A Nice Day for a Walk

 Hi everyone. Happy Thursday. This is a scheduled post as today I'm riding with my hubby  part way up the coast of Maine  to Belfast. He needs to be  there for a business meeting this morning. You might possibly remember I drove up with him to Belfast back in April. That time we went on a Friday and spent the night. This time we're only making this a day trip so we're off bright and early  and will be getting home later tonight. I probably won't get to commenting on people's blogs  until tomorrow.

The other day I went for a lovely walk down by the shore after a doctor's appointment. I hope you enjoy the views.

There were a couple of other trails, but I decided to continue on the paved trail.

Have a great day.

A Good Day to Go Riding

Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday.

Yesterday my page was about a horse ride, and today my journal page is about another type of riding. Have you ever ridden or do you ride a motorcycle?

I've been on a motorcycle a couple of times. It's fun, although I think I am getting too cautious to ride on one now. My husband has a bike. He's had it for years, and he goes out for little rides. I should get myself a helmet and ride with him, but like I already wrote, I'm not sure I really feel safe on one. When I was young I didn't think about how badly injured one could get if you crashed, and I don't think I want to go through that body trauma now, should or when something happens.

But it's still fun to make a page about motorcycles.

I had this sheet of 8x11 paper that was black and white checked with a motorcycle on the bottom left corner. There were also some motorcycles I could cut out from other paper in this pad, so that's where I headed with this page. 

The woman is an old B Line Design stamp and the way she is standing works next to the bike, but I don't think she will be riding it in that outfit though. Of course one never knows. 

I added the 6x6 sheet of printed map paper and cut out the Statue of Liberty from another sheet of paper. The upper bike looks a bit like it is floating, but 3 bikes looked better than the 2 partial ones, so I added it anyhow.  I finished off the page by inking the edges in read and adding some stickers to make my quote.

I am linking this page up to Chris' Where in the World challenge at Art Journal Journey . We'd love to have you join us this month.

And here's the recipe  for the Freezer Pickles I mentioned yesterday.

This recipe calls for 8 cups of cucumbers which is roughly 2.5 pounds or 1.1 kg. If you're making a smaller batch. you can half the amount of ingredients, or even roughly quarter them. If you use a lesser weight of cucumbers and make the recipe amount of liquid without splitting it, the pickles will still work you'll just have more pickle juice. 

-3 tablespoons of salt

-1.5 cups of sugar 

-1.5 cups cider vinegar or white vinegar  (355 ml): cider vinegar gives  a more flavorful juicer

-1 tablespoon of pickling spices  OR 1 tablespoon of dill (fresh is better)-but not both

1-Slice your cucumbers thin and discard both ends. Put the cucumbers in a large bowl and mix them with the salt. Let the cucumbers sit 2-3 hours and then drain out the excess water. If you want less salt in your finished pickle, you can then rinse the cucumbers after you drain the water.

2- Mix the remaining ingredients in another bowl. Pour  this juice into the cucumbers and let them sit for 8-10 hours or overnight. It's better if you can refrigerate them.

3- Put the cucumbers and the liquid into freezer containers or bags and then freeze for 2-3 weeks. Thaw the finished pickles in the refrigerator for 8-10 hours before serving. 

And just a note, you can substitute zucchini for the cucumbers.

That's all for me. Tootle-loo!

A Horse Ride

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

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our Sing a Song challenge that ran for the last 2 weeks. And thank you Steph for being our host for that challenge. It was fun seeing  all the entries to this musical themed challenge.

For the next 2 weeks our  Try It On Tuesday challenge is

LETS GO OUTSIDE

Think about being outside   What do you see when you’re there?  What do you like to do outside?

A horse ride is something that definitely can happen outside. I've only ever gone on one horse ride in my life. It was back in 2013 on a school trip to Costa Rica. I was given the tallest horse, and I'm pretty short. The horse's name was Morro, and he liked to stop and eat banana tree leaves along the way. 

I loved this horseback ride, and so I was excited to make a horseback riding page for this TIOT challenge.

I attached a piece of painted scrap deli paper onto some watercolor paper. I then continued the paint out to the edges of the white paper.  I also used a stencil to create a bit of texture on the brown. The trees are stamped, the girl on her horse is from an Art By Marlene booklet (as are the birdhouses and flowers). The sun is painted and stamped, and finally I doodled some little birds all over the page.

Our Let's Go Outside challenge runs for the next 2 weeks. I hope you're inspired and join us. 

I am also linking up this page to Chris's Where in the World challenge at Art Journal Journey. Although all types of art are accepted at   Try It On Tuesday, please remember only art journaling pages are accepted at Art Journal Journey.

Thanks for stopping by my blog.

T Stands for a Quiet Week

 Hi everyone. Happy T day to you. 

Last week I had a very quiet week, and  it was fantastic. Well it did rain quite a bit, but when it rained it made some good inside play time. I was able to start making some art for some upcoming challenges. ❤ And other than 1 day at work (I was rained out of the other), it was great not having to be any place for a particular time.

It didn't rain one morning so I went out and did a beehive check. I really need to check the bees on a weekend when my husband is home so he can take photos. My frames are very heavy with honey, so it's hard for me to hold them up with one hand and take a photo using my phone with the other.  (And being short means I am working with my hands being held at face level, which makes it even tougher.) But for those of you who love seeing the bees, here's a couple of photos that came out OK, but all they show is lots of bees on the frame.

I also made a video of the bees using my phone, but for some reason Blogger isn't letting me access it to post it here, even if I can access it when I go into my photos through Google. Hmm. Perhaps I am saving it in the wrong place. Does anyone know how to access it on blogger? 

I also picked my first cucumber the other day. It grew a little too big to eat because of all the giant seeds compared to flesh. I didn't want to let it go to waste however, so I made a batch of freezer pickles with it.

These are not finished pickles because freezer pickles have to sit in the freezer for a couple of weeks to finish processing. They're really easy to make. First you salt the slices a bit in a bowl and then after 2-3 hours you drain off the excess water. Add your vinegar and sugar as well as your spices, stir them up, and then put them in a container you can freeze. Pop them into the freezer, let them sit for 2-3 weeks and you get your pickles. They aren't fermented, but they're still tasty. And did you know if you have a glut of zucchine you also do the same thing and turn them into pickles? 

 If anyone is interested in the recipe let me know in your comments, and I'll post it.

For my T Day ticket  this week let me share this take out fajita salad the hubby brought home for dinner Friday night. I got mine with steak, and since the hubby doesn't eat his guacamole, I had a double serving. That's always a good thing because I love guacamole.

 For my drink to link up to   Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog  I made us each a margarita. And I'll admit, I was too lazy to get out the step stool to climb up to the top shelf to get the margarita glasses so I just made them in some regular drinking glasses. 

These were some of the small adventures from my quiet week.

This week ahead I have a lot on my agenda. It's either feast or famine I think. 😀

Have a great T day and week ahead. 

I Didn't Like the Green

 Hi everyone. I hope you're having a wonderful weekend. After a grey wet week, it's cooled off and feels like September.  It definitely makes fantastic sleeping weather, but a sunny day would be really nice right now. ❤

Today I have a page to share for Chris' Where In The World challenge at Art Journal Journey  It's another page from my Iceland journal that I'm working on.

I made this page using some blue  and also some grid paper. I added a postcard I picked up in Iceland, as well as the little paper envelope that a hotel passkey came in. I cut out the map of Iceland from a brochure, and also used some of the words from another travel brochure on my page. I stamped the directional compass, drew in the arrows and added the little plastic gemstone dots on the map and on other places around my page. The little welcome elf was cut out of a playing card, and I used a few sticker letters on my page also. 

I really like the little elf though. He makes me smile so I am going to link this page up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles.

The little plastic dots show approximate places of where our hotels were. This time I also wrote them down since I found it very hard to remember place names in the Icelandic language.

You might also wonder why my title is I Didn't Like the Green. Here's the page as I originally finished it.

The map of Iceland in the brochure was green. It works, so I glued it down and finished it off. I also finished my page. Only I kept going back to my page because there was something that was bugging me about it.

It took me several days to realize it was the green map. OK, that was an easy fix. I pulled off the hotel marker dots, and then I used a red paint pen to color in the map. Once that was done, I finished off the map as it had been finished before. 

Now I like my page. I'm sure many of you will think the green was just fine and you would have left it. Who worries over such small details?

I guess that's me. 😌

And before I sign off, here's another page from my Iceland journal. I saved the wrappers on some candy I tried while traveling. That's one of the fun things about traveling, not only trying new foods but also checking out the junk food. Grin.  Not only was this type of candy a new treat for me, but it seemed to be  very popular  as I saw it in many stores.

I also wish I had a few bags of it at home as a special treat. I did bring home a bag, but that is  now sadly long gone. 

That's all from me today. I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend. 

.

A Morning Walk in Iceland

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday. 

Today I want to share some photos from Iceland for Nicole's  Friday Face Off  and also for Gillena's Friday Lunch Break ..

Today's photos take us to Lake Myvatn. We are in northeast Iceland, just off the Ring Road and not  at the shore. In this first photo you can see the view from our hotel room. I took this first photo at about 5 AM since I was up and wide awake. 

You can see the lake and some pseudo-craters in the background. There were also some  great walking trails across from the parking lot. 

The traveling and the time change  had caught up with my husband the night before.  I was more awake and had been thinking of going out walking on these trails that previous evening.  However, the translation of Myvatn is midge lake, and since there was no wind to blow the bugs away, I made due with the evening view from my window.  (I could tell there were a lot of midges because of the number that were on the window of our hotel room.)

 At 5 that morning there was a good breeze blowing which would keep the midges at bay, so it seemed like a good time to explore the pseudo-craters.  Since I didn't know there were these great short trails across the street when I'd booked the hotel,  they were an unexpected treat. 

Here's some photos and faces from that walk.

a silhouette of an arctic tern

part of my hubby and some "locals" who were snoozing on the trail

the sky was constantly changing and created some great views

I know you might not want to see the back end of a sheep,😃 but they finally decided to move as we walked closer. Smile.

I'm not sure what type of birds these 2 are. I think tufted ducks.  I can't seem to find a good match on the internet.  David, if you read this post perhaps you could let me know.

There were a whole lot of sheep along the trail. In Iceland sheep are free-ranging from spring until early fall.

From the top of one of the pseudo-craters

More faces for Friday Face Off.

I must say the little lambs were very cute.

More sky and landscape views, including the addition of a crow to one of the photos

It was a great morning walk. We were back just in time for the breakfast buffet to begin.  And we were ready to eat at that point too. 😀

That's all for me today. I'll be back with more photos some other post. Have a great start to your weekend, and thanks for stopping by my blog. 

Two Days at the Shore Back in January

 Hi everyone. 

Today I have 2 pages to share for Chris' Where in the World challenge over at Art Journal Journey.  These pages go back to winter when I made them in my Florida journal. This journal was one I put together during February and March after the hubby and I came home for a week's trip to various parts of Florida in late January.

I haven't posted these pages yet however, so they should work for Art Journal Journey.

This first page has to do with a state park we visited outside of St. Petersburg. We had spent the first part of the day at the Salvador Dali Museum and also at the Sunken Gardens within the city of St. Petersburg. Both my husband and I wanted some out of the city time, and since we still had a few hours until it would be dark, we drove out to this park on the outskirts of the city.  

I sprayed some water on my page to wet it, and then I inked it. The background reminds me of the sky with some clouds and blue.

I die cut the big leaf and stamped the sunglasses. I added in the beach scene.

Fort Desoto State Park is a huge, beautiful oceanside park, and it has some fantastic walking trails. We walked this one along the shore and through the remains of the old fort that had been located here. That fort was what the park has been named after. 

My second spread is also from this same journal. This spread has to do with 2 museums we visited on the East Coast of Florida, about an hour south of the Kennedy Space Center.  One museum was the Mel Fisher Treasure Museum, and the other was the McLarty Treasure Museum.

All of the McLarty Museum and some of the Mel Fisher Museum had to do with the 1715 Fleet. The 1715 Fleet  was a group of 12 Spanish ships that were bringing (to Spain) a lot of looted gold and other treasures from  South America. Havanna (Cuba) was the biggest city in the New World, and it was also the location where all the precious materials arrived after being shipped out of the South American  colonies. From Havana, these commodities would be loaded onto ships to be taken  back to Spain. Some of those fleets sailed up along the coast of Florida.

These 12 ships in the 1715 Fleet were sailing to Spain. One ship's captain chose to sail further offshore, and his ship was able to make the entire journey. The other 11 ships stayed together and then ran into a hurricane when they reached the San Sebastian area of Florida. The ships sunk directly off the shore from where the MacLarty Museum is located. 

This journal page is made mostly with some old stickers. On the right I did stamp the water and the rays at the top. I also used a gold paper ship and a "fake" Spanish Pieces of Eight. These coins were called Pieces of Eight because to make change you would just cut the coin into sections. I have a little bag of these fake coins that I bought at the Mel Fisher Museum in Key West when we visited there several years ago. I thought I needed to add one because of all the treasure I saw in both museums, including many solid silver pieces of eight.

This photo (above)  is the spot where the 11 ships wrecked and where the survivors came ashore. And below, is yours truly in front of  a sign outside the MacLarty Museum.

That's all for me today. I hope your Thursday (or whatever day you are reading this) goes well!