Wrapping up August

   Hi everyone. Happy long Labor Day weekend to all of you in the US and happy long Labour Day weekend if you are in Canada. To everyone else, I wish you a happy weekend.

    Today I am sharing my last page for Chris's Hot August (Nights and Days) challenge at Art Journal Journey.  Thank you Chris for hosting. ❤ It was a lot of fun (for me) to create  a small summer themed journal all about hot days.

     Thank you to everyone who joined in also. ❤ I loved seeing everyone's take on Chris' theme.

     I  hope your August wasn't too hot either, other than making art for Chris' Hot August theme that is. Hee hee. 😁 At my house, this month went from too hot to some fall feeling weather. This summer feels like it was shorter than normal (at least to me), and when I think about why, I think it's because  in my area we didn't have all that many beautiful, warm and not crazy humid days. We started with rain and then went into humidity and heat.  I guess with climate change the rain, the heat and the humidity are the new reality.  The chill of the last 2 weeks isn't helping summer feel very long either. 

    For my page today I created a late summer garden. I used some yellow cardstock for the background. First I  took some white gesso and covered most of my paper. Luckily I had some acrylic paint that was the same yellow as the background, and I splattered that over the gesso. I used some Alison Bomber stamps for the flowers. I painted the petals with a paint pen and colored the centers and the stems with markers. I stamped the quotes (various Paper Artsy images), added a small 49 and Market bee, and then added one of the white cloth sun stickers from  a sheet of those stickers that I have  in my stash. This sun was missing a few rays, but it wasn't worth tossing out. Instead I attached it to the top of my page so no one would even notice the missing rays. I used that same yellow paint pen to color it in. Lastly I added some black metallic paper trim along the bottom.

   Speaking of this lovely goldenrod yellow color, there's lots of goldenrod blooming in my wildflower gardens right now. It's definitely a pollinator's dream flower. There are so many species of bees (domestic and wild)  just loving it. Here's a few photos, some with pollinators and some without.

 That's all for me this post.  I'm also linking up this post to Gillena's Sunday Smiles. Enjoy your weekend!

Friday

   Hi everyone. This week is winding down, and it's time to join Nicole at Friday Face Off and Gillena at her Friday Lunch Break. I also want to share some of the rest  of my Hot August (Days and Nights) pieces. I'll be linking these up to Chris' challenge at Art Journal Journey too.

    My 2 art pieces both have faces. You'll have to ignore the glare on the first one. I love using acetate on a page as it adds some cool texture, but it never photographs very well. This acetate quote you can't read well says "come one come all".

  Let me finish off this post by sharing some more garden photos from the past week. My dahlia's are blooming, and they are huge. I bet each flower is close to 6 inches/ 15 cms in size. They are as big on the plant as my face flowers in my last art piece. 

And they are so heavy the plant stems are flopping over.

It is definitely tomato season right now.

I planted a new garden bag with some cucumber seeds. I'm going to see if I can grow them in the greenhouse and maybe get some cukes later in the fall. Not sure if it will work or not, but it's fun to experiment. 

    I have lots of sunflower buds, but no actual blooms yet.

You can see that some of those sunflowers are taller than the greenhouse.  

My leaf-eaten brussel sprouts  are getting new leaves in the center of their crowns,

and the sprouts are really going too.

    I'm going to try moving these plants into the greenhouse in a few weeks also. I want to see if I can get some good sized sprouts before they need to be picked, which is usually around November.

   Wishing everyone a great Friday and start to your weekend.

Sunny Skies

      Hi everyone. It's Thursday, and I hope you're having a super last week of August. 

      Yesterday morning I had my coldest start at the lake as   it was only 46 degrees F/ just under 8 degrees C.Brrr    Iris you asked if I was sad the job was ending, and as much as I enjoyed the job, with getting so chilly, I’ll be glad not to have to sit outside waiting for boats to arrive. Especially if there’s no sun to keep me warm.😏

     As I mentioned yesterday I have a few art  journal pages that I am trying to share before this month wraps up. Here is another one that I will be linking up to Chris' Hot August (Night and Day) at Art Journal Journey.

   This page in my summer journal is made on yellow cardstock, and when I cut it down to fit the journal, I had some scraps with I lightly wiped with a golden yellow ink pad. I decided to use those scraps and cut some strips which I wove and then glued down on my background. I like the texture that it makes. The strips weren't long enough to cover the entire background, so I added some bright blue sky metallic paper trim along the edge where the weaving ended.

   This isn't a very complicated page either. (Who wants to be complicated in the summer? Right?)  I die cut the circle with the Fun in the Sun quote. I used a very old die from my scrapbooking days to make that. Then I used a paint pen and painted the blue edge of the circle quote and added sun rays coming off the circle. Once the paint dried I added some golden glitter glue. 

     I finished by die cutting the glasses, and I left the "glass" inset parts black to make them sunglasses. I then put a bit of glue on the "glass" parts to make the paper have a slight glassy sheen.

   Speaking of sunshine, I seem to have seen and taken photos of some beautiful sky views lately, so let me share a few here. I'll start with a sunset view the night before my niece's wedding, and then just a beautiful day sun view through the trees.

The other morning (Monday) when I was working at the lake,  the clouds and the sun sun were putting on a gorgeous show for me.

A mackerel sky is so photogenic. 

Have a great rest of your day!

The Month Is Starting to Wind Down

     Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. It's my last Wednesday working at the boat ramp. I just have to be there next Monday morning and then my season is done. Wow! It was just late May and I was starting this summer job. I will admit I am always gung-ho to come spring, and by now, I am ready to have some time back. It's not like I'll be sitting around though. I actually think I sat around more at the job. Hee-hee!

    Since the month is winding down I have some pages left to share for Chris' Hot August (Nights and Days) challenge over at Art Journal Journey.  Here's the first one,  and I'll be sharing more over the next couple of days.

   This page was actually quite simple to make. I used a maple leaf stencil and some lighter green paint to make the background. Then I added the sun sticker and stamped a few quotes. I like it though, and even though there isn't much to it, it does feel like a summer day to me.

   I'm keeping today's post quite short as I'm not only off to work, but this afternoon I have a Not-Back-to-School get together with some friends and some former co-workers who I don't see all that often. It should be a fun time.  

  

T Stands for the Niece's Wedding

     Hi everyone. And hello to everyone who stops by for T day at  Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog. I hope the new week is starting off in a good way for you.

      This past weekend we had the niece's wedding. Here's a few photos and a bit of a story about it.

      The niece, Ally, and her then fiance, Nick, had their big event at a summer camp on the lake where my mother-in-law's house is located. The camp is actually a summer school, and once they are done for the season, they rent out part of the facilities for weddings and other events.

    My husband's family had been on the lake since the late 1940's, and I've been visiting there since 1982. In all the years I've been going to my mother-in-law's house, I have never  been on the grounds of the camp school. It was quite lovely, and it made a beautiful place to hold a somewhat rustic  wedding.

     This was also a somewhat budget wedding. Now that somewhat budget phrase is deceiving because it was not a cheap wedding. (Is any wedding inexpensive?) However, the father of the bride, my chef brother-in-law, did all the food. That was a lot since over 100 people came to the wedding. And then there was decorating and setting up.  A lot of that happened on Friday evening. My husband and I went over to help them out. The wedding was Saturday afternoon, and my husband went back on Saturday morning to help finish building the wedding arbor and with a few other things in the kitchen.

     The bride wanted the dinner plates to be assorted old china, and I helped with a little bit of the washing. You can see all the plates that needed to be washed and ready for setting the tables.

     I didn't get many decent photos from the actual wedding because the 2 empty rows in front of us filled up with members of the wedding party and the bride's parents. Plus the photographers kept popping in that space to get their photos. But you can get a general view of the wedding scene in this photo.

    I honestly don't know if the old china plates really made the table all that fabulous, since everyone had plastic cups and wooden compostable silverware, but the tables still looked nice. 

    Plus you could bring home your plate as a souvenir if you wanted to. My husband's cousin who sat next to me, collected 11 matching plates and she was thrilled. It was even better for her since those plates had been her grandmother's. (My mother-in-law has/had several sets of china which no one wants because they require hand washing and with metal edges, can't be microwaved. These were donated to the wedding. The cousin and my husband share the same grandmother, so it's nice that someone wanted those plates to keep them in the family.) You can see the edge of her plate, underneath the plastic bread plate, on the bottom left of the table.

    I ended up with 3 plates that belonged to some great aunt. (I think they were Aunt Eva's, but I can't remember her name-shame on me.) I really didn't care if I had 3. I really just wanted 1 to put out on my dining room hutch as a memory of the event. ( And no, if the photo of the plate looks weird, the plate isn't missing an edge-but it's my hand holding it.)

    Not to make this post too long (plus I haven't really gone through the wedding photos yet), let me jump to my drink photos for T day this week. This first one might look a little strange as why would there be a drill on the dining table?

    Nobody brought corkscrews for the bottles of wine to have with dinner. This being a camp school (school being the key word), there were no corkscrews because you wouldn't serve wine to the kids having their meals. 

    My son-in-law Zach, being a tool guy and being quite observant, remembered there was a drill and a screw sitting some place out in the wedding area. He was clever enough to figure out that he could drill the screw into the cork and then reverse the drill and pull it out. 

    Off he went, got the drill and the screw and saved the day. Voila, we had wine.Too bad my daughter was looking down when I snapped this photo. 😏

     My other drink was something I tried before dinner while the couple was taking all their wedding photos.  I'd never heard of a Finnish Long Drink, but the peach flavor was amazing. I looked  it up when I got home from the wedding, and the Finnish name for this drink is Ionkero. 

    I thought there was a good story behind this drink too. Here's the short little AI write up about it that I found when I Googled it.

A Finnish Long Drink, or lonkero, is a popular alcoholic beverage traditionally made with gin and grapefruit soda and served chilled over ice. It was created for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics to be a refreshing, easy-to-serve drink for tourists. The beverage is characterized by its crisp, bubbly, lightly sweet, and citrusy flavor, with the taste of gin being subtle. 

    I especially liked that this drink  is  Finnish because  one of my grandfather's came from Finland. If you're wondering about the peach flavor (and later I had a pineapple one), I read these are new flavors added.  I'm curious if these  drink flavors  or even if this drink is available in Finland.  

    That's all for me. Have a super T day and week ahead.

   

Happy Weekend to You

     Hi everyone. Happy weekend to you. I hope you're having a wonderful weekend.

     Let me start today's post with a page in my summer journal for Chris' Hot August (Days and Nights) challenge at Art Journal Journey. It's not the most complicated page but for something so simple it has some various media, so I am also linking up to Creative Artiste Mixed Media Challenge. I'm also linking up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles.

    I covered the background paper with some ancient printed paper from back in my scrapbooking days. I rubbed a bit of green ink (TH)  very lightly over the page, especially the edges. I then used a darker pink ink (Versafine Clair) and an Adirondack chair image (?? Not sure who made that stamp). I added a 49 and Market acetate images, and also some cloth sticker clouds from Studio Calico. And finally I stamped the quotes (once again I'm not sure who made these). And that's all there is to that. 😏

   We've been having some lovely weather which was perfect for the niece's wedding yesterday. More about that in some other post.  However, we didn't get to go boating this weekend because of Hurricane Erin churning up the coast, much to my husband's and even my disappointment.  However, I have some other photos from a couple of weeks ago that I thought I'd end this post with. At least looking at photos  I'll get my water time this way. 😀

above- a couple of views of the red shed

below,  a water view of the "old" end of Portsmouth (NH)

I guess it wasn't a big kayaking day

   If you wonder why there is a British flag on this pole. That's because it's flying outside of the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion where the first governors of this still then colony lived. The house (well most of the house)  in the photo below the flags. It's now a state park.

Here's a few seabirds.

Some lobster boats and a ton of lobster traps at one of the city docks

And finally, a bit of yoga on a paddle board.

Have a super rest of your weekend and start to the new week.