More Favorite Photos from Central NY

After the heavy rains, Chittenango Falls in Chittenango were running pretty fast. There was so much mist on the falls that it created a rainbow like Niagara Falls:

The lake in Cazenovia was also heavy with rain water, the low end was overflowing. A seagull in flight over the lake:

Also near Cazenovia, a pastoral color laden scene:

After picking apples at an orchard in Nelson, I shot these last two photos. Wild apples growing along the road:

and the church steeple of the Methodist church nestled in the fall colors:

Jackie's Blog Giveaway

Over at Stitchworks Jackie had a giveaway a short time ago and I would love to show the handstitched piece she sent that I had won. It came all the way from England and I am thrilled! It is a gorgeous piece with hand stitching, lace, and goodies featuring some fabric with pounded flowers. I love the muted colors and the hand work. Beautiful! Thank you, Jackie.

A close up of some of the yummy hand work:

An even better photo of the flower pounded fabric:

As American as...

.....Apple Pie? The last pie I made Dave suggested that I should have taken a pic of it before we dug in, so today I did just that. This is from the last of the apples (at MY house anyway) Cheri and I picked. There were enough to make 2 batches of filling so I am attempting to freeze the filling to be made into pies later on. This one's still warm so I will have to wait a bit to try it, but mmmmmmmmm......sure smells good!

Nuts and Leaves

Cheri and I have been busy lately gleaning any apples we can find along with pears, black walnuts, and chestnuts. We've made two huge batches of apple butter in the past week. I have many pears from two different trees that I will attempt to turn into pear butter when more have ripened. Hopefully there will be enough in the next few days so I can take some pear butter with me when I visit my mother and sister in upstate NY next weekend. We shall see! Even though I grew up in a rural area, I don't remember any chestnut trees so was amused to see their bristly pods (I think they look like mini hedgehogs!):

I have been chronicling the changing of the leaves on our property here. This will be the first full year living here so it's rather interesting. On a breezy day you can hear the MANY acorns (we have 3 types of oak trees) dropping through the branches and bouncing off the ground. It's surprising that we have hardly any squirrels eating these nuts since there are so many. I guess it's easier to eat from the neighbors' bird feeders! Just a few of the trees:

Journal Pages

For the past week I have been elbow-deep in gesso and paint. I've been working on prepping pages for a small journal (6X8). I think it's a Stampin' Up journal that I purchased several years ago when I was selling the product, but I can' be certain. I had already made a cover with an inset embossed metal design that I painted with alcohol inks so I just needed to work on the pages. I added more pages (a snap when it is wire bound) to make it nice and thick, I ended up with 24 pages (48 sides). It took a few days and two heat guns to prep each side with gesso and even longer to paint each one. I did end up with plenty of paper towels to use later on, though! I used several techniques to paint and several different types of paint (acrylic, fluid acrylic, Lumiere, heavy body Golden acrylic, spray paint, watercolor crayons and pencils), several stencils and masks, some tape, and a sponge roller. I wanted to show a couple of pages in progress (although I painted the pages in the book, I dismantled the pages to satisfy my urge to sew on them.......probably backwards, but HEY, it's my journal! lol). April just recently sent me a goody package from AZ and the transparency frames were sitting on my table so I sewed a couple of the flowers to these pages.

The page below shows one of my new favorite techniques, I wrapped rubber bands around a sponge roller, ran it through the paint and then onto the page. To me it looks like snake skin! The base layer for the top page was brushed on acrylic paint; the bottom page was painted with my fingers.

Sew far Sew good! Now, back to the studio to sew some more stuff on!

Whaddyaknow?

Wow! I actually won another give-away! The stars have been aligned right lately. A big thank you shout out to Jackie over at Stitchworks for the beautifully handworked give away. Go check her blog out...........NOW! Thanks, Jackie!

Etsy Update

I added a couple of Do-It-Yourself Card Kits to my Etsy store today, both Halloween (pictured to the right in my Etsy listings) and Autumn shown below. Each kit contains enough supplies to create 6 unique cards. Check it out!