Let Freedom Ring

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope everyone has a joyful time celebrating the nation's birthday. I participated in a challenge titled Let Freedom Ring. The object was to create an art piece using some kind of bird cage, so, of course, I went on a De Paul crawl searching for something that I could alter to use as a birdcage. I found this flower arranging frog and put it up on a shelf to stare at me for a few weeks. (this is often how I come up with ideas) It was brass colored and I immediately painted it white.

                                                   

After having it stare at me for almost a month, I decided it was going to have a beachy theme. After all, I'm at the beach. So, I took a trip to the beach to look for small pieces of driftwood to poke into the "birdcage" as a kind of nest.

I found some great beach themed stickers from K& Company  to add to the centerpiece, along with a few seashells from my collection.

The banner is some crepe ribbon that I misted with Memories Mists, blueberry and pink lemonade flavors.

And, finally I needed a crab in there somewhere so I created my own sticker with a stamp and dug through my treasure jar of jewelry finds and found this tiny little flag (I think it's an earring), wired up a flag pole and put it in the crab's claw.

Enjoy the holiday!

Herb Garden ala Repurposed Basket Rack

Saw an idea on Pinterest the other day to plant herbs in mason jars and hang them up. So we are on a DePaul crawl the other day and found this old shower/laundry wire basket rack for about $3 and thought we could use it for an herb garden for the deck. First thing, we took it apart and spray painted black.

Then we decided to split into 2 short racks so we'd be able to move them around the deck to get maximum sun. It rains alot here, ya know!You can also see that I lined the bottoms of each basket with a piece of pond liner so they wouldn't just drain on to the lower basket or lose all their dirt.

As I planted each basket I lined them with soaked sphagnum moss to help with water and dirt retention.

This one has strawberries on the bottom and rosemary and thyme in the middle basket. Mmmmm......I love the smell of rosemary.

The top of this one got italian parsley and the second one has lettuce seeds in the bottom, a different rosemary and sage in the middle basket and will get a ginger mint and one basil plant in the top.

We also decided that the middle baskets were too low so we moved them up a notch and can move them farther if they need it as the summer progresses.

Here they are completed and ready for sunshine. Can hardly wait to start using them. Hope you enjoyed my little gardening tut!

Egils!

We spent the holiday weekend at Egils, an SCA event hosted by the barony of Adiantum held near Eugene. We had soooooo much fun. It really is nice to escape to the middle ages once in awhile.

John and Doug joined us for the week end. Their first event and I think they really enjoyed it.

John and Will all garbed up and heading off to watch some of the festivities. Check out that new sword John is sporting.

Here they are walking along merchant's row. All we needed were some horse drawn wagons and it really would have been authentic due to some serious rain the week before the event. And, where did Will get that gorgeous hair from anyway?

Will, fighting in the first rapier scenario of the day, Capture the Documents. We're all in the background to the right watching the fight.

A nice parry and thrust.

A good kill!

Will received this awesome shield as an award at the final court. The other rapier fighters voted him one of the mvp's of the tournament. Nice job, Will!

Admiring the new shield and enjoying our last campfire.

Squirrel Girls Challenge--Colorful Silhouettes

Wildflowers

I really love this technique from Technique Junkies. It really lends itself well to a variety of stamps too. I used Club Scrap's Ivory Elegance swirl stamp (my favorite background stamp) and then I got these new Inkadinkadoo clearstamps to go with CS's new Wildflowers kit for May. I used Wild Honey, Mustard Seed, Victorian Velvet, Peeled Paint and Broken China Distress inks and it's mounted on some K&Co paper. The little butterfly is a Tim Holtz um.

Head on over to Nancy's blog to check out some of the other entries by the Squirrel Girls.

Weekly Chronicles # 19--Mother's Day

Still having my troubles posting pics in the gallery over at Club Scrap so going to link up from here again. This week is in honour of our mothers and I found this sweet slide of my mom and I, very soon after I arrived. I used Club Scrap's Gratitude and Arts & Crafts kits for the layout.

Happy Mother's Day to all the wonderful mom's out there. And a special Happy Mother's Day to my own mom. Thank you for all you do, mom. I love you!!!!!!!

Weekly Chronicles Week 18

I'm participating in the Weekly Chronicles Challenge over at Club Scrap and normally I post it in the gallery over there, but I'm having computer "issues" so I'm trying the linky thing this week, till I figure it out.

This week's theme is in honor of National Scrapbooking Day and so I took some pics of the process I'm going through to scan all of my grandpa's slides into the computer and created a layout based on that. The scans and layouts are all going to be a surprise for my family so I haven't been sharing them here, but this one it's ok to do that.

I used elements from 3 Club Scrap kits for it: Concrete Jungle, Full Circle and Tahiti.

Digital Play with Munsel Lake Pictures

I took those same pictures that I posted yesterday and played around with them in PSE 8 to create a couple of digital layouts.

The first one of the sunrise, I posterized the picture to enhance the sunrise and really like the way that turned out. The page is created with Club Scrap's Aurora Borealis digital kit.

I took the 3 osprey pictures and used a CS template from their Concrete Jungle kit to make them look like old deckle edge photos and then my PSE play was trying to create the look of those glass sea floats that you find along the beach. This one used papers and images from CS Come Sail Away kit.