Art and When Food is Art too

 Hi everyone. I hope your weekend is going well.

      Some of you asked if the cats and dogs in Friday's post were strays, and I don't really have an answer to that. I did see cats waiting to get inside of doors, and I did see people feeding cats in places where there were no doors. I am not certain about the dog photos either. They looked in good health, and perhaps they could have just been pets of employees just hanging out. I did see a few dogs I suspected were strays, and that made me very sad. Both of my dogs were rescue dogs from the southern US, and it's not just a problem in other places. I think Miss Maddie was one of those strays that wandered around and managed to evade being caught for a while. She had a very stressful time adjusting to being in the house when we got her, and she was good at escaping places. She could even get herself out of a dog crate if you weren't careful.  We don't know her backstory at all, and not that we know too much about Pete, but we do know he was rescued as a young puppy being left out in a box. 

       OK, enough about dogs and cats.

     Today I have 2 pages, both from my Greece Travel Journal with geometric forms on them. I am linking up to Valerie's challenge at Art Journal Journey.  My first page is all about the evil eyes you see for sale when visiting Greece. These are popular tourist kitsch souvenirs that are supposed to keep bad things from happening to you.

Now that you are refreshed about what evil eyes look like, here's my  journal page.

     My background is blue cardstock. I started by sticking down the big evil eye in the middle that says Greece on it.  It's a sticker I picked up in my travels. Then I created six smaller evil eyes. I started with a couple of paper punches to make the blue and white outer edges. I didn't have a punch small enough for the light blue ring, but I did have some page reinforcers (you know, the little sticky rings that you put around hole punched notebook pages). They were the right size so I stuck those down, used a blue paint paint to color them and then added a black Sharpie dot in the middle.

     Once I had these evil eyes glued down, I used a white paint pen to make the strings they are hanging from. I added the kitty chipboard image at the bottom and decided not to add any details to him. I also decided to make a brick floor for him to walk across, similar to a brick pattern I saw while on my trip.

     And here's the other page that I made. It's not a very exciting page, but it does have a big square in the middle.

I wrote down some of the foods (there was so much good food) I ate while traveling, and I created this  middle square based on a sign we saw while in a small town north of Athens. 

     I used this sign as a rough inspiration for my page. On my page the square is the cardboard from  inside of a fat quarter that I recently bought (and used to make this journal's cover).  To copy the words from the sign, I used sticker letters based on what I had, nor did I worry about matching this sign exactly, except for the actual words.

      We ate lunch at the restaurant with the sign out front, and we had a fabulous meal. It was our most expensive meal of the whole trip, but well worth it.  Since the menu was only in Greek, and the owner's English was limited (but better than our Greek), he took us right into the kitchen to show us what was available for food.  Plus, his wife had made the special of the day, and she gave me a big spoonful to taste to see if we wanted any of that.

We started with salad.

And here was a special.  It was shrimp in a tomato with vegetable sauce. 

Then we had some langostinos (little lobsters that are crayfish sized)  served with this to die for mustard-butter sauce.

Then we finished with some grilled flounder.

We ate so much food, but it was all very very delicious. The good thing is we didn't need dinner that night either.

Then the owner brought out this delicious little bite of dessert.

After all that food, we had to close our eyes for a few minutes and soak up the sun,

and watch a ferry boat take some passengers in from and then out to one of the Aegean islands. 

I hope I didn't make you hungry. I certainly made myself want this meal again. 😏

I'm linking up to Gillena's  Sunday Smiles also. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.