Poor neglected blog

August since I've last posted?  What is wrong with me?  lol

I just thought I'd post a picture of a lovely cedar waxwing that was helping himself to some berries on my mountain ash tree last week.  He and about 200 of his closest friends thought it would be a perfect breakfast.  They are delightful little birds, very pretty but somewhat shy so I had to wait until they had decided I was not going to hurt them. 

Christmas, Thanksgiving and Punches!

More swap cards.  The first one is a paper pieced card featuring the SU! XL bird punch.  The petals are actually wing pieces for the bird.  The branches are from the same punch and the center flowers are from a fiskars set.  I sponged the center of the flowers- or the points of the wings, depending on your perspective - to highlight them and add depth before assembling the flowers.

The next two are from a Bundle of Cards swap.  I did a Christmas card for the first group and a Thanksgiving card for the second.  The image of the Christmas card is from Lovely as a Tree from SU!  To me it is the "go to" set that can be used for any and all occasions.  I wanted to catch the feel of a winter's night with the moon bleaching out all the color down to shadows and the glitter of the light off the snow. 

The final card is also from the bundle swap, for Thanksgiving.  The Autumn set was the first set from SU! I ever got...and I still love it.  It makes me think of a pile of fall leaves that you just HAVE to jump in.  :)

Swaps

I am participating in lots of swaps on Split Coast Stampers.  It's fun to create using a theme or common element and see the variety of things that other people can do.  I am working to get all of the swaps that I have committed to finished as soon as I can so I can concentrate on the projects that I need to do for a gathering that Ina and I are going to in October in Rochester NY. 

The first set of cards are for a My Favorite Things swap.  We had to use images and/or products from MFT.  The Christmas card used a Who's That Girl image from the "Santa Baby" set and two Pure Innocence images.  I am going to have to get some more of the PIs...they are totally adorable!

The next set of cards are for a monochrome swap.  The challenge was to create a card or cards using one color.  I found that the blue one was easy, I based it on a card that I made at Margaret's open house a couple of weeks ago.  I discovered that working with green and yellow is a bit more of a challenge, but I think I did alright.  :)  I don't normally work with yellow, so I considered it an additional challenge to my creativity.

The final image is for a ribbon flower swap.  The cards had to have some sort of ribbon flower on them somewhere.  I was quite pleased with my results. I love the Petals A Plenty folder and was so thrilled when I won it as a door prize at the Buffalo gathering I went to with Ina in the spring.

Let me know what you all think!

Sunflowers

I have wanted to find a field of sunflowers to photograph for a long time.  I usually just miss them when they are in bloom.  Late last week John came home and said that there was a field on highway 6 that I had to check out.  It was a beautiful sunny day today and the flowers seemed to glitter in the sun.  We were not the only ones that had decided to snap some pictures...cars were coming and going constantly with people searching for that perfect shot. 

I took quite a number of shots, some better than others, but I was very pleased with the results.  It is impossible not to smile when you see a field of blooming sunflowers extending for acres into the distance.

Birthday for a friend

Tomorrow is my dear friend Ina's birthday.  I took an hour or so out of making swap cards to make this card for her.  I am planning on using the corner bookmark card layout as a shoebox project for an upcoming gathering I am going to in October.  This was a good time to try it out and see how it went. 

I used Staples 110 vanilla card stock as the base.  The DP is by K & Company, from the Sera Sera stack.  I matted it with Soft Sky and Close to Cocoa.  Ina's favorite colors are blues, especially turquoise, so I added some ribbon in a no tie bow and finished things off with some stems and felt flowers by Jolee's Boutique.  I scalloped the edge of the book mark with the SU! scalloped edge punch.  I used the same DP on the bottom of the book mark and matted triangles of Close to Cocoa and Soft sky.  I finished it off with some more felt flowers, and thought the red was a nice pop of color and didn't look too out of place because there was some red/pink showing in the DP.

Here's a close up of the bookmark.  I think she'll like it.  :)

Friends

We went to Wasaga Beach today with our good friends Chris and Margaret, their girls, our kids and a friend.  The weather was hot, but not too hot, until just after lunch when a fast moving storm came in over the lake, complete with thunder and as it came in closer, lightning.

We figured we'd just wait it out and carry on and then the skies opened up and delivered a deluge of almost biblical proportions.  High winds and large pea sized hail completed the picture.  We waited it out in the cars, after gathering assorted items and getting totally soaked. 

We had a blast!  The kids were in the water for quite some time but wisely came in when the thunder started rolling.  Fortunately they were well out of the water when the lightning started. 

On the way up we drove through Amaranth and we saw the huge wind farm there.  I realise that there is a lot of opposition to wind turbines but driving past them we thought they were pretty cool.  The sweeping blades of the turbines were almost hypnotic and we quite enjoyed watching them.  I snagged a couple of pictures from the car on the way up, we weren't able to stop on the way back, but will certainly have to go back sometime to explore them more closely. 

Summer

Despite the recent heat wave and it's accompanying issues, I love summer.  I love the smells and sounds, the colors of the many flowers and the opportunities to travel. 

We have a bumper crop of black berries out around the barns this year.  I've been getting a generous handful morning and night for the past several days.  Their sweet, juicy flavor is the epitome of summer, to me. 

Can't you just taste them?  :)

Oh the busy little bee...

We have an ancient lilac tree out front of our house.  In addition to providing shelter for nesting chickadees in the spring, the butterflies love the blossoms.  I was trying to catch a good shot of them one morning this spring and was lucky enough to catch this fellow going about his business...or should that be buzziness?  :)

This actually didn't look as bad as I thought it did...

My dear friend (and Stampin Up! demo extraordinaire), Margaret has been encouraging (?pushing?) me for a while to set up a blog and start posting. I went back to this one that I had set up last year and had a good look at it and realised it didn't look quite as bad as I thought it did! I guess sometimes I surprise myself. lol