Spring Blooms

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday. Another week has flown by, and in my area we've finally had some  summery feeling weather. I think we've finally turned the corner from early spring. 😏

The other day my local botanical garden opened for the season. We had our first summer like day so far this year, and there was barely a cloud in the sky, so I met a couple of friends and we went to check out the spring blooms. 

Let me start with some faces for Nicole's Friday Face Off.  I'll also be linking up to Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

These are just some of the many fun faces in the garden.

And here's 2 frogs. One is  definitely a statue, but we couldn't decide if the other one was alive or a statue.

I guess I will need a trip back to see if the frog-that-looks-alive is still sitting there.

And let me share a few other spring blooms and views with you.

The crab apple trees were gorgeous.

     It was a fantastic visit, well mostly. The black-flies have finally arrived en masse. They're on the later side this year, but they shouldn't be around too much longer I would think.  Still, our first summer like day, blue skies, and all these spring scenes made it hard to let the bugs ruin the day.

Have a great start to your weekend. 

Alphabet Pages

Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.

     Today I am linking up to May's More Than Words Monthly Challenge. This month their theme is TRAVEL. I thought I would share a couple of pages from my Greece travel journal that I've been working on.

        At some point early in the trip, my friends and I had a conversation about what people think about when they want to fall asleep but can't. The idea of an alphabet list came up, and  from that discussion we decided we could make an alphabet list  about our trip. Most evenings we would add words from our day  and match them up to the letters that they start with.  

      My friend Deb kept the list and typed it up when we were home. (Thanks Deb.) I'm using that typed up list  in some of the pages in my travel journal, and I'll share a couple of pages today. 

     

     For this first page I used some scrap paper, some stickers, die cut trim and fussy cut stamped kitties. To this I added my A and B letter lists, a map of Athens and our hotel key from where we stayed in the city. Since this is my travel journal I marked where the hotel was located.

     My K, L and M page celebrates the spring weather and flowers we had. I used some crayons, some little plastic flowers, a die cut sun and cloud, some sticky fabric sunglasses, paper, a rubber stamps and 2 inks, markers and finally a tiny thermometer from a packet I bought probably 10 or more years ago.

      I love this list idea. ❤  Now that I'm home, it helps remind me of many items and experiences we had while  traveling, and it was also a great way to recap a day.   And you should have seen how excited we were when we came across a Q,X or Z words. Grin. 😏

     I'll definitely be doing this again next time I go on a trip. It's fun, can be done with the whole group, or done by yourself, whatever strikes your fancy. 

      That's all for me today. I hope your week is going well. 

Wednesday Art

 Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week to you.

     Today I'll start my post with a bit of poetry. Here's a silly piece I made for Valerie's and my Poetry challenge at Art Journal Journey.  I wrote a poem about my page using some words. These words came in a  box of  assorted words that I thought would be useful, but mostly were kind of a "pain" to dig through to find what you wanted. 😏 (That's why they've been sitting in my happy place for at least a decade.)

     To make my page I started with a bit of sheet music. I glued that down and then colored my entire background with yellow, red and orange inks. I stamped the couple, colored them and fussy cut them out. I stamped the instruments and fussy cut them out.  I added a strip of striped paper vertically to give me a place  to add all my cut outs. I also added the couple, but before I added the instruments, I put down an acetate frame and used a white paint pen to color in that area so the couple will stand out.  Finally I used some pre-printed words  to write a poem about the couple.

I'll finish my post with a few views from the 4 mile (6.4 km) walk my daughter and I took on  Mother's Day morning. How about some sunbathing turtles?

This Canada goose was busy eating.

This sky speaks for itself.

This next one is not a great photo, but there was a small group of Eastern Kingbirds a long one stretch of the trail. This one was the only one brave enough where I could get even slightly close for a photo. (I just had my phone with me that morning.)

And can you see this spiky guy sitting in the tree?  I’m glad we didn’t have the dogs with us because I’m sure one of them would want to check out this porcupine.

I love seeing fern fiddleheads popping open. These look like they will continue to unwrap even in this still photo.  (Just a note, not all fiddleheads are edible.)

And our turn around spot is this beach. We went early, and except before we just returned to the car, the trail was quiet and empty.

Have a great middle of your week. 

Small Things

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

Thank you Tracey from New Beginnings...Creating in My Corner for being the guest designer for our fantasy challenge. And let me say a  big thank you to everyone who joined our last challenge as well.

This time at TIOT we've got a challenge theme that can be taken a lot of ways. This time we're looking for

SMALL THINGS

I made a set of ATC's because they are smaller than most journal pages, and the theme I went with was small things with a big impact.

I think you can get where I'm coming from with these 3 ATC's. 

    I inked each card by rubbing an ink pad over it, and I also outlined the edges with a different colored ink pad. The stamps on each card come from an old Hero Arts Set that had 20 small image stamps. The only image not from that set is the baby bottle, and that is an old Cheery Lynn design die cut.

     The rings are stamped, colored with metallic markers and then  I used a bit of glitter on the stone. The drinks glass have glitter glue in the drink and then a bit of glossy accents to make the glass, and the bottle had some white glitter glue in it (which didn't stay white with my ink 😕), and then some glossy accents over that. I colored and outlined the nipple part of the bottle.

The words come from some various rubber stamps. The rings have the "title of the set" stamp on them which is why that one is stamped on white paper and not directly on the card.

There's so many ways to go with this challenge you should check out the other designer's pieces. Remember you have 2 weeks to join in, and all types of art are accepted.

Thanks for stopping by my blog, and I hope you're thinking small. 

T Stands for Spring Excitement (well only if you like gardening)

 Hi everyone. And hello to all the folks who stop by Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog for T day.

     Last week wasn't the most exciting week for me as I was finishing up a few projects which really meant reorganizing and cleaning up a few messes around the house. I'm happy I got them all completed, but I'm sure you don't want to read about them.  😏 I had some garden time too. Everything is getting green  which is very exciting. 

    It's amazing how between morning and evening leaves have popped out more, and the gardens have filled in more. I actually even need to do some dreaded weeding.

     I really had hoped to get this wall painted. This is one side of my  husband's workshop, a structure that was on the property when we bought it.  The garden has grown up so much I'm afraid I'll squish plants if I put a ladder in there right now, so I guess painting it will have to wait until late summer or fall. (I'm not holding my breath my husband will get his shop cleaned up by then however-😬)

     What's also exciting is that we opened up the screen porch this past weekend. Some of you who stop by frequently might know how much I love my screen porch.

     This year I washed all the doors before my husband put them up. That took a while, and I was pretty wet by the time I finished. 

     The 3 screened walls of my  porch are made by using screen doors. In the fall my husband puts up plastic, we put all the yard paraphernalia into the area, and then he puts plastic over the doors and closes it up until spring. 

      Yes, my porch is still a mess. Mostly what's pushed up against the wall is my porch furniture. Cleaning the porch will be one of this week's projects. I want to repaint the floor here also, but I'm going to wait for the weather to (hopefully) dry out a bit before I tackle that project.

     All this work means I need to relax a bit too.  You might remember last Mother's Day weekend I went to Charleston, South Carolina with a friend. We visited the Bigelow Tea Garden, which is the only large scale tea plantation in the United States. During that visit we were told that the first cut of tea leaves for the year made the most delicate black tea. I tried some last year, and I had to agree. A couple of weeks ago  I received an email  that I could pre-order some of this year's first cut tea. I ordered myself a bag. It arrived at the end of last week, and you can see, I was about to make myself an evening cup of tea. 

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

Driving Through the Mountains

Hi everyone. I hope you had or are having a lovely weekend.

I also hope no one is totally sick of my Greece photos yet. 😏

     One thing I loved about my trip to Greece was driving around and experiencing so many different 'things."  I'm not finished sharing photos from our visit to the Trikala area, and I will get back to that. However, when we left Trikala we  were driving west and had some mountains to cross before we reached the Ionian Sea.

      Here's a through-the-windshield view as we headed out. And FYI, there weren't always places to stop for photos on this day's drive, so there are photos that may not be perfect set ups or have bug splats from the wind shield. But those windshield photos still tell the story.

    We were looking for a bridge with 2 waterfalls, but before we found that, we came to this cool arched bridge called the Stone Arch Bridge of Pyli. According to what I read, this bridge was built in the 1500's and at one time was the only way to travel  to or from the village of Pyli and other villages in the area.

After we stopped and checked this bridge out, we drove on further, and not for the first time, missed where we wanted to go. However, we found some beautiful scenery when we went off the beaten path.

The  road just got narrower and narrower. That was our clue we missed the second bridge with the waterfalls. Here's a couple more through the windshield views as we were trying to figure  out where we were.

We also drove by one of the many road washouts we would pass that day. It must have been a tough winter with big spring snow melt.

Once we realized we were going the wrong way, we turned around and found the  arched bridge with the waterfalls that we wanted to visit. 

This bridge is the Stone Arch Bridge of Palaiokarya. I had a hard time finding info about this bridge, but I did find out that the waterfalls are man-made to go with this bridge. This is a really pretty view though, and I'm glad we found it.

   After we left this bridge we had a couple of choices of how to reach the ferry for Corfu (in case you don't know, Corfu is an island), but we chose to head along one of the roads through the mountains. We stopped to eat not too much further down the road, and here's the view from inside the restaurant and in the parking lot.

As we drove further along the road, the mountains got even higher and became snow capped. The road also wound back and forth and was one of the longest stretches of curvy roads I've even been on. It took us around 3 hours  to get across the mountains, and even though my photos aren't very amazing, the views certainly were. 

We passed more road washouts and places where stones had fallen or rolled down into the road.

We also passed a few monasteries. I'm not sure if either of these were still in use or not, but the second one looks like it most likely was.

We passed through one area where the trees were covered in lichen. I've never seen so much lichen.

Occasionally we'd pass a village along the way. That explains the electric wires in so many of the photos.

And did I mention the road was curvy?

We also found the village where my friend's grandparents came from, but I'll save those photos for another post.

     At one spot along the way, we actually came to where there was some snow on the sides of the road. Luckily we didn't hit any snow on the road.    You can also see that it was getting dark.

     This was quite the driving adventure, and definitely one of the many highlights from my trip. By this point in the day we were ready to drive the rest of the distance along a highway to catch our ferry for Corfu. 

Have a great start to the new week.