poet, Celia Thaxter actually grew up on one of the other Isles of Shoals as she was lighthouse keeper's daughter.

     Today there is  an old hotel on Star Island. The Oceanic was built in 1876. It is still a very bare bones place and hasn't had a lot of updating. You are welcome to come ashore and visit. We usually take  1 or 2 boat rides out there during the summer, and I have visited the island in the past. However, I haven't gone ashore since before COVID hit. It's always fun to take a step back in time, and I think the island is very scenic. One day I might even go for one of their (non-religious) programs and stay over.

     My husband dropped us off at the boat dock, and he took the boat and anchored in the harbor. I think he took a nap while we went for a walk around the island and explored. I thought I shared a few photos today of our trip.

My husband's boat is the tiny one on the far left of the photo.

The views from our walk were very scenic.

Besides the hotel there are some cute little cottages on the island. I'm not sure who lives in them during the summer, but I'm guessing the people who run the island.

The island is the largest off-grid solar farm off the coast of New England, all to be as  self-sufficient as possible.

     This post is getting long, so I'll share some more photos another day. But let me end this post with a few photos from another island in the Shoals. I don't know the name of this island, but I do know that the cormorants love it. We cruised by it before we ended up in Gosport Harbor at Star Island.

Enjoy your day!

     

     

Another AJJ Page and A Few Other Photos

 Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone is having a nice week so far.

Today I have a page for Halle's challenge at Art Journal Journey. The theme, if you don't yet know, is "I've Got a Notion". 

I started my page by stamping my page with some embroidery images from an ancient Hero Arts set. Here is the set; I borrowed this photo from someone's eBay site. Thank you to whoever this seller is.

I also die cut a couple of various lace style strips.  One strip I die cut in white and then inked it to age it, and the other strip I die cut in pink to match the colors on my page. I also added some tan ribbon too. The 2 characters are a TH people image. The buttons were from an old stamp set (probably older then the Hero Arts set), that I punched out and then threaded a bit of actual thread through.  And the quote comes from another very old sewing rubber stamp set, this time from the long defunct Cornish Heritage Farms step manufacturers. 

And here's a few summery photos to wrap up this post:

Here's my garden buddy, a pickerel frog.

My zinnia's are  blooming and look great.

Seed pods are forming on the milkweeds.

My grapes on my grapevine are getting big.

I'm not sure what kind of fly this guy is but he was a big one.

And I spotted this hummingbird moth at a geranium one day.

Have a great day!

Time for a New Challenge

      Hi everyone. It's Tuesday, which means it's time for a new challenge at Try It On Tuesday.  Thank you to everyone who joined our last "Things With Wings" challenge.

Our new challenge  is In The Garden.

     There are so many ways you can go with this topic, I don't think I even need to offer any suggestions. 😏 I went with a journal page for my design team example.

      While looking for one stamp in my stash, I found this great background stamp. It reminded me of a rug, and that made me think of outdoor rugs that someone might use on a patio, deck or screen porch.  I was also looking through my stash for some blue paper, and I came across a page that had some blue sky and white clouds. I used a white window frame (from 49 and Market) to frame the sky. I then die cut many leaves using a set from Sizzix that also comes with a distressing stamp. I then added lots of other leaves, berries and flowers from a pack of images (also from 49 and Market).  I added some glitter glue to the berries and some of the flowers. I also used a brown marker and colored in some of the plant pot you see at the bottom of the page. The quote is stamped from a set by Alison Bomber for Paper Artsy.

Be sure to check out the design team's pieces too. They're a talented group with lots of inspiration. 

Our In The Garden challenge runs for the next 2 weeks, and I hope you join us.

I am also linking up this journal page to Creative Artiste Mixed Media challenge #106. The theme is always anything goes. 

Have a great day, and thanks for stopping by my blog.

T Stands for Some Snippets

 Hi everyone. Happy T day to everyone who stops by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog  for our Monday T day.

    Last week was another busy week for me, and I'm slowly catching up on blog comments. Much of of last week was also quite hot. I'm writing this Monday, and we're back to normal summer weather where it's hot but not so terribly humid.  I feel like I can get back to my "normal" summer activities and not have to stick inside where the AC is. 👍 I hope this weather lasts, but it looks like we might get a lot of rain and some more humidity this week. (Which means I can catch up on blogging and art making too. 😏 Plus it's so dry, my garden would love the extra water.)

Here's some snippets from last week.

Look at this cute little fawn and their mama. They were on the road on my way to work at the lake one morning, and they posed long enough that I could stop the car and take their photo.

This 7 AM photo from my spot at the boat ramp (where I work a couple of mornings during the week) shows that it was going to be a sunny and  hot day. 

           Also last week my sunflower was blooming.

And I went for an exciting boat trip. More about that another post.

     And if you read my Sunday post, you might remember that I mentioned that we had a small family get together and brought my mother-in-law over to her house. She lives in an assisted living now as she doesn't maneuver around very well and needs a lot of care.  Her house is now in a family trust, and the 3 kids (of which my husband is one) are now sharing the house and taking care of it. 

      Although my mother-in-law gets confused about things (like she thought  we were celebrating her birthday, which we were not), she had a glorious day and asked me if we could do it again next weekend. I told her we would see, but I think since it was a good day that maybe it will happen again this summer. It does take several people to do this because she can't get into the house or around without 2 people due to the steps.

      One of my mother-in-law's favorite meals is lobster, so that's what we decided to have for dinner. And she still has a great sense of humor, as you can see in this photo when she is imitating the lunch lobsters. 😀

           For T day drink this week, here's my lobster, and you can see a Diet Coke that I'd been working on for a couple of days. I also had some yummy potato salad  that the chef brother-in-law made, as well as some corn on the cob. And it was nice enough to eat outside too, which the day even more pleasant.

As you can see it was a good week.

That's all for me. I hope you have a super T day and week ahead.