Wrapping Up May

     Hi everyone. It's hard to believe that there's only a couple days of May left. Tom at The Backroads Traveller,  left me a comment one day recently that said his days seem to have wings. Mine do too, and those wings are beating at super-sonic speed. 😏

     Today I want to share my final page for Neet's It Must Have  Wings challenge at Art Journal Journey. Thank you Neet for being such a fantastic host for us at AJJ. It was a super theme, and not only did I enjoy making pages, I loved seeing everyone else's journaling. I hope you'll be able to join us again next year. ❤

     My last page is  a bit of a hodgepodge because I used lots of bits and pieces on my work table to make it. 

    I started using some yellow paint on my journal page to make it bright and sunny. You can see I used some more punch out and fussy cut images, an end of an envelope, a scrap of printed paper and also a small Victorian style paper image of a little girl and her dog. I finished by stamping some quotes, adding some little confetti pieces as well as some flower sequins and finally some sparkle glue too. 

   Since it's Friday, I am also linking this post of Nicole's Friday Face Off and also to Gillena's Friday Lunch Break. For faces this week I am taking you back to my local botanical gardens and another section of the student art display. This time I have some cool middle school paintings of some New Hampshire (and other places too) wildlife. The cool thing is these kids painted with mud, which is something I've heard of but never seen in any modern art.

     That's all for me today. Wishing everyone a nice end of the month and start to June. 

May Is Winding Down

 Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.

   This week's been busy, and I've also been trying to get some final outside chores done (other than the dreaded never ending weeding), so if I haven't been by your blog and  you've commented on mine, let me apologize before I go on any further.

   As Saturday is the last day of May, I want to share my penultimate page for Neet's It Must Have Wings challenge at Art Journal Journey. Today's page is from my envelope journal which I've mentioned before.

     For this page I used several fussy cut or punched out images as well as some sewing machine stitching. I also used a metallic paper moon and some marker around it to represent it shining.  I stamped the quote, which I think is from the same Impression Obsession set as the lunar moth. I stamped the moth on clear acetate and cut it out. 

    This is my first week with 2 mornings of work at the boat ramp. Monday, being a holiday and finally being sunny was quite busy. The morning was mostly fishermen, and then locals who put in their boats for the season. There were also a few pleasure boaters too. 

I really loved the blue skies against the shadow and greens of the mountains.

     Over the long weekend my husband took the winter plastic panels off the screen porch. I washed down all the screen  doors (which make up the walls), and then he put those clean screen  doors up. I still had (and have) cleaning to do out on the porch  so I can use it.

     

     But I did get some flowers planted in the pots on my back deck.

    I needed a couple more bags of soil for my veggie planters, which I picked up yesterday, and I still have to put them in and plant the rest of my veggies. We have rain today, so that will chore will have to wait. Hopefully tomorrow I can get out and do some of these chores.

     Most of these plants in the greenhouse  are either veggies (still waiting to be planted) or flowers that went into the pots on my back deck. But on the left you can see the size of the potatoes I started, as well as parsley, beets and carrots. I need to move the rest of those pots outside too.

    That's all for me. I hope you had a wonderful day or rest of your day, depending what time it is that you stop by. 

T Stands for Bees, Blue Birds, and Weather Catch Up

     Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. And hello to the T day folks who stop by from Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog.

    Last week was  quite cold and on some days very wet  at my house. The rain meant I had a few days off from yard work. It seems like the outside projects aren't getting finished up quite so fast this year, but then it's been raining a lot. Hopefully I'll get my plants planted this week and then it's on to cleaning and setting up the screen porch. 😀 After that, it's just the usual maintenance and  the big spring projects will be finished. There have been more than usual of those this year.

     I did take the dogs for a nice walk one morning before the days of rain started.

 I started my summer job at the lake/boat ramp Wednesday morning when the high temperature only reached 48 degrees F/8.8 degrees C. Brrr.  Good thing I could sit in my car the whole time. The only boat that showed up decided it was much too rough on the water (there were white caps) to go out. Good thing I was reading an interesting book too as it kept me busy. 😏

   

     My other box of bees arrived, and it was actually too cold to install them on the day they arrived. The box spent the day and night in my house. Bees can't fly when temperatures drop  below  48-55 degrees F/ 8.8-12.7 degrees C (numbers vary when you read about this). It finally warmed up just enough the next day so I installed them.

 

      These next 2 photos are the box that the queen comes in with all her maids in waiting around it.

   When I installed the bees, some of them weren't moving nor leaving the shipping box, but they didn't look dead, so after a couple of hours I rewrapped the hive box in the screen material it shipped  in and then put the box in my greenhouse. I knew they'd be warmer there.

     The next morning those bees had warmed up and were buzzing. And a few of them escaped the wrapping too.

       They spent a few days in the greenhouse because it took that long for the outside weather to warm up enough. I gave them some sugar water so they at least had some food. When it finally warmed up a bit this past Saturday I opened the window and the door of the green house and almost all of them flew off- hopefully to the hive. They bond by pheromones to the queen, which I am guessing/hoping they are very sensitive to. The box still had a few bees in it that were now active, so I also put that back next to the hive, and by evening all that was left were those bees that hadn't survived.

   

     A couple of weeks ago I shared this (and a few other) photos of Mom bluebird feeding her babies. I never saw those babies fledge, and after a couple more days I never saw any sign of them in the birdhouse. I wondered what had happened the little ones, but I imagined  they had to be somewhere. Mom and Dad were coming to the bird feeder quite often; in fact they'd be sitting on the pole waiting for me to put the feeder back out in the morning. (At this time of year I have to take feeders in at night because of a couple of incidents with bears.) After they got the food, Mom and Dad would fly off into the woods.   

   

    This past weekend I finally saw one of the babies.  You can see Mom on top of the birdhouse and the baby down on the right side of the photo. It's too bad I didn't see any babies fledge, but I'm happy at least one of the babies made it. There may be more, but I've only ever  seen one at a time and I can't be certain whether I'm seeing the same one each time or I'm seeing different ones. 

      He's learning to eat at the bird feeder now. 

     I've been having a lot of fun watching him. I joked to my husband it's like having a grandchild-smile. 😏 Of course I'll never be asked to babysit which is not a bad thing either. 

     And for my T day drink I have my not so healthy but tasty dinner one evening when I went  on a movie date with my hubby.

    My husband took the afternoon off last Friday to extend his long weekend. He hoped he'd have the afternoon to do a few things around the yard that needed to be done, like opening up the screen porch or uncovering his boat. But no, it was raining, so we went to a late afternoon movie instead. Tom Cruise and the latest (and supposedly last) Mission Impossible movie was good entertainment. The popcorn and Diet Pepsi tasted good too. It might not have been the healthiest dinner but I do like movie theater popcorn.

     That's all for me. Have a Happy T day and a nice week ahead too.

     

     

    

Things With Wings

      Hi everyone. It's Tuesday and time for another new challenge at Try It On Tuesday.

    But first I want to thank Pauline for being our Keep It Simple Guest Designer and I also want to say thank you to everyone who joined our last challenge. I enjoyed seeing everyone's "simple" but definitely not boring art work.

    Our new challenge for the next 2 weeks is Things with Wings. 

     I made a journal page which for some reason I had a hard time getting a good view of. You'll have to excuse the view on the TIOT page. Here is the whole page that gives you a better idea of my page.

    I used my Dina Wakely ledger journal and some green glaze paint to start. I layered many images, some from 49 and Market and some from Art by Marlene. Then I stamped the quotes with a couple of old River City Rubber stamps, and then I finished by splattering some white paint. I like a nice splatter effect and, I also like how it pulls the page together.

    Our challenge at Try It on Tuesday runs for the next 2 weeks. I hope you're thinking wings of some sort. I am also linking up this page to Art Journal Journey whose art journaling challenge runs through the end of this week and which is also all about Wings.

    Be sure to check out the design teams art too because there are some lovely wings to inspire you.  Thanks for stopping by, and I'd love to see your wings at Try It On Tuesday.

   

Bright on a Grey Day

     Hi everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend. The weather at my house has been more like early April for the last several days. Grey, wet and brrr. I'm hoping today will be an improvement. It's  the  long Memorial Day weekend to kick off summer, but it certainly doesn't feel much like the start of the summer. 😕

     To brighten things up,  I want to share a bright butterfly page for Neet's It Must Have Wings challenge at Art Journal Journey  This challenge runs through the end of the month, which is  later this upcoming week. Plus I've used a variety of media for this page, so I will be linking up to Creative Artiste Mixed Media Blog for their challenge # 115.

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

     I used 3 more fabric butterflies. You might remember that earlier this month  I mentioned I found a bag of these pre-cut fabric butterflies pieces while cleaning. On today's page I went back to that bag and  picked  3 orange ones. I added them to a pink, yellow and orange inked background in my ledger journal. 

      This time I used some paint to color in the butterfly's body and I added some half pearls. I also drew in the antennae. To finish my page I used an old set of butterfly stamps from Cornish Heritage Farms. I stamped some of the butterflies in this set, and also stamped the quote on some yellow colored paper. Then I fussy cut the quote and added it to my page. While outlining the paper the quote is stamped on, I also outlined the butterflies with same orange Sharpie.

Hope you like it.

     Most of my garden plants seem to have fallen behind with the wet and cold weather we're having. Except for the weeds of course, 😏, and sadly  it's so far been too wet and buggy to go out and take care of them. But one of my 2 azaleas is blooming.  Strange those 2 plants never bloom at the same time. This flowering one was a tiny little plant that my dad found next to one of his azaleas many years ago. He dug  that little plant up and gave it to me. I love it when it blooms because it always makes me think of him.

       And it's not such a little plant any more either. 😉

     

   It's nice to see something bright and flashy while the skies have been grey. Enjoy the the rest of your weekend and the start of the new week.

Recycled Student Garden Art

      Hi everyone. Happy Friday. This weekend is a long one here in the US called Memorial Day. In my area it is also the start to summer "season", not  an actual astronomical season but the time when places start to get busy with tourists. I wonder how this summer tourist season will go since Trump put the tariff on Canadian goods. New Hampshire and other northern New England states  rely on a large number of Canadian Tourists, and they're understandably angry. Americans who live far from the border might not understand that, but here in New England, especially Northern New England, Trump's tariffs have definitely hurt that relationship. I'm sure that's true for many other border states too. 

     OK, this post is not to be me ranting.  Today I am joining Nicole for Friday Face Off and Gillena for Friday Lunch Break. If you'd stopped by my last 2 posts (Wednesday/Thursday ) you might have seen that my local botanical garden had reopened for the season, and that I visited last week with a friend. In part of the garden they had a special art exhibit with pieces made by students at a few local middle schools. It was really fun art, and some of it even had faces, so I thought I would share that today.

     This is what we saw as we approached the display area

     Much of the art was flowers made from recycled bottles. The day we visited the teachers were there putting up the displays, and one of them explained to us that the kids raided the recycle bins at school to get their materials for these pieces.

   Many of them were flowers, but not all of them were. According the the teachers, the kids used Sharpies to color the bottles and scissors for any cutting they needed to do. In some cases they also used a few other embellishments.

From the back you may wonder what flower this next photo is.

But it's not a flower, just a fluffed up little bird. 

I'll finish with this flat backed little frog.

    It was a fun little exhibit, and I hope, when it is done with, these recycled pieces don't get thrown back into the recycle bin, or worse yet, the trash.

   Have a great Friday and start to your weekend.