Art and Flowers

Hi everyone. I have a busy blog post for you. Today I have a couple of pieces of art along with the rest of my photos from the bridge of flowers. 

So first I have a journal page for  Art Journal Journey. This month's hostess is Jo and her fun challenge is poetry in motion.

I was in a silly mood yesterday when I made this page. I dug out this book of children's poetry that I remember getting when I was probably around 10 years old.

In it is a poem by Lewis Carroll that appeared in his book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The Crocodile

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale! 

How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws! 

The background is a piece of watercolor paper that I wiped down some paint brushes on, and then I drew and painted the croc and fish. He doesn't look as frightening as a real crocodile, but I wouldn't want to be those little fish.

And over at Moo Mania its the last few days of the CAT challenge. So I made this silly cat tag.

I just couldn't seem to get the cat face the way I wanted it. I painted over the slanted cat eyes because they looked too evil, and then I made big eyes which looked too goofy and I finally settled with these.

I made my tag background with stamping coloring and using some scraps of a polka dot napkin.

I like this pink, orange and blue combination lately, so I am going to link up to Tag Tuesday, My Favorite Color Combination challenge. 

And finally, I have more photos from my trip last week to the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.  If you want to see the other the links are here: July 30th post and July 31 post.

That's finally it for me today. Hope you're having a great day!

T is Just Down the Street and Over a Bridge (of Flowers)

Hi everyone. It is once again Tuesday, which means it is T Day. And welcome August. My husband always says that no month is faster than July except for August. I think he is right about that one.

Today  for T day  I am taking you on a worldwide journey .

Pocket your passport, skip the jet lag, and avoid that shady two-star hostel. The food you travel the world for is just down the STREET

A couple weeks ago I had an art day with a fellow blogger friend Corrine. Corrine and I live about, (give or take with the traffic), 45 minutes away from each other. After a morning of fabric painting we decided to go out for lunch and headed to this great restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Here's how they describe themselves on their website. (The highlighted quote above is also from their website.)

                     " STREET is an eclectic, casual restaurant and cocktail                     lounge that satisfies both your hunger and your wanderlust.                     From falafel to phở, burgers to bibimbap, we serve the                       world’s most flavorful street food in one lively place. And with                a global palate of beer, wine and cocktails, the bar at STREET                  is one of the hottest evening destinations in Portsmouth, NH."

                          I've taken you here before, but this time I did remember                                          to snap a photo. We both had Korean bibimbap with steak.                                And to drink I had an unsweetened ice tea and also a glass of water.  Actually Corrine had the same, so it was easy for our waiter.
             (Who by the way happened to be a former student of mine. I can always           tell a former student when they walk up to the table and give you this long                     look. Of course since I teach high school by the time I see them                    they are  usually so grown up I can't recognize them any more, but our                 waiter was nice enough to share his name and I recognized his curly hair right away then.)

This photo is making me hungry. :)  The base is sticky rice and there are mushrooms, zucchini, carrots, scallions and lots of other delicious additions to this dish.

Of course this time I forgot to take ny photos of Corrine and myself, so I guess I can never be quite compete. LOL.

Stop by  Bleubeard and Elizabeth's  blog to join in and see what the T Gang has been drinking, eating and maybe even up to lately.

Also today I want to thank Linda K for the gorgeous ATC card she sent me for the T Day swap.

It came in a great envelope.

And also included a few little goodies.

Thank you Linda for such a beautiful ATC and all the little ephemera too. They will come in useful, as I am sure you know. :)

And finally some more blooms from the Bridge of Flowers. I showed you some of them the other day which you can check out here if you wish

Unfinished and Bridge of Flowers blog post.

I think the light drizzle and grey day made the colors pop even more.

I still want to know how they are able to keep so many flowers blooming at the same time. I am guessing they must replant over the course of the season. Whatever they do, it was gorgeous.

I have a few more photos I will show you Thursday since tomorrow is lookback day for Second on the Second.

Happy T day and your visit is much appreciated.

Unfinished

Hi everyone.  My quiet weekend continues. Yesterday I only got as far as cleaning my car out (so glad that is done) and so MAYBE today I will do a little bit more. I am definitely off to the happy art place though, as soon as I finish my breakfast. The dogs are hopefully tired enough from their walk that they will leave me in a little peace for a bit. :)

So it is almost the end of July. I will say that with me in summer mode the month is just a  wonderful and fun blur in my head. Good thing I keep a little calendar journal to remind me if what I actually did. Ha ha. I will say I still hate to see July end, even though there's still August, but I don't get the full month (of August) off to enjoy and somehow that back to school date lingers out there reminding me kids and classroom are coming. 

So today I have one last page for Elizabeth's Art Journal Journey Summer Love challenge. I am sorry to say this page never got finished, even though I started it awhile back. However since it is done enough (although still curled up) I will share it.

You would think I would have had time to iron it flat. (Thanks to all of you who shared that suggestion.) However it got buried while I tried to figure out what it needed, and I found it yesterday, and decided it would be better to post it now. Otherwise it would end up back in the bottom of the pile most likely.

My inspiration for the piece was this sheet of scrapbooking printed vellum I had.

So last week I took a road trip to the yarn store ( which I talked about yesterday). On the way I saw signs for The Bridge of Flowers on the the Mohawk Trail. The Mohawk Trail is one of those old byways from back in the early days of automobiles. It runs from central Massachusetts through the northern Berkshire Mountains. It's a scenic route and the Bridge of Flowers is just one stop. I had driven at least some of the Mohawk Trail  twice before many many years ago, but always in the early spring, so visiting the Bridge of Flowers meant I was  not seeing a bridge of flowers. And since  the bridge wasn't far off the highway,  and I was on a summer  road trip, I went to check it out.

And I'm glad I did.

The bridge doesn't look like much from this view, but you can see the fog covering the tops of the mountains which I thought was pretty.

 Walking along the bridge was to walk through  a lush and gorgeous garden.

I wonder how they managed for the plants to have so many blooms at the same time.

 With this river and hilly view in the background.

I have tons more flower photos, but I will save those for T. 

Hope everyone's weekend is going well.

Thanks for stopping by.

Just Things

Happy weekend everyone. This is a quiet one for me as the hubby is taking a 2 day refresher motorcycle class. He's had his license for years and hasn't ridden so he figured he needed to do it again. It's kind of weird for me  not to have people around and someone wanting to do something, but it is rather nice to decide what I want to do. Today its some chores like finishing my bookshelf clean out and cleaning all the dog hair out of my car. Or maybe just an art day too. I'm actually feeling kind of lazy right now, home from my walk and enjoying a little quiet.

I wanted to show you this HUGE month that was on my sliding door the other night.

 It was as big as my hand, by far one of the biggest I've ever seen other than the luna moth.  And in he had his wings pulled up one under the other too.

 For some reason it photographed better through the glass door than when I stepped outside. I looked it up and I think it might be a silk moth. Nothing else seemed to fit it.

I did like this one when I looked down on its eyes.

So yesterday I had a big disappointment.  My husband only works until noon on Fridays during the summer, and we went out fishing in the boat after he got home in the afternoon. We caught some mackerel and then went striped bass fishing. Mackerel fishing is fun because when they are running you catch them very easily. 

Stripe bass have however eluded me for years. Until yesterday. We went and anchored in this quiet spot and I put out my line with a mackerel on it, and sat down to read my book and wait. Then my line took off and the reel is screeching and I am so excited to finally hooked one. :) I worked and worked to reel the fish in, and my hubby went to grab the net, when, SNAP, my line broke and the fish swam away. Somewhere in the bay is a striped bass with an orange fishing float hanging from his mouth. It must be a nuisance for him, and if he's just come on in, I would have taken his photo and then let him lose back into the ocean.

But that was not to be. I said a rather naughty word when my line snapped, and I won't repeat it here.:)

And Thursday I decided to take a road trip. I brought the dogs along for company (which is why my car needs to be cleaned today because it now looks like a dog hair rug everywhere). It was a rainy day and only in the low 60's so bringing them along wasn't an issue.

The first stop and reason for my road trip was a yarn store in western Massachusetts called Webs.

It is a 3 hour trip, but as my knitting friend once told me, "Webs is a destination." It is true. There's a large and nice knitting store in the front, and then in the back 

there is this yarn warehouse. Six aisles of discounted yarn. :)  Here's just one of them.

And they were having a sale on some of it also!

Last summer in Iceland I bought some skeins of Lopi Icelandic yarn. It was really inexpensive there- only around $2.50 a skein.  Here it is over $9. 

Of course I couldn't fit tons of it into my suitcase, so I bought a few assorted colors and figured I could get the background yarn here at home.

I wanted something softer than Lopi too and that's why I took a road trip. I figured maybe I could find the yarn for the body of my sweater on sale.

And I did find some Valley Yarn (made by Webs) which worked and was softer and on sale for $4.59 a skein, which means I can make my sweater for less than $75. I have a hard time buying sweater yarn and spending $200 when I could go buy the sweater for less than that.

I also made a couple of other stops on my road trip which I will show you another day as this post is getting long.

But first, another tag for Chrissies favorite color challenge at Tag Tuesday.

Happy weekend everyone.