Card and sunset

Hello, I am a little late in posting, this was a busy weekend.  We got our daughter and son in law all packed into their Uhaul and said goodbye to them on Saturday, they are heading to Connecticut, she will be attending Yale to get her Doctorate in Theology.  It was so hard to see her go knowing she will be so far away and we probably will only be seeing her once a year for a few years, but thankfully we can call and text at anytime and I am thankful for that.  She is pretty close they will be arriving today and hopefully can move straight into their apartment.

Just after we got back from our trip to Michigan is when my stamp group had our week of challenges and one of them was to make a card that reminds you of the park.... Well since I had just went to 3 different parks in Michigan it wasn't too hard to decide on what theme I was going with :)

I put a touch of clear glitter pen on the water and light in the lighthouse

Art Impressions-- Windows to the world M-3175 stamp colored w/pencils
Spellbinders -- Labels One die
Poppystamps -- Tailored stitches border die
BasicGrey -- Picadilly paper and scraps
Paper Studio -- enamel dots
Wink of Stella -- Clear glitter on the water and light

Because we spent so much time at the fort and eating lunch after before getting on the road we only managed to make it down to the bottom of Michigan to a beautiful town called Saugatuck.  It has a little harbor that we ate a dinner at and then headed over to Oval Beach which is on Lake Michigan.
They had stairs to get down to the beach, you park on a cliff and we stayed on the beach until the sun started setting and I needed to get back up to the car to get my camera and I started off by taking some shots of the flowers that were growing along the top.

Now to the sunset. I hope I didn't over due but it just amazes me how much the sky changes during a sunset and there was just enough clouds to make it really cool!

I love this one of my hubby with the glow of the sunset on him :)

The boat in the above picture was also in the harbor when we were eating, they came almost as far as we were and turned around and headed back.

My hubby said we could head back to the hotel and I told him we could stay a little while longer and we were glad we did cause all of a sudden all kinds of reds started popping up in the sky.

The top one I zoomed in on it and this bottom one is zoomed back out.

As I am writing this my daughter has texted to let me know that they are in their apartment now and the movers they hired actually came on time and have it all done for them, they rented this house without even looking at it just what they could see on line and she is happy to report that it is just what they wanted :)

Hope your week is off to a good start too!!

Thanks so much for taking the time to stop by, I know how busy the summer time can be.
I am still playing catch up on visiting blogs :)

Connie

Colonial Michilimackinac

After our night of fireworks we were going to head back home but first I told hubby we need to go to the fort, I hadn't been there since I was a kid and we have been up to Mackinaw city many times and never stopped and he had never been at all so we decided to spend the morning at the Fort before making our trip home.

I loved the texture in the roof and the different ways they did the chimneys on these houses.

They have people in almost every building telling you a bit of history about each one.

As you can see by the flag at the fort, it was under British rule at the time, and there wasn't any breeze :(

Had to get another view of the bridge

Standing in one battlement to get pictures of the other ones, I took the following pictures from the walk that went around the fort.

Don't they have a nice raise garden going here.

I just love the roof and the arches you can see in the middle building there

Yep another view of the bridge through the buildings :)

You may have noticed in some of the other shots the excavating going on down there between the buildings, they said they always have some people in there working to find items that they soldiers and families left behind when leaving the fort.  There was a whole museum under one of the buildings with many of the items they had found, so interesting, and it  came at just the right time too, it was nice and cool down there and after being in the hot sun for over an hour it felt really nice.

I didn't get many pictures when we went back down into the fort I was so busy reading and listening to to the people, but I did manage a couple.. As you know from some of my past picture posts, I do love my doors and handles and I just thought this was a neat lock.

She was getting the water nice and hot so she could do the laundry, so glad we don't have to deal with all of this today, makes me really appreciate my washer :)  One of the soldiers in the buildings said that the wives of the married soldiers would do the men's laundry for a fee and sometimes they would make more money than the soldiers brought in.

On our way out we caught them getting the cannon ready to shoot off, I stopped taking pictures here  and took video of it on my phone.

Here is a photo my hubby took of the cannon firing.

Sorry about the long post, I sure have a hard time deciding on what to post, it is so much easier when I don't have many photo's to choose from, LOL!

Thanks for stopping by today, and I hope you have a fantastic weekend!

Connie

Coloring

It has been so busy I haven't had time to get the post of the rest of our trip done yet, I hope to share it next time.  Good news hubby was able to get the oven fixed yesterday and it went so smoothly that we were also able to get the lawn mowed so we were on a roll.

When it was time to make my next card I needed I was totally out of ideas, but kind of felt I needed some time to just sit and color, that can be relaxing for me if it isn't a scene I am trying to color so I reached for my colorist book and picked this one to color, it already had that black polka dot background with it so I just mounted it onto a black cardstock, hopefully it isn't too dark for a summer birthday.

That little flag also comes within the book so all I had to do was cut it out and stamp my sentiment and I was done. HERE is a link, if you are interested in them.

Hot off the press -- Awesome Blossoms for Colorist, colored w/spectrum noir markers
Stamps of life -- Minis 4 circles sentiment stamp

Thanks so much again for taking the time to stop by today!!

Connie

Michigan 4th of July trip

I figured since July is quickly coming to a close I need to post some pictures from our trip, I will do it in parts since once again I have quite a few I wanted to share.

The first evening getting into Michigan we stopped at Grand Haven State park which is right on Lake Michigan, we wanted to see the sunset over the water.

I liked this shot of the waves coming on shore and the spray they left.

Sunset with the lighthouse

Next morning on the 4th we headed to Mackinaw City, we went to a different area we hadn't gone to before to get a different view of the Mackinac bridge. This bridge is what links the upper and lower parts of Michigan together.

It was a beautiful day to hang out by the water.
In the evening we didn't have to walk far at all to see the fireworks, the hotel we were staying at is right on the beach and the fireworks were fired off right on the peer next to the hotel, it is the quickest we ever got back from seeing fireworks :)

The following pictures of the fireworks were taken by my hubby, I didn't want to take pictures I just wanted to sit back and enjoy the show :)

I am a little late posting today it was another one of those long days that there was always something happening.  Last big thing was our air conditioner and thankfully that has been working ok.  Now the oven has stopped heating up.  Today we went out and found a new ignition, hoping that will be what is wrong with it, hubby is going to install it tomorrow hopefully.  Let's hope that is all that decides not to work around here, we don't need anything else.

Hope your week is off to a good start,
Thanks so much for taking the time to stop by,

Connie

Christmas in July

YAH!!! I have two cards ready for Christmas, that is pretty good for me, I am usually coming up to the end of November thinking I really need to start my Christmas cards.

One of the ladies in my stamping group had the challenge to make snow on your kraft base using splatters of either ink of paint.  I went with using paint and a toothbrush because my stamping was all done with my white ink and I had to stamp mulitple times just to get this amount of stamping to show up.

Now I will have to say that it would be smart to wear old clothes and maybe use a box or something to put it into because you should have seen my clothes and my desk when I was done, everything was covered with a fine mist of white paint...uggghh.  These are perfect for mailing, one layer cards.

The stamps on the 4 corners was from one of the ladies in my group as well as the background stamp in the next card, she was moving and getting rid of some of her stamps. I do think those stamps may be studio G stamps.  The sentiment is from Inkadinkado, Silhouettes stamp set and stamped with Memento Luxe Wedding dress ink

The stamps on this one are from Inkadinkado -- Seasons Greetings stamp set, I perched the bird on the sentiment since he was a little too big for the tree :)

I do love the look of white on kraft, I think next time I might try to emboss everything with white embossing poweder so that the stamping shows up a bit more.

Thanks so much for taking the time to stop in today and I hope you enjoy a lovely weekend!!

Connie