Fun Faces

 Hi everyone. We are in the final countdown of the month  of August and of meteorological summer. Ouch! I hate to say that, even though fall is a favorite time of year for me. It's just what comes after autumn here where I live in New Hampshire that tempers the idea of fall a bit. 

Today for Nicole's Friday Face Off and Gillena's Friday Lunch Break I have some photos to share from a visit last week to my local botanical garden-Bedrock Gardens.

Let me start with some faces. This first one is a living face ( and a bit small),

and these next ones are obviously not alive.

This one is for Iris.

Hope you  like them.

Have a super Friday and weekend ahead. And if you're in the US or Canada, have a great Labor/Labour Day long weekend too.

Art in Brown

Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.

August is winding down very quickly. I would have been back to school for a week now if I was still teaching. It's weird, but I still get  back to school thoughts and slight moments of anxiety  come late August. I'm starting year 5 of retirement so you would think I'd be past all that. 😕 I guess after 36 years in the classroom it's so ingrained in my head that it's going to take awhile before I get to the point where I don't  have any back to school moments. If that ever happens.

Today I want to share my final page for Jo's Wonderfully Wild challenge at Art Journal Journey. Thank you Jo for a great month.  This was a great theme, and I liked how wild could be about so many different things.  I also want to thank everyone who joined Jo for this challenge. 

Keep in mind it is only the 29th of the month, so you still have a few days left to join.

For my final journal page I went with one that really feels really wild to me.

     I started by attaching an 8x8 inch piece of paper down in my journal. I knew I needed to cover the edges around the paper, and I wanted something that looked more natural so I used some paper bag scraps as well as some handmade paper scraps.

     The  image at the  bottom of my page is made using 3 different dies with black paper and also a piece of yellow paper. You can decide whether you want this to be  sunrise or sunset. The bear with his surrounding  background (Frantic Stamper) actually had a frame around the top, but I cut it off. The sun and the hill (by Hero Arts)  is another die cut, and finally I used the tree perspective die cut (Tim Holtz) to tie the whole combination of images together. I finished the page by stamping 3 quotes from an old Technique Tuesday stamp set.

    I also want to squeeze in one more tag for Pinky's Seashore challenge at Tag Tuesday. I went vintage with this one.

     I used some watercolor paints on the background, and then stamped the seahorse, sea star and the postmark onto the tag.  I added a bit of torn washi tape. Finally I finished with the bathing beauty and the quote. All the stamps come from another old set  put out by T.J. Designs rubber stamps. You might remember them.  Here's a photo of the set I found online. I think most of the companies  I remember from when I started stamping have gone. It's sad, but then there's some fun new ones around too.

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

 

Wednesday Art

 Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. I'm here today with a bit of art for a couple of challenges. 

I'll start with a journal page for Jo's Wonderfully Wild challenge at Art Journal Journey The swallows were my idea for the wild part.

     This started as a page to use up some extra yellow paint. The red mesh is actually the elastic edged top that came on a quart of wild local blueberries I bought earlier this summer. I cut the elastic off and then glued it down on the yellow background.  I thought the black and white house worked so I added that, but I didn't want it floating on the page. To fix that I used this scrap of felt button trim that was sitting on my work table and that was left over from a page I made for last month's challenge (Halle's) at AJJ. The sun face and the birds are acetate images, and then to finish my page I used some other OLD stamps (the word and the fragment definition).

I also have a tag for Pinky’s Seaside challenge at Tag Tuesday. 

     I started by first stamping as much of the postcard as would fit across my tag. Then I stamped the life preserver and the anchors. I colored those in, and the silver metallic marker I used for the anchors covered up some of the black edging, so I restamped that images so you could see the outline. After that I used blue watercolor paint to color the part of the tag where there wasn't any image. I then stamped the "on deck" phrase and added the punched out seagull and sailboat images. 

      And since I'm on the topic of the seaside, here's a few photos from over the summer when I've been out on my husband's boat along the shore.

I love this take on  Captain Morgan rum. It’s quite clever.

Here is what happens when one seagull moves too close to another one. And when they think you're going to feed them, which we didn't.

A cormorant  drying off his feathers. 

And finally, all the cranes at the Naval Shipyard.

And that's all I wrote for today. Hope you're having a super day!

T Stands for a Flowers for You

Hi everyone. Happy new week to you, and a big hello to everyone who visits Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog  for T Day.

     Last week was busy for me, in a good way with some outings and a few other things going on. My summer lake job wraps up next Monday, so when this post goes live I have only 2 days left of work for the summer. But after last week's cool down I am thinking fall. Especially being at the lake. One morning last week it never got over 58 degrees F/ 14 degrees C, and there were clouds and some wind, so to stay warm I sat in the car for almost my entire 5 hour shift. Luckily I didn't need to run the engine, but I did need to escape the wind off the water. Of course my only boat was 5 minutes before my shift ended 😏. However even with that chill, it doesn't seem possible that by next week we'll be into September.

     For Today's T day post I want to share a few photos from a trip to my local botanical garden last week. A friend and I went on Thursday, and this friend, unlike the ones I usually go with, has a real eye for seeing easily missed things. And seeing I haven't been there since opening day back in May, it was a great visit.

    I thought today I would share a few views because I'm guessing flowers and other gardeny things might make you as happy as they do me. We brought a picnic lunch with us, so I'll share that at the end of my post.   

     We stopped on our way and picked up sandwiches to have a picnic lunch at the garden. We also got this flavored seltzer water which we split.  It was not too sweet and really fruity. I'm going to keep my eyes open to see if I ever come across it again, and I'll definitely have one if I do. What is also interesting about the can is it doesn't scream at you who makes it.

Cheers to T Day, summer gardens and flowers.

Have a super T day and week ahead everyone.

 

Crows

 Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you. My daughter has been around this weekend, and she's keeping me busy. 😀 If I haven't managed a visit to your post(s) that's why.

     Today I have a page for Jo's Wonderfully Wild challenge at Art Journal Journey I've been wanting to create a scene for this challenge, and this is what my mixed media/collaged scene ended up being. And no, I'm not rushing autumn, but this page just seemed to call for that season.

     I started this page by painting the sky a dark greenish-blue, which I really wasn't very happy with as it was too green. To fix that I sponged some brighter blue over it, and I painted some clouds. I like the blend of the two shades quite a lot now. 

    The "grassy" area started with some scraps of green paper that I had painted for another project. I ripped the paper in pieces and layered them along the bottom of the page. Then I used a black Sharpie as well as green and yellow Stabilo pencils to create the "layers" or a bit of topography of the field. I added the 2 trees which were both punch outs. I cut the swing off the smaller one in the background.  Then I colored in the trunks and branches to make them darker, as well as adding some green and fall colors to the leaves. 

    The quotes are stickers, and the crows are some die cut birds. I used one die for the larger crows. The smaller birds are not a specific crow die but more or less work for crows when cut from black paper. 

     I finished by adding a couple of quote stickers. 

     And here's a few random scenes in photos I've snapped this summer. I may or may not have shown some of these before, so if you've seen them, then I guess you just get to enjoy them a second time. Grin!

   I am also linking up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles.

 Enjoy whatever is left to your weekend and have a great start to the new week ahead.

The Nunnery and Monasteries at Meteora

 Hi everyone. It's another end of the work week already.  As I mentioned last Friday, I want to finish up my photos from Meteora, Greece and show you some photos at the actual the monasteries/nunnery.  I'm linking today's post up to Nicole's Friday Face Off  and Gillena's Friday Lunch Break. And this should be it for trip photos, at least those for Greece at Friday Face Off and Friday Linch Break. I might have a photo or 2 in some future post if it relates to the post topic. 😏-grin.

In case you missed the post or are interested in viewing last week's post, you can find it here: Meteora Part 1.

Today I'll show you some  views after climbing up and visiting  a couple of the religious centers. First is the nunnery, and then one of the monasteries.  Photos weren't allowed inside any of the religious centers, even though we were able to visit areas within them.

Let's start with the nunnery. I showed this photo last week, but just to give you a view of the building for perspective.

    I mentioned last week how women were required to wear skirts to enter any of these religious buildings. This is an unflattering photo, but here's yours truly and one of my traveling companions at the nunnery. There you were given skirts to put on and not charged to use them. At the monasteries they charged you  a small fee (I think 1 or 2 Euros) to use a skirt. We had large scarves that we brought along,  and  we wrapped them around our jeans. I don't have any photos of us in our scarves, but I have one at the Nunnery in our lent skirts.

     This is also my face for Friday Face off. 

You can see we just wrapped them around our jeans.

These next 2 photos show the area at the outside of the nunnery.  As I mentioned, no photos were allowed inside at all.  You can see some stairs and the path that took us up to and then away from the building. There was even a little bridge you had to walk over, but when you looked down from the bridge you could see the beautiful little garden area. Visitors weren't allowed to go down into the garden.

Here's a much more flattering (maybe grin) photo of us taken from one of the outdoor patios in the nunnery.

And I thought you might get a kick out of the public bathroom at the nunnery. 

The lady in the next stall and I had a good laugh about it.

Most places had more complete toilets or at least toilets with bowls, but this one was so unique I had to take a photo of it.

This monastery was our next stop. The sign was tucked away behind some trees as we walked  in. 

Here's the view of looking from down below. I also showed this photo last week.

This monastery had a lovely outdoor patio-like area. Not for sitting though, even though in the gazebo (which is in a later photo)  you could sit for a bit.

And there were some views too. In this first one you can see all the cars in just one parking lot. Each monastery has their own parking area because the buildings are spread out. This wasn’t the main lot but at least offered extra parking. 

Eeks. I'm not a fan of heights, and so I'm glad there were wooden bars on this window.

You might remember the little basket on the pulley I showed you last week. This is where those baskets come and go out.

More of the lovely patio.

This was the largest brewing barrel I have ever seen.

And this is a cool way to recycle part of a pot. It's so pretty too.

Another patio view.

     This monastery had a small museum where photos were allowed. There was some interesting information about it's history, and then some artifacts which I though were interesting. It was hard to photograph  many of the pieces though between the lights and the glass over them. But here's a couple including an old illuminated manuscript and some lovely ancient stitching that is so well done it looks like it was made with a machine. (But of course isn't.)

I apologize for the long post, but it's time to move on so I decided to squeeze it all in one post .

That is it for me today, and my last Friday Greece post. Have a super weekend ahead.