• Blog - Creativity

    T Tuesday: tea and coffee edition

    November 12, 2018 - By 

    Hello and welcome to another edition of T Stands for Tuesday.

    Over the past week or so I’ve been pulling together papers from my stash to begin the process of creating my December Daily journal.

    I also dug out a set of book covers I’d been saving for just the right project. I wish that I hadn’t discarded the spine…although it may have been in bad shape. Oh well…I’ll find a way to make it work for me.

    Originally I was thinking that I’d use crisp bright colors for my journal, however I discovered that the vast majority of my papers were one sided prints. This is fine in some ways but left A LOT of blank white pages. Yes, I know…journal…but I like having color and pattern to break things up a bit. Besides…plain white pages are intimidating.

    I decided while cleaning the coffee pot (because I can’t seem to do just one thing at a time lately) that it would be a good time to do a bit of tea dyeing of some paper. I really wanted to tone down that white and give a more cohesive look to the journal.

    After soaking the papers in the tea solution I baked them in the oven. Yep…Mr. G came in from the garage…asked me what I was doing. “I’m baking paper.” He shook his head and told me that he was going to pretend he didn’t hear me. I chuckled to myself thinking about the fact that I’d be ironing them too.

    I wasn’t happy with the level of aging from just the tea staining. I added some instant coffee to the mix which definitely did the trick. My papers where a lovely shade of brown…perfectly aged.

    Would you like to know the most important thing I learned through this process? Caffeine absorbs through the skin. I spent about an hour with my hands in and out of the tea/coffee water. I didn’t think a thing about it until I realized about 100 pages into the book I was reading in bed that I wasn’t a bit tired.

    Not….one….tiny….bit.

    Typically I can get through about 10 pages before my eyes start to slam shut and I read the same paragraph over and over. Nope not Saturday night. I read the entire book. Seriously…the whole dang book. Finally I got up and took some Benadryl to make me sleepy…even though I knew I’d have the dreaded brain fog the next morning.

    So let this be a public service announcement to all of you…wear water proof gloves of some sort!!

    Sticking with my caffeine induced post…Mr. G bought me some coffee beer. 

    It was pretty good. Just one though. Definitely not one I could drink more than one in an evening…or even in a week. That 4 pack will last a while.

    T stands for Tuesday
    What are you doing today??
  • Blog - Creativity

    T Tuesday: full ♡ edition

    October 29, 2018 - By 

    This past weekend was one that filled my heart. J came home on Wednesday night for the first time in 2.5 months. It was really great to have him at home again. He left again Sunday afternoon but Thanksgiving really isn’t that far away. 

    Then Mini-me and I shared a little treat together before heading off to the mall. We were both in search of shoes. While we were there I asked her if she wanted to go to Barnes & Noble to see if her magazine was on the shelf.

    It sure was! Her look of glee was priceless! She had already gotten her complementary copy but seeing it on the shelf makes it even more real. Here she is taking a photo to send to her friends. It’s so funny that the girl pictured along with Mini-me’s words happens to look A LOT like her from behind. Crazy coincidence since the publishers didn’t know what she looked like. 

    The magazine was featured as one of the Trending magazines on the newsstand. How cool is that!?! I’m so proud of her.

    I’m still plugging away at my new journal. I decided to gut the rest of these books since they really aren’t good for anything but fodder for other projects. 

    After removing the text block I go through and remove any images for future use. It seems the older the copy, the more images I like. 

    This book was just too pretty for me to gut yet. The cover makes me think of mid-century bark cloth. So pretty.

    I’m thinking about putting together a December Daily journal. Over the last few years I’ve noticed some posts and social media chatter about them but figured it wasn’t my thing. Now I’m thinking about giving it a whirl. Now that I’ve figured out the multi-picture prints on one print..(I’ll have to do a tutorial)…I think that I might be able to keep up with both words and photos throughout the season.

    Have you ever played along with December Daily?

    T stands for Tuesday
  • Blog

    T Tuesday: Twin Ports edition

    October 22, 2018 - By 

    Last week was a 3 day workweek for me. Schools in MN have a long MEA (Minnesota Education Assocation) weekend off of school. Most families use this 4 day weekend to get away from it all before winter hits in full force. We used part of our weekend to visit J at college for parent weekend.

    Even though we’ve been to the Twin Ports area loads of times, this time I decided to play tourist a little more since we were exploring more than just Canal Park In Duluth, MN.

    I loved the old signs on this building in Superior, WI.

    Some of you know this but others don’t….I HATE BRIDGES. No seriously…its a problem. Near phobia status. And there are two big ones that we use to cross back and forth from MN to WI. 

    I honestly kept myself busy snapping photos with my photo so I wouldn’t have to think too hard about the fact that we were on a super long bridge high above the water or land depending on what part of the bridges. ICK!!!! Gives me goose bumps.

    After we had crossed the dreaded bridge for the third time we stopped and had a drink and appetizers at a local bar. I had a darn good Bloody Mary with beer chaser. The chaser is called a snit around here.

    It was a nice weekend although it was cold and windy. But not as windy as it had been about 10 days before that. A crazy storm whipped up and there were gale force winds hitting the harbor.

    This is an old photo for reference of the flooded walkway.

    Check out this video…

    Isn’t that crazy!! It’s weather like that that the Edmund Fitzgerald (made famous by Gordon Lightfoot in his song Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald) went down in.  Speaking of crazy…J and his buddies decided it would be really fun to go down to Canal Park since they heard it was flooding. The wind and waves weren’t quite as bad but the canal was still flooded at the time. The invincible 18 yr olds went and stood in the knee deep flooded canal walkway while the snow came down sideways. Thankfully all was fine and I didn’t see any of these crazy videos until morning.  Grey hairs people….grey.

    I did a bunch of journal writing about this event. I saw the most amazing photo on FB of a wave crashing against the North Pier lighthouse by Charles Howard Smith.

    I’ve created a few more pages that are more personal. In addition I got my title page done.

    I’ll add then end date when I feel I’m done. I’ve started adding smaller photos to my journal for visuals as well. I’ve started resizing several images to fit on a standard photo print. It’s cheaper to print and better quality than printer ink on paper in my opinion.

    See how I’m able to get many small images on a 4×6 print. This way I can add a little image without taking up an entire page in the journal.

    I’ll be doing more of these type for sure. I’m loving how this is evolving for me.

    T stands for Tuesday
    Work and raking on are the agenda for me…
    What are you doing today?