Nature Notes Freebie

Here´s a set of 5 grungy elements which coordinate with my recently released Nature Notes.

If you like them, you´ll find them here.

And if you´d also like a quick page created from the same kit, watch this space...

Season Of What?

John Keats called it the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” but to me it´s always been the season of colds and chills and cough syrup and a plentiful supply of Kleenex. In case you haven´t already guessed, we both mean autumn but either Keats was immune to the dreaded virus or he was using poetic licence. As for me, only the first line of verse 3 rings true, namely “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?” I know exactly where they are. They´re six months into the future, that´s where, and the way I feel at present they can´t come fast enough!

Still, all isn´t doom and gloom. At least I´ve got my autumn blog header to cheer me up while I write this though that open fire and cup of tea look so inviting I could nod off in the process. But not until I´ve announced the release of Nature Notes which, with it´s subtle greens and browns, seems to me to reflect the more appealing side of autumn with a few glittering little reminders of summer thrown in. The sight of it gives me hope that once I´ve recovered from this beastly cold I may again take pleasure from walking through the forest crunching autumn leaves beneath my feet “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.” 

Ah. I´m beginning to feel better already.

Here´s Nature Notes.

 

There will be a few freebies to go with it once I´ve fully recovered.

Thanks for looking.

PS If you´re interested, you´ll find Ode To Autumn here. 

At It Again!

I was sorting through my summer garden photos and I came across one that made me smile because I see they´ve been at it again. Yes, I know I´ve shown them at it already several times but this year they´ve really outdone themselves. Well, one of them has. He seems to have managed to paint quite a few of the white roses red before Her Royal Frightfulness came to investigate. Too bad she caught the wrong one!

I created this page using Nature Notes which I´ll be releasing soon.

Snailiens

If I haven´t been around for a while it´s because I´ve been making the most of the summer by spending my days in the garden. While the good weather lasts, being outside is preferable to scrapping, designing, keeping up my blog and just about anything else you can think of which requires a computer. I did spend two weeks in Scotland though. No, not in my mothers´garden. Judging by the changeable weather, summer seems to have lasted until around mid-June this year and I came back with less of a tan than I had when I left Germany. I also came back with less of my luggage than I had when I left Germany but that´s another story. Thanks to UPS it was delivered a week later. How nice it is to have a hair brush again. I missed that most of all. (Since the only alternatives were Dora´s brush and the lavatory brush, I wisely made do with a comb.) Despite the weather I also miss Scotland, especially my home town, Glasgow, where I met up with my friend, Eileen, a couple of times. We visited the Art Galleries, Glasgow University´s Huntarian Museum, Kelvingrove Park and the wonderful Victorian glasshouses in the Botanical Gardens, the last of these being the best place I know to heat up in on a chilly day.

I said earlier that I hadn´t done any designing recently. Well, that´s not strictly true. Eileen looks after a little boy twice a week and often reads to him. Somehow we got onto the subject of bookmarks and I said I could make one for him and asked what kind of motif he´d like on it. Since the current book is a harmless children´s fantasy by Enid Blyton, I was surprised when she said “Aliens”. Apparently he´s also interested in finding creepy crawlies in the garden, bringing them indoors and examining them before releasing them again. Somehow that rang distant bells which came closer the more I thought about that, to me alien, hobby. You may remember my preoccupation with combating the snails in my garden this year. Well, I think I may have been influenced by that when I designed this alien-themed bookmark . 

I hope he also likes slithery slimies...which is more than I can say for myself.

Painted Seashells Freebie

Here´s a little set of 3 painted seashells to celebrate my recent holiday on the coast. If you´d like them, you´ll find them HERE. 

Happy shell gathering!

Held To Ransom

Yesterday I left my computer for a while to attend to my laundry and when I came back the entire screen was filled with a message purporting to be from the police. It informed me that I´d been caught visiting illegal websites and that access to my computer was being denied until I´d paid a fine of €100. Even if I hadn´t heard of this nasty malware I´d have realised immediately that it was a scam but it was still quite a shock to suddenly be denied access to my computer. I was totally perplexed about how to deal with it until it occurred to me to simply switch off the computer and immediately switch it on again. This prompted Windows to offer me the option of running it in safe mode in which I had access to all my programmes but no access to the Internet so I was able to run a malware scan. Sure enough, 3 items were detected and deleted and after I´d restarted Windows things were back to normal again. I´m no computer expert and there´s probably another way of dealing with this pest but it worked for me. If you don´t already have Malwarebytes I suggest you install it immediately. You can download a free version here: www.malwarebytes.org/

Back Again...In More Ways Than One.

Well, I´m back from my holiday in Domburg and it´s taken me a couple of weeks to recover from it. To begin at the beginning...The first half of it was sunny and warm. In fact there was one memorable day when the sand was so hot it practically raised blisters on the soles of my feet. That really was too unrelentingly hot to be called a perfect day but it was preferable to some of the days during the second half when it rained almost non-stop and kept Dora and me confined to our little house most of the time with just short outings in between showers. That would have been bearable if the house had been well insulated but you can hardly expect that to be the case in a converted outhouse and it felt really damp indoors when it rained. I´ve suffered from back problems for years and they´re always worse during cold and damp weather. If I´d been able to turn on the central heating I´d have been OK but it was only shortly before I left that I finally discovered how to do that! So for the last week of my holiday I was creaking about like a superannuated robot in need of an overhaul. I´ve more or less recovered from the worst of it now but after I get back from Scotland I´ll have to see about getting more treatment in the orthopaedic clinic. It only only works for 5 years and my last course of treatment was in 2003 so it´s well overdue. 

Still, all isn´t doom and gloom and I wouldn´t want to give you the impression that I didn´t enjoy my stay in Domburg because I did and, of course, so did Dora. She spent most of her time rearranging the beach and creating mantraps for the unwary or plunging into the sea after her favourite toy. I sometimes think that dogs are like little children. You can buy them the most expensive toy but they often end up playing with the box it came in. In Dora´s case it isn´t actually a box but it´s the same principle. This particular toy I made myself from a piece of sacking roughly sewn together, filled with corks from wine bottles and tied with an old shoelace. It replaces the fancy floating toy I bought her which is a sort of fish shaped loofah which she shuns, much preferring the tatty old sack. Here it is in all its enchanting splendour. Ha! 

  

One thing I did buy her on holiday was a new and very smart red collar to replace her old disreputable one which had faded to a dirty pink from too much exposure to salt water and her penchant for rolling in mud. I´m sure she´d take it off and put on the old one again if she only had thumbs and could work out how it opens.

Well, I could go on about my holiday for ages but I won´t. The summer isn´t over yet and while I sit here chattering the sun is shining and the garden is calling my name so I´ll get off now. Before I do though, I´d just like to mention that Lajuana, as always, has done a great job updating the store. Not surprisingly, this month´s featured kit is Jewelled Sea which is one of my favourites as it perfectly expresses the joy I feel when I´m on the coast. In good weather or bad, it´s always been my favourite place. 

 

You´ll find larger previews of this kit HERE along with a couple of freebies. Thanks for looking!

A Perfect Day

Perfect days in life are few and far between and for me today certainly isn´t one of them. It´s dull and rainy and seems more like October than June. All the more reason to look forward to my summer holiday when good weather is forecast.

I love the sea and most of my perfect days have been spent on the coast. One of my favourite North Sea resorts is Domburg on the Dutch Zeeland peninsula where I rent a small cottage near the shore every summer, mostly just for Dora and myself as Herbert´s too busy to spend more than a few days with us. I get up early every morning as I particularly love the beach at that time when it´s abandoned by everyone except Dora and me and the seagulls. It doesn´t take much to keep us happy for the rest of the day. When I´ve had enough of lounging around reading I´ll go off to the high tide line to see what new shells the sea has washed up overnight and Dora will follow me carrying either her ball or the cork toy I made for her, and being Dora, sometimes both! 

  Click on image for a larger view.

I know that this isn´t everyone´s idea of a perfect day so, while we´re away, I wish you whatever makes you happy this summer. Hope you´ll have lots of perfect days.

A Tribute To Stanley Unwin

This is my tribute to Stanley Unwin who would have been 101 years old today. What? You´ve never heard of him? The man who could explain absolutely anything in such clear and precise language that even a child could understand?

Here´s a short video of one of his educational lectures.

 

Now you can´t say that wasn´t informative.

One of his many fans has described him as “The masterlode of Stanfoolery of the verbally thrips oratory.” He went on to say, “Stanley lived in a little village in Northampton called Long Buckby, which was known for the boot and shoe bespokey all lock stitchy in the leathery uppers, deep joy of the footwear.” ...and that just about sums him up.

“Deep joy” was one of his favourite expressions which is why I chose it for my tribute page. Also, it perfectly describes how I feel whenever I listen to his Stanfoolery.

In fact you could say he liked this phrase so much that he took it with him when he died.

 

But let Sir Stanley himself have the last word. He usually did anyway because anyone talking to him would have been incapable of speech after listening to him.

When All Else Fails....Colourize!

Whenever possible I prefer to scan old damaged photos myself, especially very small ones which can be difficult to restore unless scanned at a high resolution. However, not all the photos in my scrapbook belong to me and I often have to rely on other family members to scan them for me. In this case the original was scanned at 300 dpi which is the absolute minimum for a single photo and may even have been all right if it hadn´t been just one of half a dozen scanned together on one page of an old album which meant that all detail was lost. At first glance I was struck by the composition and decided that by adding contrast and then sharpening it I might manage to revive it. As you can see, that was a definite improvement...but still not enough. I felt that what it really needed was an immediate focal point. The beach ball, which was just a blur in the original version, looked like a good choice and I think that colourizing it worked pretty well but there was still something missing. I think it was at this point that I realised I was never going to be able to make a presentable photo from it – there simply wasn´t enough detail - but that it might make a really good impressionistic painting so I applied the Paint Daubs filter. Having done that it seemed to me that the parasol merged too much into the sky so I added a color overlay. It took a while to get the right shade of blue but I´m quite happy with the result. A little more contrast was all it took to make it perfect or at least as perfect as I could make it. All I had to do after that was to remove the stained border and create a new one using an off-white shade sampled from the photo itself. (Among my simple tutorials you´ll find instructions on how to do this.)

 Click on image to enlarge

I think you´ll agree that the final result is a lot more interesting than the original. As you can see, I made a note of all the steps I took to transform it from a pale blurry image to quite a presentable little work of art. If, like me, you´re also a beginner in the art of photo restoration I hope this will help and encourage you!