A zentangle of sorts and apple chips!

This post was actually writen yesterday (Thursday), but Blogger refused to upload my pics yesterday, and it took F-O-R-E-V-E-R this morning...but finally...here it is...
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I sat with my grandson as he tried some paintbrushes out today that my daughter had found in her room, called Paintastics! There are about 6 colored prefilled brushes, and then there is a white double ended ( a brush on each end), and each end, when painted over a color, changes that color to another color...so if you start with orange, you can change the orange to pink with one end of the white brush, and yellow with the other. Good for kids to play with.
While he was doing that, I was thinking about not much at all, just doodling and came up with this tree in the financial journal...I thought if I blew this up real big, it would be neat art for a securities company! This page mentions Janis, Morgan Stanley and a few others! I wrote "Grow With Us" at the top to reflect my idea after I had done it...LOL...funny what your mind comes up with!

And here are a few shots of my dried apples! They are surprisingly good! Some did not dry as much as they should, most were just right, and some dried a lot and came out kinda crispy like apple chips. Those are intrguing to my brain!

I like the dried and over dried ones the most (the darker they got, the crunchier they are)...and such fun! I have my bag of munchies right now, here...crunching away as I blog! I can't wait to try some of your suggestions also! Gonna spend some time tonight looking up some ideas for the dehydrator.

The next project I want to try is turning shorts into skirts! I wear a lot of shorts down here in the heat, as I imagine a lot of you do as well. I saw where a blogger had done this and I think I would like to try...maybe as a sort of second life for the shorts...and something I can then wear to work...I am so darn cheap the idea really appeals to me...but I hate sewing...so it takes everyting I've got to pull out the sewing machine. Ohhhhh...groan, bitch, moan. It will happen...and probably today. I will try to show pics!

Happy Cactus/Succulent Monday!

A semi-decent pic of the Sansevieria in my backyard. This variety has at least a bit of texture colorwise, and I find it more attractive than the other plain ones. This is my photo for Cactus Monday. I wish I had a drawing or painting to go with it, but I ran out of time, sadly.

Here is page 7 of my Financial Dream Journal (including the cover). It is being recycled from a Financials Market Report, to an art journal. It has 160 pages, and I am on page 7. I am enjoying covering up the financial information, and turning it into whatever else I wish. The pic below has a hand drawn wording and ribbon, which is colored with watercolor pencils. Then I cut a palm tree trunk out of a magazine and made cuts up the page to thread the tree up and through the page.

Then I added more magazine flowers, a road with a car, a house and a cat. It has just enough going on that I could call it DONE. I covered it with a coat of Modge Podge to seal everything together, as I have done with all the previous pages.
This is just something I do for fun and to relax. The process is what I love.

This afternoon, after a long hard rain for most of the afternoon, we took the grandkids for a walk around the neighborhood, and with all of the rain, snails were everywhere. My daughter was in heaven. She collected about 30 and came home and put them in a bug house. The grands enjoyed seeing them. She released them after a few hours, and after I had gotten a couple of pics (they were very hard to photograph for some reason). My daughter has loved snails since around 2nd grade...and she still does, at age 20!

The newest lip rankings!

This page in the financial journal held the numbers to the LIPPER RANKINGS! I painted out the page lightly and left just the unaudited
LIP ratings!!! It's a party in the woods as the animals celebrate the newest ratings! They all agree, unanimously, that the #1 lip is perfect! There is some debate on the others though, but in general, they feel the rankings turned out about as they should have! All the woods are atwitter!

These pages just form themselves, what can I say! :) Page # 5 in the Financial Dream Journal, done this morning with grandkids running about!

Have a happy Sunday everyone!

Not much new...

When Friday at work ended, I was kinda tired from getting up so early all week, but I took an hour nap before we went out to eat...just down the road, to our fav Mexican place. Thank God it is so close, as it has become our favorite type of food, it seems. I had a vegetarian dish of spinach enchiladas and black beans and rice on the side. The beans were too salty, so I did not eat them, and I only had a few bites of the rice since it was so carbilicious!!! Oh, I made a new word...LOL.

Remember those bromeliads I had found along the road and picked up for free? I stuck them up under the hibiscus on the lower branches along the ground, and they are happy! Hubby and I went over to Lowes this evening to find a new one to tuck in, and they didn't have the type I wanted. I need to research them because there are so many types, but I want a smaller type but with the firmer leaf (not the leafy leaf, if you know what I am talking about)! I believe they are called Neoregelias...you can see some HERE. I love all the pink ones!!!

Today my friend and I went to a housewarming for a gal at work who I have worked with for the last 20 years, off and on. She just got her first house, and I am so happy for her! She had been registered at Target, and had picked all different colors of towels and hand towels, and a multicolored pack of 12 washcloths. My friend and I had gone to Target and tried to peice together all the towels on her list, and it semed like none of it went together...well, when we saw the multipack of washcloths all in bright cheery colors, we knew we had to match them, so we got a matching colored towel and hand towel for each color of the washcloths. They were beautiful. We decided to pack them in a laundry basket, and they had a black one which really showcased all of the bright and white colors so nicely. We threw a card on top with a curly ribbon bow in the same bright colors of the towels, and I thought it was just a wonderful gift, and just such a pretty presentation!

This evening we picked up the grandkids, and have been playing, and of course, Donovan and I had to do a little painting in our otherwise trash financial books, ...the one above is the one I painted, and then daughter came along and really took it up a notch by adding the bugs! Suddenly it was complete! Thanks Carolyn!!!

"Financial dream journal" pages 2 and 3 done!

Well, I couldn't go to sleep until I stayed up to complete my new journal's page 2. The country page!!! It was fun...I painted the background page a sort of tan color, with two shades of orange circles all around...then added my magazine cut outs.

It features a lovely home, an antique clock, a sweet old boy horse, strawberries vining across the page, and best of all, some aloes in full bloom!!!
So fun and relaxing...a real "nobody cares how it turns out" kind of carefree attitude had by ME! Yeah! When I finally finished it around 12:30am, I knew my time was up, and I simply had to close my eyes for my 5am wake up call!!! :)

Tonight I did the adjoining page, which stated out to be a "city" page, but it sort of drifted. You see "Paradise" under the moon, stars, skies, and a sweeping tree, under the sun and clear skies, with love unfolding below.

Another fun time had by ME! I might be able to get to bed by 10:30pm tonight...all I have left is to clean up the kitchen, finish the laundry, lay out my clothes for tomorow, and hit the hay!
Sleep tight everyone! xoxo- Julie

An art adventure after work today!!!

Yesterday, when I checked the mail, I had recieved two of these thin papered books (literally) from investment places, that they send out routinely and everyone throws in the trash, cause you can't read the jargon! I decided right then and there that I would try painting the pages with acrylics and then doing whatever I wanted to do artistically. Here is the book when it arrived:

And here it is after I painted the front page, and cut out stuff from magazines, and did a sort of collage-y thing. It was so relaxing, just freeing my mind and allowing myself the freedom of creating whatever I wished! I gave the other book to Donovan, and he started painting his too, but quickly lost interest.

Here is a little drawing I did when we went on a day trip and stopped at a really great Ale House restaurant. I had a Sharpie with me...(NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT ONE)!!!!!! LOL. It was fun to do, and I am kinda attached to this little drawing for some reason, I can't bear to throw it away...maybe now that I have it on the blog, I can part with it!

Had a good day at work, got my name badge, my security badge, to be able to enter the call center, the parking garage, and the building. I got my computer passwords, and got my direct deposit set up! When I got home, the kids had been very good for my daughter all day, in good moods, and shortly they all left to go swimming at the kids house...so Grandma Julie got a little quiet time, and made dinner. Now I've got my feet up, and will rest till America's Got Talent comes on, and after thet it is bedtime again so I can rise again at 5am!
xoxo- Julie