The100DayProject - Week 12

 Not sure what kind of bird this is but I loved the colors.

While this may appear to be a pineapple of sorts, it was meant to be a plant in a pot on a table.

This was inspired by a photo I had taken some years ago of a row of sunflowers that lined the entrance road to a farm stand we visited.

This one is inspired by one of my bowling ball creations.  It's not as decorated as the actual one in our garden, but it's in better shape.  The real one is going to get a touch up soon.  I'll be sharing.

And this is a bell jar terrarium just in case it wasn't apparent.

April Birthdays

April is birthday heavy for us.   Since it's been such a lovely Spring I went with a lot of floral inspiration for the last couple of birthdays.

 

This one features a turnabout stamp for the back panel.  I liked it enough to send it but there was a lesson learned about color distribution.  With the turnabout stamp you stamp the same image 4 times rotating the stamp 90 degrees after changing the color.  I stamped the two greens and then the two pinks and I probably should have alternated them.   

And here is a "slimline" card that fits perfectly into a business size envelope for mailing.  I used some of my favorite shades of blue for the flowers.  There are four pieces to each of those flower heads.  This is where a good tweezer comes in handy!

This last one wasn't for a birthday, but rather a thank you for a friend who met me for coffee for my birthday last month.  I came across this stamp in my stash while looking for something else and thought it would be perfect.  

 

We have a few more birthdays coming up in May including our youngest grandson who will be turning 2 very soon.  We had a great visit with them at the condo this weekend.  He is very much into playing "cars" lining them up and watching the wheels.  And he had his first visit to the beach.  It was a little cooler and windy by the time we got there but he loved walking in the sand and would have walked right into the water if we let him.  

The100DayProject - Week 11

There's quite a wide range of idea sources for this group from Pixabay to some of my own photos to what I see outside my window.

I now realize that the hole in the tag looks like it could be the sun or the moon in this one though that was not planned.

This one was based on a photo that I took of a woman sitting on the edge of the bulkhead by the Barnegat Lighthouse.  However, she was holding a black umbrella over her.  I just wanted to give her a little more color.

And these are my favorite trees blooming in our backyard with the daffodils that HWNSNBP has naturalized on the side of the hill.  IRL there are evergreens behind and on the sides of these trees but I wanted to showcase them and not clutter up the background.

I've been trying to add a little variety to the backgrounds of some of these and not just the straight lines.  I think it is working out well.  

Happy Administrative Assistant's Day

This year I won't be the beneficiary of any Administrative Assistant accolades but I always encouraged my daughter who works in a school to remember her office staff on this day.  This year she made up little Baskets of Sunshine for the three admins in her school.  She collected little items - all mainly yellow in color - to include in these baskets.  And she asked me to make cards to go with them.  

I used a sunburst die for the yellow rays and found some dsp with blue and yellow flowers - her school colors - for the panel under the rays.  The flowers on top of the rays are also die cuts.  

I gave her a white panel on the inside to write her message.

Happy Administrative Assistant's Day to all my former co-workers.

Jingle Belles - Go Planet...It's Your Earth Day

Don't our hostesses come up with the coolest post titles!  This is a busy birthday week for us and in addition to that I wanted to send out some Earth Day wishes to some friends and came up with what I thought was a great idea just before I went to bed the other night.  Unfortunately, I couldn't remember what it was when I got up the next morning.  Hopefully it will come back to me and I will recycle it for next year.  

Poor memory and all I still managed to put together a second card for the Jingle Belles Earth Day challenge.  

So what did I add to that red card base?  The patterned paper is another save from a security envelope. Red ones don't come very often. The burlap ribbon was all that was leftover from some forgotten project.  The bear was actually a gift tag, one of many I made one year for family members that I saved from the trash.  That itself was recycled from a brown paper bag when I made them.  The wreath base is a punched donut shape from a green paint chip to which I added snippets of green ribbons from the scrap bag.  The red bow on the wreath was actually the ribbon that was used as the hanger for the bear tag.  I just snipped it off the top and tied it into a bow.  

I remember growing up we didn't have much but my parents were big on books and two of the books that I loved were "The Make It Book" and "The Do It" book which showed you simple creations that you could make from everyday things around the house with very little extra needed.  And one summer our town offered an art course that was being taught by a couple of my uncle's high school friends.  I don't remember exactly the project that I worked on, but there was a prize for it - a book called "How to Make Something From Nothing".  I think those books were what influenced me to repurpose, recycle, and reuse long before Earth Day began (yes, I'm that old).

Okay, time to head over to the Jingle Belles to leave some love for the other cardmakers.  Once again, you can join me by clicking here.

Jingle Belles - Peace on Earth Day

Once again the middle of April and Earth Day brings us to one of my favorite Jingle Belle challenges where we use materials that are recycled, reused or up-cycled.  It's a time when I can take a look through all those snippets and scraps that I have been saving to see what I can repurpose into a Christmas card or two.  

This first card will feature four items that I found that seemed to blend together - a paint chip, a piece of the inside of a security envelope, a bow from a bag of specialty candy, and a graphic image from the packaging of a decorative flag that we purchased.

I trimmed down the paint chip to fit the card front (Dapper Denim cs used for that) and placed the graphic over the writing on the paint chip.  The security envelope swatch had already been torn so I left it that way.  I just had to straighten up the sides a little.  Added the bow and there you have it.  The bow is a tad bit bulky so it will probably need extra postage.  

Please take a minute to click here to see all the other creations on the Jingle Belle blog.  

Spring Notes

I made a few Spring notecards with a new to me (but old in availability) die.  I saw some cards on Pinterest using this die and immediately wanted to add it to my stash but it was first marketed in 2014 so I had to look around for it online and was lucky to find it on Ebay.  (There is a bigger version that I'm  contemplating purchasing also.) The stamped image is an older Unity stamp that I used a portion of for the center of the die cut.  I also dipped into some older colored cardstock in an effort to start using what has been collecting dust in my paper stash.  I only have a few sheets left of the Mint Macaron and Certainly Celery used on this first card.  Petal Pink and Cameo Coral were used on the others.  

The stamped image was colored with Copic Ciao markers.

I absolutely love the spring wildflowers that have taken over parts of our yard in recent years.  Some of it was planned and some was spontaneous.  It always makes me smile when I find them en masse or in in unexpected places.

Siberian Squills have spread this year like wild fire.  This is a portion of our "fake brook" and it makes me so happy to see the blue Squill water.

These are Marsh Marigolds and unfortunately they are very invasive and I will be trying to pull some of them out this year.

More Squills and a the white flower is called "Bloodroot" because the sap from the root is red.  These move around the yard as they seed themselves but there aren't many of them to be found.

Up closer to the Marsh Marigold and some Spring Beauty.

Spring Beauty in pale, pale pink.

Confederate Violets.

Yellow Violet.

More Confederates.

The primroses aren't wildflowers but they do come back each Spring.  HWNSNBP will buy them at Home Depot for the kitchen windowsill when they come out in late winter and we always try to transplant them to the garden when they are done blooming inside.  We have had some luck with them reviving in the outdoors which is not something you can count on when flowers are originally started in a greenhouse situation. 

I have forgotten the name of this pink flowering plant but I love that it has made a home in this bed.

The Chionodoxa's are scattered amongst the Squills.

  

I haven't seen a Puschkinia in this bed for years.  I even had to make sure that that was the name of it.  It might be confused with a Wood Hyacinth but it is much smaller.

This Anemone or Grecian Windflower was a surprise also where it decided to bloom.  There are a couple that have come up in the walkway and I'm glad that I decided to leave those clumps of leaves when I did some early weeding.

This flower is a mystery to me also.  I don't remember planting it and don't know it's name either but I was happy to find it in this bed.  I actually didn't even see it until I was weeding some the other evening.

The naturalized Daffodils are blooming on the hill and the Redbud trees are just about ready to pop.  I hope to have some pictures of them together soon.

We have daffodils planted in the garden to use for cutting purposes and HWNSNBP brought some in a couple of nights ago.  I say night because we often do yardwork at the end of the day when it is cooler and usually work until the sun goes down.  Anyway, he brought in a beautiful bundle of Daffodils in a large mason jar and put them on the kitchen counter.  Later on, when I was doing the dishes I looked over at them and there was the biggest spider I've every seen on one of the daffodils.  I don't do spiders.  I didn't even want to take a picture of it.  He got a tissue to catch it and I told him that he'd better not miss.  Thankfully he didn't, but I am so glad that we saw it sooner than later when it might have found another cozier place to hang out in.  Needless to say, I reminded him that he has to shake out and inspect those flowers before they come into the house!

And one more note in this long post.  We have been looking all over for a particular Lavendar variety called Dilly Dilly which we had success with in one of our borders last year.  The other two varieties that we had in that border didn't fair well and we wanted to replace them with the one that did.  Of course the nursery that we originally got them from didn't have them again this year (we've been back there three times checking) so it's been a bit of a wild goose chase until yesterday.  Even though it was raining off and on, HWNSNBP suggested that we take a ride to the Great Swamp Nursery.  On the way there I finally saw an eagle in the wild.  It was in a field with the carcass of what looked like a deer on the side of the backroad we were taking and HWNSNBP even turned around so I could try to take a picture of it, if only with my phone.  I usually take my camera with me when we go that way but because it was raining I had decided not to.  Well, by the time we turned around to get close again, it had flown off, or so we thought because turning back around to go in the original direction I saw it again a little bit of a distance away but at that point we were again past it and he wouldn't turn around again.  So no picture, but the other good news is that a last peek at the labels of the Lavendar plants amongst the many that they had at the GS before we gave up rewarded us with the last few Dilly Dilly plants that they had.  Success on a rainy day!

The100DayProject - Week 10

Some Easter and Spring-themed tags from the past week.

This was inspired by a photo I saw on FB by Han Cao of Washington, DC.

Avocado squirrels are a real thing - as seen on the internet.