Happy Mail and Journal Page

     I wasn't going to write up a second post in the same day, but I am so happy with my newest craft tools I wanted to share. I love quality tools and handmade tools make me happy and feel connected.

    My weaving loom is 30 inch wide maximum This shawl is around 27 inches wide. I have never purchased longer stick shuttles to weave this wider width, so I checked out Etsy first for hand crafted ones. I found a site that I fell in love with and I am guessing they are Amish. They were making beautiful stick shuttles in various lengths-perfect! He said for a better price to shop at his online site as Etsy had raised their selling fees.  Going to their site they were $5.00 less for each shuttle than at their Etsy shop. I need to look into Etsy's selling fees as I was planning on listing some things for sale-perhaps not.

   Anyways I knew I would be super happy with these shuttles so I grabbed the camera and took a few photos while opening up the box. These shuttles are sooooo smooth, smoother than the ones I have been using that were not handmade. I love the name of their company too

  It is a good thing I had tracking on this delivery as I knew it was coming today and was watching out for the mail as they beep me when I have a package-so they don't have to walk down the hill and then down the steps. I knew the box would be too long for the mailbox. So when I got the email notice it had been delivered in my box-I went right up to retrieve it-totally surprised they would do this as the box was sticking out a good ten inches and it is really windy here still.

They offered allot of different wood choices,  so I asked for shuttles that had pretty grain in them and were of darker woods-the top one is walnut and the bottom one is cherry.   They harvest the wood from fallen trees on their property or near by  She also sent me a very sweet thank you note.

You can see this will be much nicer now to grab the shuttle from the other end while weaving

And when I saw the theme for Art Journey Journal for April chosen by our dear friend Eileen, whom recently did not recover from her heart surgery, I knew what I wanted to do.  The theme is: inspired by

  When ever I would post a photo of the bright sun over the lake-Eileen would always say "looks like diamonds in the water".  I am not that good at painting, so didn't even want to try and do a painting at the moment, so I grabbed a magazine photo in my stash, used sparkle gel pens and Crayola metallic pens to create this page

I took allot of photos and these were the best. Allot of glare came off the page from the metallic pens, but I think you can see that I drew diamonds on top of the water

I enjoyed making this page and honoring Eileen, she offered allot of  inspiration for my journal art.  

   I don't think this page though is good enough quality to submit to AJJ but I did enjoy creating it and wanted to share it here. Thank you to Elizabeth so just added  my page to AJJ's theme this month.

If you missed it-my last post is cast iron Easter dinner recipes.

Enjoy your weekend and holiday-if celebrating