T Stands for Tuesday & Lots of Photos (Long Post)

  Hi Everyone,
      Here in the States we are winding down our 3 day weekend with Memorial Day. Of course with Missouri being mostly open many and I mean many drove to the lakes.
    We were originally forecast to have a wash out with lots of rain and t storms but where I am we were mostly missed.
   So the two of us had "entertainment" looking out over the lake since late Thursday. There was also allot of fireworks going off too every night. I could hear them loud and clear but couldn't see most of them.
   I even saw on facebook where one of the bars on the lake made the national news-big signs saying to self distance but of course no one was doing that.

    Tuesday is upon us already where we share a drink related photo in our post, and link up with friends at Bleubeard and Elizabeth. (link in my sidebar)

    Saturday mid day was probably the busiest on the lake with boats everywhere. and I just don't understand these ocean boats being on the Lake of the Ozarks, so many this long weekend. I was making our dinner at the time and didn't grab my camera to video all the craziness.  I did get a couple videos that shows about a 1/4 of the number of boats that were here on Saturday.

  Lots of these ocean boats-all sizes here on a lake-Larry says people showing off their wealth and toys.

Lots and lots of these personal water craft "toys"   We call them motorcycles on water

This first video shows all sorts of boats, all different sizes. Towards the end of the video you will also see a very long and large boat that is used to shuttle people back and forth to the bars that are on the lake
   I also was showing with all the activity the water was splashing up over the rocks, and so much debris has drifted in around our dock.

   I made us a New York Cheesecake for the weekend-using Lakanto powdered sweetener. I also made a thin crust with gluten free graham crackers and almond meal, butter, Lakanto sweetener  This was my best bake ever sooo creamy and delicious
     If anyone would like the link to the recipe-go here  I did not bake this in a water bath per recipe, and I did add the crust. I baked at 300 degrees f for about 90 minutes. The other changes were two packages of full fat cream cheese and one package of the 1/3 less fat cream cheese, lower fat sour cream, and I used Lakanto brand sweetener instead of Swerve-both brands are really good I just prefer Lakanto now.
    If you are looking for healthy recipes-no sugar etc this site is really awesome and makes more sense to me then some of the other keto recipes I have seen.

This is our favorite jam now, comes from France not overly sweet, always thick with fruits I love it

 Off in the distance is a pirate ship-used for tourists. This little bird flew in while I was taking a photo If you enlarge the photo you  may see it in the distance.

A better look

Another ocean boat

Another painting with Valerie's photo. I wanted to do this again, and I will be painting from this image again, as this time I was learning how to use the colored pencils wet. You can see the black kinda got away from me. I do like it though

A drink reference-I found a box of the Strongbow hard cider that I had picked up over a year ago.Perfect for the weekend. I prefer this brand over Angry Orchard hard cider as it is allot lighter and less filling.  I also like that these cans are smaller in size too.

  More flowers blooming, my mints and lavender looking good after all the rains last week, and my tomato plants I grew from seed need to get planted soon.

The lavender had a set back from staying in the pot too long but looking good now-the center really died back on me. I am not going to harvest any of the blooms this time, to give the plant a boost

I am thinking of digging up some grass below and in front of where the lavender and mints are to plant some of these tomatoes One is Burpee big girl, and the other is a large heirloom tomato also for slicing.

 
This afternoon I poured this over ice-I really like it no fake sweeteners in it just Ozark spring water that's been carbonated with a splash of natural flavorings

Happy T everyone

Memorial Day

An Entry for Mia's 3rd Blogaversary Candy

 I needed a little art time this morning so I colored in one of Mia's mandala's I chose her #11 mandala. Click on link in my sidebar for more information.

  This is another one of those "out of my comfort zone" projects. I don't do well with coloring (I should play with this again) and not this form of subject matter.

  However, I was pleased with the results. I added this page to my chocolate spiral journal book that I have been using for paintings and larger pieces.

I used these pencils, gel pens, crayola's pens that were very fluid

This chocolate pecan pie looked soooo delicious I thought we would celebrate Mia's bloganersary with it.

T Stands for Tuesday & Iris's Blooming, New Painting

  Happy T everyone,
  You are most welcome to join us with our hostess Bleubeard and Elizabeth for T  just show a drink related photo in your post.

  If you caught my post yesterday, you saw I was playing with colored pencils. I also found in my stash a small handful of watercolor pencils-I am finding those very fun to work with.  So I needed more colors, the ones in my stash are USA made (they looked old so didn't know if still in business)  I searched online and found them at Blick and still USA made so I am happy about that. (no more China products for me if I have a choice)

 



  So I am thrilled to find these I bought their 24 pencil set which was on sale which covered the cost of the taxes and shipping so pleased with that. They were less expensive at Blick then on Amazon

  I had asked Valerie if I could use one of her photos as a reference for a painting. Thank you so much Valerie. This was a castle wall with flowers growing in the bricks. I couldn't wait til I had more colors so I just went for it with the few pencils I had.  My creative muse has arrived-stress mostly gone (finally)
  I forgot again to cut off the inch of mixed media paper first to fit in my journal, but I was able to cut that off after I painted this and it still looks great. I love it, but will paint this again once I get the new colors. (I only had black, blue, green, and a yellow)
  I will submit this piece for Mia's flower theme over at AJJ too

all photos will enlarge just click on them

I am really happy with this piece. I don't know if I captured that this is a brick wall or not though?-I plan to look for a you tube video before I try this again.

   Over the weekend I finished up with the roving I was working on and started with the blue roving-I had bought these as Yellowstone Park inspired colors and want to weave some sort of garment with them.

  You can see my Sunday afternoon mango margarita there on the coffee table too.

Isn't this blue pretty-I bought it to reflect the prismatic springs there in Yellowstone

Here is another photo of my margarita

We had rain off and on over the weekend and today (Monday) too. Lots of bird activity to watch-more baby ducks, herons, the pair of eagles flew in today too.

The water was really choppy when we spotted this family-the waves were tossing them about

  I grabbed the camera this afternoon and took a few photos of the pretty iris's that are blooming here now. We didn't see most of these last year as we were not living here full time yet.

and the peonies are blooming now too
    This is a road we started making so Larry can drive his Snapper down the hill to the lake for fishing-instead of walking down-this area is really steep

I also picked up one of the books that Erika shared. I love reading books with  recipes and this one intrigued me as it is located in an area pretty secluded and I think was part of Scotland or still is-I just started reading it. Thanks Erika



I will close with a very happy dandelion-I love dandelions and with all the rain they are still growing here

Husband is progressing well-he is pushing himself allot-still very painful (he does Not take pain medicine) but he is out of the wheel chair, and uses one crutch or his cane for balance now.

Happy T everyone

Another Flower Page for AJJ

   Happy Sunday everyone,
  The weather here has been well not good for those of us with allergies. The air is very heavy with humidity which holds all the pollen we have now. It's been raining but not severe and not as much as predicted, but the lake water has been rising. It is usually at full by Memorial Day-influenced with the rain amounts and  how much water is let out at Bagnell Dam.
   So we are in need of getting back to outdoor projects but not today. The coming week is suppose be sunshine and warm. So I am hoping to be back on painting the outdoor furniture. We ended up ordering the paint I need online as no one here locally has it. That should come in this week.

  Our electricity went out early this morning. The problem when that happens to us now is everything is fiber-the phone and the internet-so everything goes down. Even the cell phone is set to work off the wifi to save minutes. So I had to drive out of the area to call. I could tell this whole side of the lake was down. They had it back up and running in a couple hours.
  I miss my big gas stove in these situations because I could still cook and bake-as this was a commercial and old stove that didn't use electric to turn on the gas-why they did that I don't know.

  Anyways, I headed to my craft room. I wanted to try doing something for Mia's theme Flowers over at AJJ  with colored pencils. Last year when Crayola's site had awesome sales I bought a few things including a couple different types of their colored pencils. I also had picked up a package at Yellowstone that were colored pencils but had no wood in them.
  I tried these and another set I had to see if they would work with water. I hadn't known about watercolor pencils at the time.  The one set did work a little bit.
 
   I also grabbed a couple stamps and colored them in.
When I went to add the piece to my smaller journal I forgot to cut it to size so it was too wide-sigh-so I added it to my painting journal.
  I grabbed my big vintage box of old crayons to run the page over with a crayon-and wow I totally forgot that one side was full of colored pencils that I had picked up cheap at garage sales. I went through them all and found a handful of them marked watercolor-so I am anxious to try these and see how they work. I think I may like these. What a very fun find!!

When I was watching those free art videos last month, on a mixed media video, the artist was showing these water brushes-you fill them up with water and then use them over your watercolor pencils-I thought this was really cool-she used these on her trips. I found a package with several different shapes of brushes.

On the left my colored pencil find-awesome

and this is the handful that were marked watercolor

This was my inspiration page.  I always thought it was not good to copy or use a photo for inspiration.Another  one of the artist's videos I watched who is a professional painter in Canada advised to have a reference-to train your mind to see more, as your brain was too repetitious  So I don't feel guilty now using a reference

The stamps I used was the bird, the spider, and the little bunch of flowers. The rest of the page and the daffodils are with the pencils

All photos will enlarge just click on them

I will be adding this to Art Journal Journey for Mia's theme Flowers

Happy Sunday

Flowers and a Lovely Lady

 Good morning everyone,
   I made it back into my craft room this morning. I wanted to make a mixed media page in my journal for flowers and in the process of going through papers, I found an envelope filled with 1800's photos. I had picked those up at a garage sale years ago before retirement when we were living in northern Illinois. The photos were glued down to very heavy card stock.

  I found a pretty lady with flowers in her hat and so I went from there.

    I gessoed the page first then glued down green tissue paper with glitter, settled for these flowers and tore the edges added the vintage photo-I cut it down, and stamped a couple butterflies.
   This is a simple entry but I hope you like it.

This was on the bottom of the photo so added it to the top page

I will be sharing at Art Journal Journey for the theme flowers, and at Try it on Tuesday for the theme lovely ladies.

T Stands for Tuesday & Photos at the Lake

  Another week is upon us, which brings us to our T day with hostess Bleubeard and Elizabeth. You are welcome to join us, just share a photo with a drink.

  No art to share again.
     Larry is getting better, out of the wheel chair and using crutches now to get around in the house. He is still in allot of pain where the heavy tool box hit him.
  We have physical therapy coming now-they do allot of exercises. and we have a nurse coming too once a week-don't know if that is necessary but probably comes with the in home care.

    This morning early I went grocery shopping, and wanted to check out a new to me store-Sav a Lot. I mostly wanted to check out their meats as I had inquired and it is all USA sourced. However when I got there-No beef at all, no pork, I did buy a nice package of chicken tenderloins, their homemade sausage, and bacon-that is made in Kentucky. When I got home I sent them an email if they were all USA or owned by China (which I refuse to buy from any more-especially foods) and he came back "We are USA" So I was pleased.

  Off to Wal Mart and Wow very little meat there as well. We don't eat allot of meat any more, so a little goes a long way for us. Mostly a large salad and a little meat of some sort, some side veggies.  They only had 4 packages of lean hamburger one pound size so I bought two. They had a big package of pork steaks which I like to throw in the crock pot-always very tender. I was surprised hardly any meat in their cases.  I did find beautiful fresh fruits-so happy about that-pineapple, huge strawberries, blueberries, red raspberries.

  I did drive to the woods house one day last week-to meet friends that we gave our commercial freezer to, and I dug up several herbs-peppermint, spearmint, apple, ginger mints. I still need to dig up my madder plants (dye plant) and we are going to take apart the two raised beds that Larry had made me-and put them down in front of that rock wall where the herb plants are. I will replant my madder in one of those and use the other one for small veggie plants.
    I do have an animal of some sort that insists on walking in my copper pot at night-he broke down one of the apple mint plants-Larry thinks it could be a ground hog. nay need to set up a trap and relocate him/her.

   We did have a lovely full moon a few days ago

We have been seeing baby ducks the last few days-so sweet

A few minutes ago we saw a pair of Canada geese with their 4 little ones swim by.
   We are really enjoying the views of the lake.

For my drink reference I have been brewing up my decaf coffee in my pour over-which I really love the flavor of.

    I hope to be more relaxed this week to get involved in some art projects, and I still have my closet curtain to sew up.

Happy T everyone, hope this finds you all well and safe.