This and That for Wednesday

 Hi everyone. Here in New Hampshire it's  another very cold temperature day, and it's supposed to be bitterly cold tonight. We had a little relief yesterday so I went outside to enjoy the winter day, because today I'll chose staying warm inside the house. 

 I'll start my post with a tag for Valerie's Steampunk challenge over at Tag Tuesday. Steampunk is something I need to do more of because it is such a fun theme. I dug some steampunk and masculine stamps  off the top shelf, and after dumping them onto the floor, I had fun mixing and matching.

Here's the tag I came up with. 

I stamped this gear/blueprint image first, and then rubbed brown and grey ink pads to color my tag.  The heart is an ancient image from Chocolate Baroque. I stamped it in red, and then used metallic markers to color the wings and the gears. I also colored the heart a deeper red with a Sharpie.  Have you noticed that when it comes to red markers is that it is hard to find a red that you think of as true red? I know we probably all have our own idea about true red, but for me, Sharpie's are the best true red. 

Once colored, I lightly ran a black ink pad over my image to make it a bit aged. Then I outlined the gears with a black Sharpie and added some pen dots to make the gears looked pinged and old. Finally I added the small gold paper wings.

I also added a gold paper key and a bit of tissue scrap at the bottom, and finished off my tag with the black paper trim and also the stamped quote. It's hard to read but it says "being lost is worth being found".

I also want to share some soup I made the other day for Kathy's Food Wednesdays, over at her blog Hummingbird Studio at the Lake.  I ended up with one of those soups you make when you clean out left over veggies, but it actually started with me wanting  to make some bean soup.  This soup is not quite vegetarian as I had a few pieces of bacon that I chopped up and added, as well as using low salt chicken stock. 

The leafy greens in the soup is some kale that I grew last summer in garden and had been blanched and then frozen.

 I picked up this bag of mixed dried beans , but I forgot to take a photo of the beans in the bag. 

However, I did get a photo of the beans rinsed and put into the stainless steel pot in my Instant Pot. 

I think this is a fun photo. The beans have great colors, and there's an interesting reflection.

I have an Instant Pot back from my working days, and it is a great way to quickly soften dried beans. You put them in  with water and a teaspoon of oil (it cuts back on the foam) and set the Instant Pot to pressure cook for 1 minute. Before you start the pressure cooking push the keep warm button and have the beans sit in the stay warm mode for an hour. After that hour I drained the beans and cooked my soup in a big pot on the stove. 

It was yummy, and since my husband won't eat beans, I have my lunch prepared for several days.

I also mentioned that I went out yesterday to enjoy our slightly warmer winter day. Maddie was at doggie daycare so Pete and I went for a ride down to the beach. Yesterday I went to York Beach, in York, Maine. I like the fact that there is an open bathroom there.

The clouds were interesting; the beach was basically  empty, and even though it was a little chilly, I got to go for a nice walk (as did Pete).

I love the reflections.

And I love the happy face on Mr. Pete.

I hope your week is going well. Stay warm, and thanks for visiting.

Add A Quote

 Hi everyone. Wow. We're already into the last full week of January. It's also been 2 weeks since our last challenge at Try It on Tuesday. Thanks to all of you who joined us with your "something new" pieces. And congrats to those of you who received a top 5 for our December snowflake challenge.

For our next challenge, the theme is "Add a Quote".

I made this art journal page, and it has 3 quote related items on it.

I started with a stencil that I tried to use black Sharpie to cope the number lists with. The Sharpie's tip was a bit too thick, so I changed over to a pen.  I also used the same stencil and some green paint just to make the numbers stand out a bit more. Finally I sprayed a bit of ink as I didn't want my background to be too strongly colored.

I cut this lady out of a holiday multi-paged Amazon ad magazine. If you look carefully you can see a bit of her classroom behind her.  I had this frame sitting on my work table (I used the actual quote bubble that was on the inner part in some other art), but it fit her perfectly. Plus it is a speech balloon  that has to do with quotes.

Then I added my 2 quotes. One I cut out of this same ad-magazine page as I cut out this pretty young woman, and the other is a quote sticker. I finished off my page by using a stencil to add in the little boxes as well as the golden hexagons.

I hope to see your quote artwork over at Try It On Tuesday. Remember all art forms are accepted, and you have 2 weeks to join this challenge.  Be sure to check out the other design team examples too, especially if you're stuck for a quote idea. The possibilities are really limitless with this challenge.

I am also linking up to this month's art journaling challenge at Art Journal Journey. This month the theme is "Let's Face It", and you still have about a week to join.

Thank you so much for visiting my post.

T Stands for More Cold Weather

 Hi everyone. Another T Day has rolled around over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog, and this is the last one for January. Weren't we just wishing each other a happy new year?

There's been  some cold weather this past week at my house, with mornings below zero  degrees F (or below -17 degrees C). According to the weather people, there are more cold mornings to come this week. That means the ice on the sidewalks, driveway and my road won't be melting anytime soon.  I am missing my  walks, but I don't want to risk a slip while walking on ice. 

Above is the ice on the back sidewalk. After our snow and rain event last Monday, the sun came out and warmed up for just a couple hours. Even though the side walk was cleared with the snow blower, there is always a little left on the ground. This time that little bit melted, but it didn't have any place to go as the ground is frozen. When it got cold that night, it froze and turned to this disaster. It's been a mess like this all week. I keep waiting for a warm day for it to turn back to slush so I can clear it.

Even the UPS guy slid off the driveway one afternoon. Luckily my husband was around and the 2 of them managed to get his truck  unstuck. That took about an hour. 

In the meantime, my slide over my boots ice grippers are my best friend.

Last week I showed you the puzzle my husband and I entertained ourselves with on the weekend. We worked on it some more this past weekend, and it's definitely coming along.

Some of you asked what the picture on the puzzle is, and you might be able to make out that it is inside a Costco store. (I know the glare on the right side makes it hard to see that.) Here's a photo of what the finished piece will look like, with a bit of glare too, but I think your can see a little more of what the finished puzzle will look like.

If you aren't familiar with Costco, they are a buying warehouse. Most items are sold in large quantities, but not all. I think we are both getting a kick out of this puzzle, except there are packages of toilet paper on so many pieces. Tricky.  The toilet paper must be a big seller.

You might remember that our T day friend Carola had us vote on her 3 favorite photos. She chose 1 name as the winner of 3 cards with those photos on them.  I won the three cards from our fellow T friend. Today they came in the mail, and the photos are even more beautiful then they appeared online.

There are 4 cards because Carola because one of them was a lovely note and the other 3 are my winnings.

Thank you so much for these beauties Carola.

I also did a bit of baking last week. This time I tried an item on my baking bucket list.  I never seem to complete my  baking bucket list because there are so many interesting things to bake.  I add new baking treats to my list every now and again so that my list seems to stay between 10-15 items all the time. I keep the list in the front of my yearly journal so I can check off and add items as the year goes on.

Jeanie, at the Marmalade Gypsy posted her madeleine cookie-cake recipe, and they looked much easier to make than I expected them to be.  Some people call them cookies, but I read online that they are technically small butter cakes. Last year I bought a madeleine pan, so it was time to give them a try. I used Jeanie's recipe.

You have to chill the batter, which you can see in the plastic container (no room in the fridge for the bowl) and my pan.

As this was my first time making madeleines, I wasn't sure how full the molds were supposed to be filled, which accounts for the uneven edges. Those little bumps on the edges were easy to snip off and next time I won't fill the pan quite so high. You can tell they don't lie flat and that's because I did get the nice rounded backs you are supposed to get.   However, for some reason I got these holes in mine. I know they are air pockets but I'm not sure what caused them. Very strange. Anyone have any ideas why that might be?

I made mine with lemon zest. To cover the holes I dusted them with powdered sugar.

It's a great recipe, and they tasted delicious, especially with a cup of tea. The link to Jeanie's blog earlier in this post has her recipe.

This is my ticket to this week's T where we share our drink related posts.

And I think I've babbled on enough also. Have a wonderful T day and week ahead.

And as always, I appreciate your visit.

Summer Garden

Happy Monday and new week to you. 

Today I have a short post with a piece of art I created recently.

I'm sharing this journal page I made the other day for my "Let's Face It" challenge at Art Journal Journey. With butterflies and dragonflies, I must have summer on my mind.

I started my page by cleaning some paint off a brush on some watercolor paper. Once that was dry I attached this large sheet of Dina Wakely tissue paper. It had the faces and the leaves  already on it.

I colored in the leaves and added some doodled as well as colored flowers. Then I used a black paint pen and added the dots all over my page.

The butterfly and dragonflies are from an Art By Marlene punch out book. For the cost of the book, around $5, and the fact that I must have had it for 2 years, I am still getting images from it.  I think you'll see Art by Marlene images occasionally pop up on my journal pages as there's many left to use.

 

 I  decided my page needed a border. I used a stencil and a black sharper to trace and color that in. I spent an afternoon this past week tracing and coloring on several pages. Just like cutting and pasting, it can be so relaxing. (Not that my week had really been stressful.) I finished off my page with a sticker quote as well as some tiny foam dots.

There's been some terrific art over at AJJ so far this month. Thanks to those of you who've shared pieces. Remember there's still a bit of January left to join in if you feel inclined, and I hope to see you there.

Thanks also for visiting my blog today.

This Past Week in Mostly Photos

 Hi everyone. The weekend is here. It's once again going to be on the chilly side  here in New Hampshire. 

This past week we had  a mix of weather again. With snow and rain on Monday and then some more very cold temperatures, we now have lots of ice.  Last year I was lucky and able to walk through most of January, but this year in order to walk I'd need ice skates. Smile.

I've had to find some other ways to get in my outside time, so I took a couple of drives.

The most exciting drive I took was on Wednesday. I was down at the coast for my allergy shots, and since I was in the general neighborhood, I decided to drive to Salisbury State Reservation right over the border into Massachusetts.

I had 2 reasons to drive here. First, this is a big area where snowy owls  are seen, and I've been hoping to see one. Second of all, the tide was in, making the beaches very narrow, but this state park has other trails where I could walk. The coast didn't get any snow in our early in the week storm, so trails would work for walking. 

Of course I got there and even though the thermometer in my car read 42 degrees F (5.5 degrees C) , the wind was right off the North Atlantic, and it was biting cold.  My walk was short, but the trip was not wasted by any means.

This owl kept swiveling their head back and forth, probably wondering why a small crowd  gathered . When I left that morning I grabbed my camera that had my 18-400mm lens on it (I just leave that one on as it is really flexible). I just wished I had brought my big lens with me, but I honestly didn't expect to need it.

There are some owls this year, but it's not a year when we have a lot of them in the area. This next photo is not cropped at all the make the owl larger. It is pretty much the view I saw.

 And besides the snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus), I also had another nice bird sighting.

This hawk was obviously hunting not too high off the ground.

I know there's a lot of photos, but I'm really pleased to have caught these in flight views.  Birds in flight, especially this slow hunting flight style, is really fascinating, don't you think?

I did some online research to try to identify this bird, and I came up with Northern Harrier. If that's what it is, it would be a first one of this species for me. The reservation in Salisbury is a huge area for birders, and I noticed that someone who links up bird sightings mentioned they also saw one on the same day I was there. Here's the link  too that: Recent bird sightings, Salisbury Beach Reservation.

David if you read this, perhaps you could confirm because as I have said before, I am not very good at hawks.

I took a few more scenery photos that I will share another day.

The other drive was up to the big lake near my home. There were no birds of notice, but the ice fishing is getting into full swing. I suspect that by the time of this post there will be a lot more fishing shacks out on the bay.

The ice runway is also laid out, but it wasn't opened yet. I took these early in the week, so I bet with the cold we've had, they might be able to land planes now. By the way, this is an FAA official small airport, not just a random landing strip. I must say I get a kick out of the fact that this area actually has an ice airport. I'm not sure it actually delivers people to the area, but a lot of small planes take off and land, most likely to say they have done it.

A different type of arty thing I did this past week was wind some yarn into balls so I can knit a vest. This device (if you aren't familiar with it) is called a yarn swift. On the left you can just make out the ball winder. 

Some yarn you buy is ready to use in a modified ball, but some comes in hanks. For those you who don't knit or crochet, a hank is a loop of yarn (like you can see in my above photo) that is twisted  in a figure 8 kind of shape. There are also a couple of little pieces of yarn holding the loop together. If you didn't wind a hank into a ball before using it, you would spend more time untangling it than you would knitting or crocheting.

You can see some of the yarn I balled this week here. There is one semi-hand wound ball on the back right, and a yarn I wound using my yarn winder on the left.

I am excited to start knitting my vest. I'll show you more as it gets done.

Thanks for getting through this rather long post. And I hope you enjoy your weekend. 

More Little Faces Journal

 Hi everyone. It's just about the weekend-again. Hope your week has been going well.

Today I am want to share a few more faces from my little face journal with you. If you missed part 1 and are curious, here's a link to it: Little Faces Part 1.

I am also linking up the latest challenge at Art Journal Journey, which happens to be Let's Face It.

As mentioned in my Wednesday post, these pages are 4x4 inches in size. The white watercolor pages all began by being colored with some watercolor paints.

Here's my cover page. I painted the black paper in a messy way to give it a bit of texture.

I also added this chipboard snow flake and some  tiny white plastic gemstones.

In the above photo, my light blue marker (from the glasses and her bow) look white here, but rest assured they are light blue.  I used some assorted acrylic bits and pieces to finish off the page. I thought that maybe she was dreaming of a warm beach on a cold January day.

I used a Janet Klein image of Salvador Dali. I don't know if he was a diva or not, but in my piece he is, and he is standing behind a very un-Dali like picket fence.

She doesn't look very dressed for snow, does she? But with that golden blonde hair and her  outfit she looks like wants to be cute more than she wants to be warm. At least she is wearing a hat!

These twins are also Janet Klein images. They are supposed to be Twiddle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum from Alice and Wonderland. I turned them into just 2 rambunctious boys with glasses and with lots of their toy balls bouncing around the background.

And here's a couple of pages with black backgrounds.

And finally for my last page today, I used a head from my funky fossil set twice, but gave her two different bodies. I like to think she is looking in the mirror at the store after having tried on each outfit.

That's all for me today.

Have a great start to your weekend. Enjoy.

California Journal- A Few More Pages

 Hi everyone. I hope your week is going well.

Today I have some more pages and photos from my California trip journal. My book is getting thick and hard to lay flat, so please ignore my not-so-perfectly-flat-page photos.

This first photo is a left over page from my visit to Palm Springs. I cut this image out of a travel brochure. These 2 people with their sunglassed poodle represent the vintage movie star glamour  of this desert city. I can't say it looks much like my husband or myself though, even if we are vintage. Smile.

In case you're wondering why there are stars on the sidewalk, Palm Springs has its own walk of stars, so I added some stickers to represent them.

I am linking this page up to Art Journal Journey for this month's Let's Face It challenge. 

Next we're onto our drive from the desert back out to the coast. 

Whoops, I forgot to take a finished view of this next page. What the underside of the tag says is that we turned off in San Bernadino and drove up through the National Forest that wound through the mountains.

I used this stencil (repeating it several times) in the next page because that's how it felt to drive on those switchback roads up into the mountains. All of a sudden you would come out of the forest onto a beautiful view, and then you would wind through the forest some more.

These photos are not in my travel journal, but I'll share them here. This is the route we took up through the mountains, past Big Bear and Arrowhead lakes.

These signs were at the picnic area where we stopped for lunch. Even though we passed through a couple of communities, we didn't see anyplace we wanted to eat. That was OK as we had lunch food in the cooler.

On our way out of the National Forest we drove through the northernmost corner of LA County. This was the area of the 2020 Bobcat fire.  I remember seeing images of it on the news. What was amazing was how many of the homes the firefighters and others had been able to save. Many of those people had signs out thanking the firefighters, which I included in my sketch page of my journal.

Once we got out of the mountains we came out onto this flat area. 

Then it was over the Coastal Range, and into Ventura County. When we got to our hotel, we were totally fogged in.

On this page I used another brochure. This one has an inside harbor map where I could mark info about our trip.

This all happened on Monday. On Tuesday we were off to Channel Island National Park, and I will share my journal pages another time.

Thanks so much for visiting.