Black Phoebe

I love my little black phoebe...

More Bird Sketches

Shells

reading "Gift from the Sea" and drawing the little pictures that start each chapter...

Bird sketches

some more sketches...i'm in love with the black phoebe and mountain blue bird at the moment.

a cup of perspective

sometimes we need a cup of perspective, right? sometimes i need a big, steaming cup of it with a chocolate on the side.

Sketching

i've been having fun sketching this summer. in fact, i'll share some more with you in the coming week. work has been go-go-go as we finish this huge project and home always has something to do so it has been nice to spend a few moments here and there to draw. i find it very peaceful.

Sleepy

an here's a pic of my grandparents

and here's a picture i painted of my grandparents...heehee

a little bird for gramma/pa

i regret that i didn't take a better picture of this little bird painting i made for my grandparents. oh well. we had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with them recently and i wanted to bring them a little something. i had been wanting to make a painting of the black phoebe that sings every single morning outside my bathroom window and here was my chance. :) it was really fun to play with the paint and bits of paper. i think i'm going to make some more of these.

Lovebird

for my parents' anniversary, i made them a little card. i love them. :)

Emmalou

Pretty soon we will be in Boise, and I am hoping to spend some time with Emma to make a craft. When we were going through our stuff after the move, we came across countless scraps of paper from art school and decided to roll them together so Emma could use them for her sketches. This kid draws every single night before bed, not to mention that she has notepads for drawings in the car and all through the house. I think she'll like some extra paper. :)

a happy birthday

today is my birthday so i thought i'd post one of my favorite recent pictures. i love how this shell looks like was stitched together...so beautiful! what a year it has been...last year, i was newly engaged and already in the throws of planning a wedding. it is so much better to be married than to plan a wedding.

my husband has been spoiling me like crazy with little gifts here and there and i feel so loved. :) is there where i admit that when i was asked what i would like, my list consisted of books and spices? the thought of new-to-me books makes me so happy. it reminds me of when i was a little girl checking out a pile of books at the library--2 or 3 reading books (most having to do with horses) and several craft project books. my mom found one of those project books years ago at a discard pile and gave it to me. every time i see that book, it makes me smile. it was all about making miniature rooms with scraps. to this day, i hesitate before i throw out a matchbox (should i make something with it???). seriously, now i'm starting to unearth some issues here. haha

anyway, last year i wanted to eat something scrumptious from home. this year i have a list of ingredients and am making my own (our own) scrumptious meal. salmon and veggies with an apple cider/creamy glaze. oh, i do hope it tastes as good as the recipe sounds! (its from this cookbook, of course.) we're eating 'light' so we can follow it up with a blueberry version of the strawberry summer cake. yum. yum. :)

To My Friend

I'm glad your birthday is the day before mine so you can tell me what it feels like. Though we are countries apart, I do hope you have a wonderful birthday (make that, have a wonderful new year). I'm thinking of you today...

i love the Lord

 

happy Father's day!

He Knows

 He knows the way I take.

(psalm 139:3)

I love my sister

 (a heart in my coffee cup)

Thinking of my littlest sister today on her birthday. I love her.

Nice View

this little pink flower has a very nice view. this was taken on that hike back during memorial day weekend.

Oh Happiness!

"oh Happiness! There's GRACE enough for us and the whole human race!"

(david crowder song)

A Small Act

we watched A Small Act last weekend and wow. i highly recommend it (though it is not for children as there are a few terrible images in the film of the violence that has swept through Africa at different times in her history.) that said, it was such a reminder of how our few dollars given to someone in need can truly go so much farther than we could ever have dreamed. i thought about how much we pay for education here in the states and how we take it completely for granted. of course i'll finish elementary school and go to high school. of course i'll go to college if i want to (even if i can't afford it, i'll take out loans...) but for so many people in this world, education is for the rich, education is something far off and hoped for...it is the promise of a better life and a break in the cycle of poverty.

we finished the movie with tears in our eyes. we are so blessed.
help us to give more and more out of that blessing!

Books Read Recently

Books read recently (words above are typed below):
Tom's Midnight Garden - oh, i love how magical this book is! i wish more children's books were written like this (i.e. for children)
Transforming Grace - a great reminder that "grace isn't just for beginners"
Farmer Boy - reread this series this winter. wow. times have changed.
Five Children and It - perfectly captures children as they are. i love this book.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - (by Eric Metaxas) - a true story that reads like a thriller. Amazing story. (side note: anything written by Eric Metaxas is worth your time to read...great author.)

Cute

 

seen last march... :)

Succulent love

have i told you lately how much i love succulents?
my husband loves them too. (the second ones are from his boutonniere and my bouquet!)

Tiny Things

these teeny tiny flowers were raining down on us at the end of May (after a LONG hike)...they were so precious i had to take 8 million pictures of them. here's one.

An Hour of Play

“You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” -plato

Very true.

for instance, my husband learned the other day while we were playing Pictionary (the two people version that isn’t really much more than drawing pictures and having the other person guess), that I am a mite bit competitive. I had flashbacks of my dad totally beating us girls on Candyland (and whooping it up) and my mom saying to him, “you need to let the girls win”…

But, but…

I have a feeling this quote isn’t exactly referring to board games, though.

Watercolors…

This is so sweet. It’s so fun to draw out instructions like this…this post is a reminder to do that more often.

(via bright as the dallas sky)

Encouragement

I love the ladies at Destiny in Bloom. Great encouraging articles.

See also: (in)courage. (they are a division of Dayspring cards…but their articles are written by several different bloggers and authors. Wunderbar! :)

Oh Blessed Day!

Oh! This blessed day
This blessed day of hope
Of quietness
Of thankfulness that rises
And spreads itself around into
The smallest things
Multiplying until everything
Is crowned with joy and light

This dark green leaf…I remember when your tree was filled with a thousand red glories. I picked a red leaf up off the ground and put it in my bible. I picked some more and placed them on the table. Day after day I walked down this street so I could see them—red against the grass, red against the blue sky, red against the black branches…such beauty! But then your tree was empty--blown by an early spring wind (our seasons are confused here—these trees were turning color in February) and I stopped walking that way. I didn’t walk that path for a while, only saw those beautiful silhouetted branches a few times…and then!  Yesterday I walked by again, and the trees were completely clothed with green. The leaves danced in the wind and were that perfectly polished leaf-green. The color you get in a small box of crayons.

The steady thing in all of this was the tree—standing strong and upright and reaching its branches to the sky. The wind and cold and heat changed it over and over again but it never moved. Could it be that the one thing that could stand strong in our lives through all our seasons could be a grateful heart? A heart postured to look up and spread its arms wide, no matter what?

Great sketches

These sketches are so much fun to look at. I love the detail.

A Long, Rambling Post about Food and Inspiration

(peaches from my tree last year...oh, i miss that tree!)

I’m supposed to be writing my grocery list. But instead I am writing a post about cooking inspiration. That’s how things go sometimes.

I’ve really enjoyed pulling out my cookbooks and trying new things during the last (nearly) 7 months of being married. Before, I went through stages. Making everything including applesauce and jam from scratch then going on month-long year long frozen food only binges. Forgive me. Now that I have someone to cook for, and someone who graciously washes the dishes, I am finding myself more apt to stick to it. Besides my mother would be appalled if I wasn’t serving my husband a ‘proper meal’ for dinner. Sometimes those ‘proper meals’ are dressed up oatmeal dishes, but hey, sometimes a girl needs a break! (and besides that oatmeal is ah-mazing!)

Some of my favorite cookbooks to cook out of are:
Jamie’s Dinners and Jamie’s Food Revolution
A Homemade Life
The Silver Palate (this is my growing up food…though I admittedly use this only for special occasions—way too much sugar/fat/butter…ah, the 80s!)
Supernatural Cooking yum. yum. love Heidi Swanson. Please order her new book for me for my birthday. Thank you.
Feast by Nigella Lawson. Love. Love. Love. Only one recipe I’ve ever made out of this book turned out awful. But I highly suspect that is because I substituted, ahem, several ingredients. Don’t do that. (not until the second go-around at least)

For questions about things, such as how to cook pigeon (I’m kidding), I always go to:
The Joy of Cooking.

I admittedly just love reading portions out of it. Its amusing to read the rather large selection of casseroles and jello salads. My mom found editions for each of us girls that correspond with our birth year. I love my mom. The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis wonderful too. Oh, I love to read chapters out of that book. It makes me soooo happy it is ridiculous.

There are 8 cachillion food blogs out there now and so many of them have breathtaking photography and upcoming book deals…the benefit of this is the huge range of recipes out there to try from really good amateur and professional cooks. Some of the blogs I frequently cook from are:

Simply Recipes--One of our favorites is the Boston Baked Beans Slow Cooker recipe. This usually ends up being a meal for us along with homemade biscuits from another great blog. The story behind the ‘boston baked beans’ name is good too, and every time I pull out my jar of molasses, I think of it glugging down a city street in waves. The air must have smelled sickenly sweet. (Apparently, “glugging” and “sickenly” are not real words. You know what I mean, though.)

I go to 101 Cookbooks for gorgeous photography inspiration and scrumptious recipes. We make a version of her couscous/garbanzo bean salad at least once a month. Soooo good. She also wrote “Supernatural Cooking”…

This weekend, I’m going to make this strawberry cake from Smitten Kitchen. Again, her recipes never ever fail to bring great happiness in our family.

The Steamy Kitchen and Good Life Eats are great too, though loaded with ads. We’ve tried several of their recipes and all of them have been delicious.

What Katie Ate is bookmarked, though I haven’t tried any of the recipes. I am taken by the lovely photography.

Still, in the end, I always go back to Molly. Last week alone, we ate 3 meals from her recipes…amazing chicken meatballs made with cilantro, golden raisins and pine nuts and dipped in yogurt sauce, chana masala that made us both cry from happiness, and dutch babies (enough said). Yum. Yum. Yum.

Wow, that was so much fun typing all of that out. Now, what was I doing again? hmmmm

A Creative Gift

A friend gave me a wonderful gift for Christmas this year. She took a moleskine journal and wrote a tiny bit of a story on every single page. Then she wrapped it up and gave it to me. Inside the front cover was the title as well as the credits. Words were by her. Illustrations by…me. What? I flipped through the book—each page holding one sentence only and my imagination started to burst. Oh, what an idea! I’m sure this has been done through centuries of old, but I had never thought of such a thing—and as a personal gift between friends…how fun! Her story is very amusing; it is a genealogy of a lady who calls herself a countess but isn’t really one. This seems to run in the family as her mother did the same thing. There is a Barron in the family, a Count and twins (one of which is a cat). 

Ironically, it took a while to actually commit to drawing in pen in this book. I found myself somewhat stressing about it—“oh, I want to draw in this book! But I can’t because I can’t draw very well and all my drawings look the same.” My husband suggested sketching out ideas. He has many techniques to get the creative flow going. Maybe that’s an obvious statement since creativity is his job. But anyway…I still stressed about it and made some feeble sketches. And wrote in my sketch books how hard it was. (For some reason, I had the hardest time deciding what kind of eyes I wanted these people to have. Seriously.) A couple months passed and then one day, suddenly, out of the blue, I had an idea. and I drew it. and then I drew another page. And well, the book is halfway done now. It has been so much fun and strangely addicting. I love her descriptions—it is very evident that she is a filmmaker since they are very picturesque and visual. None of that ‘She is a nice person’ here. More like, “She has impeccable penmanship.’ Love it.

(the picture above is a blurry sneak peek for you...)

My heart overflows

photo by Lindsay Edmonds

I first came across Lindsay’s blog through another lovely little blog called Roost. I was intrigued by the idea of soaking grains and Lindsay has a lot of information for her readers on this subject. But I digress. This morning’s post was not at all about soaking grains but about her trip with Compassion to the Philippines. It was moving to read her words…amazing to hear how a small amount of money can change a life. We hear it all the time in ad campaigns—‘you can change a life!’—but truly, it is happening. It is real. My heart overflows this morning as I think about these children who have hope and a future because someone they may never meet here on this earth gave.

(more on the beauty of Compassion at Shaun Groves’ blog.