Happiness is....

Hi everybody!

I'm happy to say that the nice weather is still with us, and that spring is springing all around us. I am making the best of it as long as it lasts. Hope you are all having some good weather too.

I made something different for Paint Party Friday this week. I have based my characters on those of the Street Artist Thierry Noir, who was one of the artists back in the 1980s who painted the awful wall dividing Berlin. The wall has long since fallen,  but parts of it have been preserved as the 'East Side Gallery' and is now a national monument.  He will be having an exhibition of his works at the Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch soon, so if any of you live nearby you might be lucky enough to get there.

The East Side Gallery / Berlin

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

I painted 2 creatures like his, and  have made mine face each other. And they are smiling, and carrying a flower - the artists has painted his 'people' carrying this sort of flowers often. I think I am wanting to show that meeting someone, smiling, perhaps giving a flower or a small present, is a way of giving and experiencing a moment of happiness. I have painted mine onto a sheet of paper with the brick pattern, which has been in my stash for ages. I just distressed the wall a bit. I used portfolio oil pastels, painted over with water to stop the colours smudging. The quote is from the Dalai Lama, 'Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from our own actions.'

I am also linking to AJJ - moments of happiness and Moo Mania and More - Twosome
and to Simon Monday Blog - anything goes

And finally a few pictures from today's walk:

Here you can see the pathway I showed yesterday taken from the other direction, and to the left, what used to be the old moat, and is now a part of the park.

Have a great day, take care, and thanks a lot for coming by!

Twosome

Hi everybody!

Just a short post today, as I need to get ready for yet another appt at the doc's.

But the weather is still lovely, so I will be able to enjoy my walk there and back.

At Moo Mania and More the theme is 'Twosome'. I have used one of the photos I made last week to make a card. I printed the photo of the twosome onto matte photo paper and matted it with scraps of black and blue mirri-card, and some hand-painted paper in greens and blues. Those geese are always in double pack, and really seem to practise synchronised movement!

 And a few more impressions from my walk yesterday;

This rock used to be a fountain, I am hoping they will get it working again:

  And I would love to know what this is is! An old ice-cellar perhaps? Or the entry to an underground shelter left over from the war? Or? What are your ideas?

 The lovley lane from the park to the Rhine:

That's all for today, take care of yourselves, have fun and thanks a lot for coming by.

Another double Tuesday

Hi everybody!

We had another beautiful spring day here, so I was once again able to walk along the Rhine and round about our little town. The nights are still quite cold, but it soon warms up once the sun comes out.

Our theme at Tag Tuesday this week is school days. As someone who spent many years at school, as a student and later as a teacher, I still have a soft spot for school themes, although I am happy that I don't have to teach any more.

This tryptich tag is one I made some time back, but as it fits the theme so well, I decided to post it again.

The second tag has been made from a piece of my precious Graphics 45 paper, which is very difficult to cut into! I mounted it onto some black card from an old calendar. I replaced the picture the little girl is holding with a little blackboard, after fussy cutting round her litte fingers so it looks like she is holding it. I added the second blackboard paper-clip instead of a band or ribbon. The images on the tag remind me of my own schooldays.

At TIOT our them for the next 2 weeks is to use some beading. I made a tag using seed beads and home made paper beads. The tag has been stamped, and then I put some glue on some of the background spots and sprinkled the seed beads onto them. I used some brown lace between the top and bottom layers of the tags, which were fixed together with an eyelet. The flower is from Prima, the wooden violin from Crafty Emblies and the lovely fibres from Sandy! The home made beads were made from scraps of embossed metallic paper.

 

Today a lot of the meadows along the Rhine were covered with dandelion 'fairy-clocks', a lovely sight. As kids we used to enjoy blowing the seeds away.

 This path along the top of Barbarossa Wall always reminds me of Lantern Waste in Narnia. Perhaps that's one reason why I so much love to walk along it - another link to my childhood.

That's all for this time!

Take care, have a good day, and thanks a lot for coming by!

Memories, red bugs and blue flowers

Hi everybody!

Another lovely spring day is coming to an end, and I am really thankful for these warm 

and sunny days, which enable me to spend a lot of time out of doors. Hope those of you in the UK enjoyed your Mothering Sunday!

I have made another piece for my memory wall, using my fave corrugated cardboard and a photo of my Mum taken back in 1918. The photo has been printed onto canvas, and the edges fringed.  The cardboard was partly peeled, painted with emulsion paint and then distressed with vintage photo ink, which I embossed with Frantage vintage gold EP. I used some lace and a scrap of paper stamped with a script stamp (LaBlanche) as matting, and edged it with Vintage photo again.  The flower and leaves are from Prima, and I tied it all together with some lovely fibres. 'Dream' has been stamped and embossed. I am linking to Ink on my Fingers, Challenge 301, browns.

I saw these bugs having a party or something on a garden fence when I went down the road this morning. I looked it up and it's called a firebug (Pyrrhocoris apterus), and apparantly feeds on mallows and limes. Glad they weren't on our fence! ( we haven't got a fence!)

The flowers at Schloss Kalkum are prettier than the bugs!

Have a great day you all, take care, and thanks a lot for coming by!

Heavy Metal and Wild Life

Hi everybody!
It was anther wonderful spring day here, with blue skies and mild temperatures, so I spent a lot of time outside. Once again, the H*******K lost to the weather - I am sure rainy days will come!

The challenge at Artful Times is Heavy Metal.  Here I have repurposed a 6x6" canvas which I didn't like anymore. First I painted it with gold metallic, but didn't like it, so decided to make it rusty heavy metal. The canvas had been textured with tissue paper and structure paste. The head is made in a mould, the totem on the left is a ball pen I got some years back, and the heart has been made from metal foil embossed with an embossing plate from LaBlanche, and then fussy cut. After fixing the objects with the hot glue gun I painted them with Vivacolor 3-D rust paint, and sprinkled them with distress EP from TH. After heating, I went over it again with some more colour, and then added som vintage gold frantage on some parts as I thought it was getting too dark. By the way, if you are embossing metal with your heat gun, don't touch it till it cools off - ouch! I wanted this to look like some rusty old metal objects with lots of patina. I like experimenting!

After walking along the Rhine I went to visit the ducks and geese at Schloss Kalkum. They were happy to see me , well, at least happy to see the bread and salad leaves I took with me.

The goslings are growing, and I saw there are 8, not 7 as I first thought. Their parents keep them well under control, and visitors too!

Hope you are having a good weekend whatever you are up to.

Take care, and thanks a lot for coming by.

Words are magic

Hi everybody!

Hope the snow is slowly disappearing for those of you who have been in the 'ice-age'; here we are having wonderful spring weather, which I am enjoying.

This journal page has been made for the Vintage Journey challenge number 2, where the theme is words.

I straightaway thought of this quote, spoken in 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows' by Professor Dumbledore, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, 

and remedying it.” 

Words are really something very special. I wrote a lot of words about things that are worrying me just now, and then painted over them with acrylics, added some fairy dust to help the magic, and then collaged the rest. There is also a lot of background stamping, which is hard to see here, but that's part of the magic - making things invisible!

I collaged some torn paper, pieces of old letters from the 1930s, and some images. The alphas are from Tim Holtz, as is the Tissue Tape. The rest of the quote was computer generated. Of course, Mr Umbrella Man sneaked onto the page when nobody was looking. I painted his shadow using the die-cut negative, and gave him plenty of words. I had fun making this one, and it turned out as I wanted it to, which often doesn't happen, so the magic seems to have worked!

I am also linking to AJJ 'Fantasy Scene' and to Paint Party Friday and to
Paper Saturdays

There is lots of text in the background, too.

The owl seems to be another connection to Hogwarts.

A close up of the background to show the fairy dust.

Today this wonderful tree surprised me on my walk, the blossoms were not open yesterday. Spring has its own magic!

I showed a photo of these stairs near the old mill by the Rhine some time back, and wondered that they seemed to lead to nowhere. Now they have been freed from the grass and plants growing over them, and I learned from the local paper that there used to be some bathing huts in the Rhine back in the 19th century. The nurses from the Florence Nightingale Hospital here   (F.N. did her training here) used to escort the sick people to their baths, and at the top of the stairs was a waiting room, where they could get ready for their dip. They were brought from there to the huts to bathe in Victorian propriety. The stairs are very ancient, and were made with door-steps and window ledges from the castle ruins! I hope the powers-that-be manage to conserve them.

And last but not least, a tree that I noticed by the Rhine today, with fungi growing out of the stem.

If you are still awake after all that, I thank you for your patience and wish you a great day!

Take care, and thanks for coming by.