Start of the Week Post

Hi everyone. Happy start to the new week. I hope you enjoyed  your weekend. (Unless of course you have the 3 day holiday weekend in the US, then enjoy the rest of your weekend.)

I have a page to share over at Art Journal Journey for Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's "What's Your Style?" challenge.

I started with a painted, inked and spray inked piece of paper. Then I used a large piece of printed tissue paper by Dina Wakely over that.  

I had cut out an image from a magazine for another journal page, and had all this plain colored background paper left over. Rather than throw it out, I drew these flowers, fussy cut them, and then glued them down on the bottom of this page with matte medium. Once that dried I gave them some details.

I loved this quote in my Amazon holiday fashion ad booklet, so I cut it out and glued it on my page, before I'd even finished with the page. (How's that for working out of order-hee-hee.)  I knew I wanted  to go with some people who were dressed to impress, so I used this old Judikins stamp.

Finally I finished it off with some Valentine's day heart decorations from my stash. They do look like a gorgeous couple, dressed for some big event, perhaps their wedding or some award ceremony.

It's been another studio/spare bedroom work weekend for me. Saturday the rest of the closet was removed, which really gives a good view of the new open. space. 

The toughest thing to do that day was to move this wall unit I use for storing small things. It's  from an old hardware store, and maybe not the cutest piece, but I love all the small cubby hole storage spaces. It weighs a ton though.

I'd had it on the wall that formed part of the front of the closet, where we had it bolted to one of the beams in the house. It had to be moved to rip out the front of the closet.

We did get it moved, just a few feet (no more than 1.5 meters). This will be it's new space. We will have to move it one more time when we put the new floor in. This space was the corner where my work table was tucked in, but now I have a lot more choices where to put it. 

There's still a lot to do, but step one of the de-construction  can be checked off.

And if you have Netflix, have your watched Icarus? It is a 2017 documentary about doping in  sports and seems really valid (again) now with the Russian skater issues at the Olympics. Plus it is has an giant twist. I recommend it.

Have a great start to the new week. 

And thanks for visiting.

Saturday This and That- A Photo Post

Hi everyone.  Happy weekend. 

Not much exciting in my world right now. We have more spare bedroom de-construction going on this weekend. After a couple warm days the cold is back. I think I might be going out with my daughter on Monday as she the President's Day holiday off from work, but neither my husband nor her fiance do. We've been talking about meeting up and doing something fun. Nothing definite planned yet though.

Today I am sharing a few random photos from my week. 

Not that either of us needed the calories, but my husband brought home this absolutely yummy cake for Valentine's Day. It was just a basic chocolate cake with white frosting, but it was one the best chocolate cakes I've had. It was just from one of our local markets, and to top it off, it was marked down since my husband didn't stop (at the market) until he was on his way home from work.

I like the lighting on Maddie's face in this photo from the other night. You can see Pete is already sound asleep  on his bed in the background.

I've created a mess in my dining room by using my sewing table as my new art table. I keep bringing things down that I want to use. I hate to see what it will look like by the time I am ready to move back into the spare bedroom. Smile.

We had some nice sunset colors the other day. I like how the trees create a bit of  texture, even if this is a one dimensional photo.

A few weeks back when it was windy, my weed  collection bin blew down into the woods. It was stuck between 2 spindly trees, and since it's been icy I left it there, figuring I could collect it when the walking became easier. Then on Thursday we had more strong wind, and I noticed my bin blew all the way down the hill into the woods. Later I noticed it had blown even further into the woods. I figured before I lost it for good, I better hike down and collection it.

Here's looking back at the house part way into my rescue mission, and 

here's looking back into the woods where the bin ended up.

And in this next photo, here are my rescued bin and my boots on the deck. I'm happy my bin didn't rip on any trees as it blew. I now placed it securely in the garage so I don't have to rescue it again.

And finally, a view of a couple of my bird feeders and my bee hive. The grey squirrel army has made a mess of the birdseed by knocking a lot onto the ground. I've counted 13 grey squirrels out there at one time. 

However, all the seeds make walking out to retrieve these feeders ( for filling) easier as they give a bit of a grip to the ice. Those seeds have also created lots of food for ground feeders like this flock of mourning doves that comes around frequently.

I also wonder how my bees are doing. I can't fully open the hive because it is still going to get quite cold, and I don't want to ruin their heated space. (The bees are adapted to heat  an area of the hive to about 95 degrees by clustering around the queen and making a substance to seal up any cracks). Yet since it was 60 degrees F (15.5 degrees C) the other day, I just lifted the top just a tiny bit to take a fast peek in and see if there was still food for them. The bee experts say the toughest thing for bees in late winter is that they run out of food. There wasn't enough honey in the hive to feed them all winter, so last fall I put in some homemade sugar paste and also some protein/pollen patties for them to feed on.  My quick 30 second glance told me they still had food,  but the question remains, are there bees in there alive? I guess I'll need to wait another 4-6 weeks before I know that answer.

That's the "wild" excitement in my world right now.

Have a wonderful weekend!

High Style

 Hi everyone. Hope you're week has gone well.  It's Friday and almost the weekend. I hope you have something good on your weekend "agenda". My weekend won't be wild or crazy, but the hubby and I will be doing more de-construction in the spare bedroom. 

Today I am here to share another style page over at Art Journal Journey for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's What Your Style? challenge.

My page was inspired by the quote that I cut out of an Amazon holiday clothing ad magazine that I received (for some reason) in the mail back in November.  I'm happy to have it though because there are lots of "style"words and pictures I can use. That's where the "Dressed to Win" quote comes from.

I'd love to take credit for the background of my page, but I can't. It is one of those art paper you get inside a Somerset Studio magazine. I have a small pile from some old magazines I cleaned out a year or so ago.

I was inspired by the gold on the page. I started by tracing the  silhouette of the woman with a stencil on some white paper. I also traced it on my page with black paint so I wouldn't have to cut out the thin arms. I did change up this woman's head a bit though, as I thought she needed some visible hair.

I cut out the body of my stenciled on paper image. Then I used a scrap of yellow fabric and created the slinky dress she is wearing underneath her cloak. I used a glue stick to attach her cloth dress, then I cut out the body and glued it down to the black silhouette on my page.

To finish her evening look (and we know it's evening as I added the gold moon), I created her cloak out of this sheer scrap of fabric I had. The neck is cinched with the most glamorous of all accessories, a couple of staples. 

I then used some metallic paper trim, some stickers and a few plastic pearl like items to finish off the bottom of the page.  And yes, you can see my style with the slightly crooked words and trim at the bottom.

This lady is definitely dressed to win, but I look at it now and that quote would have been perfect for a sports themed page. Oh well, I didn't think of it earlier. 

I am also going to link up to a new challenge blog for me called River of Creativity. Right now their challenge is anything goes. And I am also linking up to Creative Artiste More Mixed Media challenge #79. They're challenges are always Anything Goes.

That's all for me. Have a great start to your weekend. And thanks for visiting my blog also. 

More of My California Journal

 Hi everyone.

I am back once again with more of my California journal. I mentioned last California journal post how I didn't have as many bits and pieces to make these end of the journal pages, so I had to take a different   approach to create them. I must say I am loving my pages as well as having lots of fun making them, even if they do take some thought how to put them together.

These pages today are from the end of the trip.  At the beginning of the journal I kept pages  more chronological.  With these last pages in my journal, as had an idea, I made that page.

My first page goes back to the ride along the Pacific Coast Highway. We watched this sunset just before we got into Carmel.

That view inspired me to make this next page.

I painted the sun and the orange sky on some plain rice paper. Then I cut and tore that image out, and after gluing it down on a book page, I used some watered down black acrylic paint to tie it into the whole journal page.

My next page  is made with paint and a stencil on a Gelli plate. Since Monterey, where we spent the last day of our trip,  was in the past a huge sardine canning town, I thought these fish on my Gelli  print would make the perfect page. (The words are straight on the page, but my book is so fat I can't lay the pages flat to photograph them.)

We also saw school of sardines at the aquarium too. This is not the best photo, but these fish are my inspiration.

With this next page we're back to Carmel with a few bits and pieces that I did have in my travel stash. I added a lift up tag , some stenciling done with a Sharpie, as well as drawing the border on my page. This is the same style border I had used earlier in the journal for some consistency. 

And then it's back to the Pacific Coast Highway for the next page. While walking around Carmel, I picked up this free magazine with lots of Impressionistic art in it. I cut this image off the back cover. It's beautifully done, and unfortunately I didn't get the name of the artist of painted it to give them the credit they deserve.

I would love to be able to paint like this.

And lastly, here's some pages from the aquarium in Monterey. That was the last attraction we did on our trip, other than driving.

For this first page, I took a tag I had (I didn't make it) as well as the words off a paper bag from the aquarium. I stamped the quote, painted the circles, added the green metallic paper trim and also a small fish bead. I thought the tag worked great as we saw both an octopus and lots of squid.

Then I created a page to remember we needed proof of Covid vaccine to get into the aquarium.

And finally, I had bought a blank greeting card with these cute otters on it while at the aquarium.  Notice the design on them is a map of the area. I picked up his particular card out to cut it up for my book. I liked how it not only had the map, but had the otters. We saw a couple of otters in the aquarium, as well as some wild ones in Monterey Bay.

Can you pick out the otters in this photo? 

I'm getting very close to being done with my journal. I wasn't sure when I made this journal how many pages I would need, so I have a few pages left to complete. I think there will be one more California journal post on my blog too. 

As these pages are examples of my styles, I am linking up to Bleubeard and Elziabeth's "What's Your Style?" challenge at Art Journal Journey.

Thanks so much for visiting.

Wednesday This and That

 Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday to you.

Thanks to you have gave me words of support for the big project going on at my house (the spare bedroom/ art space redo). And yes, I did expect things all over the house (eeks), and I am stressed about it not getting done in a timely manner, just because I know my husband so well. BUT, he did build my screen porch for me and finish it, and he did get the bee area set up for me in a timely manner, so I really shouldn't have any reason to think this won't get done in a few months.  Smile, with a little bit of a worried look on my face.

Today I have some art as well as some food to share with you.

Let me start with another tag for Sandie's challenge at Tag Tuesday. Her theme is King, Queen or Both.

Last week I made a queen tag, so this week you get the king.

This tag didn't go quite as I'd hoped. Unfortunately the images I stamped with light tan ink don't show up really well through my background colors, so you can only really see the dragon and the fleur-de-lis at the  bottom clearly. If you look carefully you can make out a few other images, but there should be another dragon on the tag.  At least our king has his sword to keep the dragon at bay however.

I also have a journal page at Bleubeard and Elizabeth's "What's Your Style?" challenge at Art Journal Journey.

I was back using my Amazon clothing ad book I received in the mail (before the holidays) to make this page. 

Other than  sweaters and oversized flannel shirts which I couldn't find in the booklet,  I made a page about my preferred winter clothing style. As you can see, I have a pretty casual every day style. 

The background is another page pulled from an old magazine, but I did do quite a bit of stitching around the border. The white thread actually shows up fairly well in person, but not so well in the photo. 

And I'll wrap up this post with my rustic asparagus quiche I made the other day. I am linking up to Kathy's Food Wednesday post.

OK, my crust is a little crooked. Smile.  I did make a homemade over store bought frozen crust.

I then steamed some asparagus and lightly cooked some onions until they were translucent. After pre-baking the crust and cooling it, I put my veggies in the bottom of the shell. Then I mixed 3 eggs, a cup of half and half and added a pinch of salt, pepper and nutmeg. Finally I sprinkled shredded cheese (I used Swiss) on the top and baked it in a 325 degree oven for about 40 minutes. (The recipe called for 25-30 minutes, but my oven has more cold spots than hot and I baked it a bit longer to brown the top a bit.)

Oh and I forgot to mention I used some bits of left over crust (after I trimmed it) and hand out the 3 little spears of asparagus just to decorate it.

That's all for me today. We're going to start warming back up after a couple of very cold days, and I'm looking forward to that!

Thanks for visiting.

T Stands for the BIG Project continued

 Hi everyone. I hope everyone had a nice Valentine's Day if you celebrate. I know some people always seem to do dinner or something for this day, and others, like my husband and I, don't really do anything much. We never have, even though we've been a couple for around 40 years now.

Since it is Tuesday it is time for T day again over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog . Today's post is a bit long. Just warning you. Smile.

Last week I mentioned we are redoing one of our spare bedrooms. It's where I keep my art supplies, and where I  spend a lot of time. Here's what's been happening with  my big house project in the past week.

 I did lots sorting (not really cleaning) and  packing up of supplies last week.  Luckily lots of my supplies were already stored in organized bins as you can see in the photo of my mess below.  

Then this past Saturday is what I called Moving Day. First my husband and I moved the Christmas decorations up into the attic, and then  most of my supplies got moved out of my art room. Luckily for my stuff, not so lucky for me, we have an unfinished addition on the side of our house, something my husband decided 22 years ago we needed. We did get a garage  and some great attic storage space out of it, but we have a downstairs room and an upstairs room which have just become storage space.  

(The outside of this addition is finished off and makes my house look a lot larger than we actually live in. My husband decided this was his project, and he was not paying for a contractor to do the project. We did pay people to come and do particular items, like framing, and it was moving along nicely until we could not get an electrician to wire it, so my husband took that on. He got it almost completely wired himself, and then life got in the way. We started putting things out there, and now it needs a big purging of "stuff", especially things my daughter didn't take with her when she moved but that she says can't be thrown away as she wants them when she finally gets into a house. Once the addition gets purged, then we can move forward. I'm guessing one of these days we might finish it off.)

Here's about half of the supplies out in our addition.

Because there is no heat in our addition, some things can't be put out there. I did clean out a lot of the mess in my daughter's old bedroom, but somethings are just going to have to be stored there so they don't freeze. Plus, I refused to pack up a too big stash of paper, (much of it old and back from my scrapbooking days, but still good), so I moved some storage cubes off to the side and put all my paper there.

But before any of this occurred, I realized I wasn't as excited about the project as I should be. Yes it's a lot of work that didn't excite me, but also, I was feeling like I had no place to be creative. It actually made me quite sad one morning, until I realized what I needed to accomplish first was to get a table set up where I could work. When I mentioned this to my my husband he suggested I should pick up my sewing table in the dining room and work there. It's mind over matter, isn't it? That's the first thing I did, and I will say it made all the difference moving forward with this project.

This past Sunday was what I call Demo Day #1. It started with me doing some more packing and moving boxes. If you compare this next photo to the first one in the post, you can see what I spent my morning doing.

It was time to take the sheetrock down, starting with the outside wall of the closet. First we pulled off the old IKEA CD shelves, which fit some big steel ruled Sizzix dies perfectly. Those went out into the addition also.

One side of the closet wall's sheetrock comes down.

Then we're breaking through to the other side, in the actual closet.

Sheetrock's all down. I carried 7 trash bags of the scraps down 2 floors to the basement for next weekend's trip to the dump. Boy those bags were heavy.

Then it was time to pull out the studs.

My husband was having a lot of fun by the way. I think he could take out some of life's frustrations as he demo the wall. Smile. If it hadn't been so close to Superbowl time I think he would have kept working.

 Now there isn't much of that wall left. We do have to still take down the front of the closet, where the door is.  That may be next weekend's project.

This week I can pull some more carpet and pack up some of the other half of my supplies. 

Oh yes, and my T day drink reference.  Sunday night, after packing and studio deconstruction, a shower to clean off the dust and a little Superbowl football. a cup of Strawberry and Black tea is just the ticket.

This is my drink for this week's T day. 

Thanks for getting this far in my post. I hope you have a wonderful T day and week ahead also.

Happy (Almost) Valentine's Day

Hi everyone. Hope everyone is having a great weekend.

 As tomorrow is Valentine's Day, today I have a romantic page that isn't quite  my usual style, even though I've used lots of elements that are my style. I'm not sure all the lace on the edges of this page looks like me. Since it is so much fun to play with different items, so I must say I enjoyed making this page.

I started by using a stenciled 8x11 inch background.  I added some stamped white tissue paper.  I  also stamped this ancient  image (from the long defunct Postmodern Design stamp company) on white paper, colored and fussy cut it. I  stamped the "enough said" quote on white tissue paper and added that. Then I added the mini felt heart stickers at the top, the sticker letters to make the word love, and also a flowered felt sticky trim in white.

The white felted flowers didn't stand out, so I painted them pink, put in some black Sharpie details and added some little foam confetti pieces their centers.

I still had too much space on the top and bottom of the page for my liking, so I trimmed my page back to just below the bottom flowers and just above where the hearts were.

My page now looked too wide and too short.

I decided lace was always very romantic, so I used some wide pink fabric trim along the top and bottom of the page, and I also added a small strip of beige lace too.  To give the wide lace some support as it was just kind of flopping on each end, I mounted the whole thing on a fresh piece of watercolor paper. Now I am happy with it.

I'm linking up not only to Elizabeth's "What's My Style?" challenge at  Art Journal Journey , but I am also joining Jane's "Hearts and Flowers"  at Country View Challenge.  

Elizabeth also mentioned this new challenge on her blog that she found the other day. Thanks for passing it on to the rest of us Elizabeth. It's called River of Creativity and right now their challenge is anything goes. I am also going to link this latest page up to this challenge. 

I hope if you celebrate Valentine's Day you have some romance. It's not a holiday my husband and I really celebrate. Not that I don't enjoy some flowers, but we've just never made a big deal out of the day.

Whether you celebrate or not, Happy Valentine's Day.

Here in New Hampshire we're moving back into some bone chilling cold after a few gorgeous warmer days. Luckily they say later in the week the temperatures will bounce back up again. I love the feel of spring, but it also means slush and mud.

I'm not sure you can see the 2 little rivulets on my road, one on each side,  but you can see the mud.

Freeze, melt, freeze, melt, eventually there will be nothing left to freeze or melt. This view would make some great art texture.

And since  today (the 13th)  is Superbowl Sunday here in the US, if a favorite team of yours is in the game, I hope they do well. It is always fun to watch a good football game, no matter what team is playing, so my hope is that it's not a one sided blow out. Plus I hope for some fun commercials. 

Thanks for visiting my blog also. It is always appreciated.

California Journal

 Hi everyone.  Happy Friday. I hope you've had a nice week.

Today I'm back with more of my California journal. Yes, I am getting close to finishing it. In fact I am ready to be done with it and  to move on. I didn't bring home as many bits and pieces from the latter end of the trip, so making pages actually became harder to do. Not hard in the sense of making the pages, but trying to figure out what I wanted to put on the pages to represent the trip was a challenge.

Today's  pages have to do with the drive up the Pacific Coast Highway-route 1 from Ventura to Carmel. Here's 3 photos (I've shared these before) just to refresh you memory what my pages are referring to. 

One item I have repeating through the journal is circles. In my emptying of my studio closet last week, I cleaned out my little sticker shelf, and  I found a few chipboard stickers that would work well in the journal. You can see them on my page below, as well as an acetate sun I had. Sorry about the glare on the California route 1 sticker.

I put the above page next to this page.

It took me forever to make this page (above). I might have been a bit too ambitious. I was trying to catch how there is a big drop off from the road along this stretch of route 1, and how there are mountains on one side of the road, and how the road gives you some amazing views.  I didn't have a photo from the trip in front of me when I laid this out, so this is more a collage of what I remember of many views, not one actual view.

I used acrylic paint, Gelato crayons, water color paint, stabilo pencils, white ink and a regular pencil.

Drawing the drop off was tricky, as well as making the steep mountain sides have a bit of texture. It works for me though, even if it did slow me down as there were so many steps that needed to dry before I could move forward.

My pages in this next spread  is about driving along this section of the California coast.  The left page is made with lots of torn pieces of some sheets of printed paper. You'll see this technique and style again a few photos down this post, and that next page was actually made before this page. I liked it so much I decided to copy it here.

I stenciled the quote, added a few stickers as well as stamped the month.

I made the writing tag by stamping  a line image a few times on white paper and cutting all the lines out as one piece. Then I hand wrote in my story.

Below I made a pocket to hold the info page I picked up when we stopped to see the elephant seals.

To make the pocket I used a strip of kraft paper, and added a scrap of this photo paper to it. Then I doodled in some lines and added the stickers. I stamped bits of the arrows  and added the dots.

And lastly, here's my other page made with torn pieces of printed paper.  I added the acetate hummingbird (found while cleaning out the studio closet) because  I had watched an Anna's Hummingbird while walking in Carmel. Hummingbirds and flowers in November was such a treat.

I can't say my pages all flow because their similar, but since these pages are a few examples of my various styles, I am linking up to Elizabeth's "What Your Style?" challenge at Art Journal Journey.

Have a great start to your weekend!