Inspired by the photo in this article in the WSJ.  Have a wonderful Valentine’s Day!

Last week we headed up to Michigan to visit with my parents for a bit.  In between eating, napping, and conversations I was able to go out hiking at the various parks around Lansing.  It was a great chance to pull out my too-little-used camera again and dust off any photography skills I may have once had in hopes of a nice shot or two.

The pond at Fenner Park was mostly frozen over and the trees under the ice presented ghostly outlines from above.  Ghosts…that’s why I was shivering that day.  It was about 45 degrees that day – unseasonably warm for January in MI and no excuse to shiver over the temps!

I think that was still in Fenner Park – my parents hiking out in front keeping an eye out for deer photo opportunities.  My parents shoot deer with cameras, my neighbors here on the other hand use other equipment to shoot deer.

Dad and I woke up early one morning and headed to Hawk Island Park to try our hands at goose photography.  I took loads of pictures, and am just sharing a few here.

Several seagulls joined the geese on the frozen pond about a 1/3 of the way through our time at the park that morning.  Everyone seemed to get along just fine.  In contrast, at one p0int a different goose flew in to join the crowd hereand was greeted angrily.  He had to defend his right to be on the ice with all the other birds for some reason.

It was a beautiful morning and well worth getting out there, despite the fact that I didn’t sleep in and the temperatures were much lower than our Fenner Park hike!

There’s dad waiting for his chance to shoot a few geese in action.  We didn’t see much out of the bunch behind him, but fortunately a few groups (gaggles???) had taken off at the beginning of the morning.  This is the best I could catch with my camera:

Dad figured they were headed over to the buffet at the University Club as they were definitely not headed south!

Here’s another batch of geese which originally headed south and then circled back to hit that delicious buffet:

Must be a good buffet.

Thanks for taking a look and have a great evening!

]]> http://www.peacefulbend.com/kT/?feed=rss2&p=2015 0 http://www.peacefulbend.com/kT/?p=2005 http://www.peacefulbend.com/kT/?p=2005#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:45:21 +0000 kT http://www.peacefulbend.com/kT/?p=2005

Here are a few recent cards.  The card above was a challenge to use tags in our card making.  So I made a card out of two tags!

And I tried out some finger-inking in the next card:

My fingers were black for a couple of days after this card.  Well, this one plus another that I made with the same technique, but I’m not showing that one yet since it’s for my dad’s bday.  I don’t want to ruin the surprise.

But here’s another bday card that I made after lots of errors and tribulations:

The main image used a technique called embedded image, and it was not an easy technique to master.  In fact, I haven’t really mastered it, but this came out acceptable enough to keep.

This was made for the Hero Arts challenge to create a scene on a card, so this is my first try.  Not too bad, and it reminds me of springtime.  When the temperatures were cool.  Ah those long-past days of two months ago!  :)

And finally, I’ll end with a sketch challenge that shows just how hard it is to do an embedded image.  See that circle panel with the happy birthday sentiment?  That was supposed to be a totally blue circle with a white sentiment embedded in it.  Instead my white just melted and spread out over the whole surface, forcing me to just stamp with black over it.  Maybe I’ve invented a new technique?

Thanks for checking out these cards – hope you enjoyed them!

I should mention that I decided to do that at about 2pm and the party started at 6pm.  I waited so long to do this because: A. I’m inherently lazy, B. I’m not much of a decorator, and C. I got caught up in looking around this week’s SCS inspiration site L’affiche Moderne.  I finally settled on this print to help me create the banner.

Here’s the ‘H’ and part of the ‘a’ in Happy:

I didn’t take very long to photograph this since it was created so late in the day and I still needed to tape each flag onto a piece of twine.  I laid all the letters out in order, flipped them upside down, taped each and every one onto that twine, turned it over to hang and…..fainted.  Crud.  I taped them on backwards!  Unless you’re dyslexic, in which case you could have read it perfectly fine.

So off came the tape, I reordered everything…backwards this time…and taped them on again.  This time was just right.  Jane and Trevor came by to start setting up and we hung the banner outside, just in the nick of time!  Here’s a look at the banner hanging in front of the crowd of party-goers:

And a bit closer view of the banner:

This was fairly fast and easy to make, but I do wish I had left myself a little more time to tape it together.  :D

So for those of you who know the Bownesses and couldn’t make it to the party, I’ll share a few of my shots to update you on the festivities.  As you see in the above shots, the guests all gathered on the front porch to wait for Rob & Willie.

Here is the happy couple with a long-time friend coming up to the winery to supposedly celebrate the release of our new wine, Grapes of Raft (Jane designed the label for this wine and is the Bowness’s daughter, for anyone that doesn’t know and is interested in this post thus far!).

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!!!!!!!

Family members as well as friends came from all around to help celebrate their 30th.  Here’s hugs for moms and stepdads:

And then they greeted everyone up on the porch.  And told Jane that unfortunately she had left a picture of her invitation on the camera and so it wasn’t a surprise after all.

Oh well!  Everyone laughed and shrugged their shoulders and shook hands and drank wine and ate and had a good time anyways.  Trevor (Jane’s hubby) made note that this whole party would have been a lot easier if they had known that the Rob & Willie already knew.

And that cracked Clyde & I up.  ’He knew and she knew, but they didn’t know and they thought they knew that they didn’t know, but….’  :D

In any case, everyone had a great time, including the happy couple.  Here’s Willie showing Rob my gift to them…an empty frame with a paper promising a photo from the party to insert into the frame:

After they finished opening gifts, the happy couple embraced as passionately as they could given that they were being prompted to by all the photographers:

Cheers to 30 years and many more to come!