Thing-a-day.com

  For my thing today, I FINALLY learned how to upload a photo, thanks to help from Kiki!!!!! Not sure what kind of tree this is, but she lives in Trexler Park. She has a large burl protruding from her trunk and in the spring is surrounded by daffodils and then red and yellow tulips. Because of her appearing to be great with child, and because of her garden of flower children, a friend and I dubbed her the Fertility Goddess Tree. For me she is a very feel-good thing!

Went for a hike today at the Nature Conservancy to scope it out as a possible site for our daughter’s upcoming wedding. There’s a rustic pavilion with picnic tables, a burbling stream, a lovely hidden glade with benches and a tree-stump pulpit that would be perfect for the ceremony. Now in February, two days after the snowstorm, everything is softened with a coating of snow and silence, against a backdrop of the setting sun blazing copper, orange, and aubergine in the early evening sky. It’s perfect, in tune with her affinity for the outdoors and nature and beauty. I imagine that in September it will be even more spectacular with autumn’s colors in full display. There could be no better setting for “my little artist” and her fiance on their very special day!

Nature–the place for

The robot and the rainbow

To join together.

This month is coming to an end and I’m feeling drained of creativity. I normally make something pretty much everyday because of my store Pedras and my blog New Sprout or just because. I’ve been having the urge to take photos of things lately. I don’t know the city I live in very well and don’t really feel comfortable walking around it. Normally I wander everywhere I live and find interesting things to take photos of. Now I just don’t know where to wander.

Here is a picture of the only Godetia that has sprouted from seed for me. Not sure if the seed batch I got was bad but nothing ever happened from the many I planted.

Yesterday I forgot to post. Really I just needed to take a break. I feel drained from creating everyday and trying to create before the sun goes down so I can take decent photos. Yesterday I did do some creating really. I took my camera onto my balcony and took photos of my plants. That is rather normal for me since I keep a garden blog called New Sprout. It’s difficult to post gardening related things when I only have a balcony to garden on. My plants are few but that makes me notice changes better then if I had many plants.

This is my Lemon Balm plant. It smells like mosquito repellent and can be used for just that. You can make tea from the leaves and cook with it but the smell doesn’t make me really want to do that. I’m sure it probably doesn’t taste like it smells. I just need to get brave one day.

I have landscape design projects to do today so my crafting time is zilch. I’m a procrastinator and save my homework to the last day. Shame on me.

I drew these from photographs, for an illustration I’m making for my job. It’s for a story about the other kind of WASPs—white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I’d never tried to draw a real bug before (though I did draw a finger puppet and a pin two years ago); they’re, um, complicated.

Update: Here’s the final illustration—

Today is Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. On the 15th of every month garden bloggers from all over the world show their blooms. Carol from May Dreams Gardens put this together. Check out her blog comments for GBBD to see others who posted for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day.

This was my first time posting. I normally don’t have any blooms since most of my plants are young and I like to start them from seed. Here is my post for todays blooms that I have. I don’t have many only a few. I count the photos I took today as my thing-a-day.

Snapdragon

Cocktail Vodka Begonia

Knotweed

These are from the 10th. I’m keeping up pretty well with doing stuff every day but not so great with posting.

And to spare everyone a separate post for the 11th, I’ll put my picture of the first crocuses here too, for a touch of spring!

For yesterday’s Thing I went to the top of this:

so I could see this:

And I took tons of photos along the way!

I live in Cupertino, California - a relatively small city in the Bay Area about an hour away from San Francisco. Nothing very exciting happens here, but it is nice anyway.

Today was mild and sunny, so I took a stroll down to the University of Leicester Botanical Gardens. I’d never been before (despite living here for three years), and was pleasantly surprised - it’s beautiful, even in winter! Looking forward to taking a book down there to read in the summer. Anyway, I snapped lots of pics and, for my thing for today, I’ve created a collage of the best.

P.S. I am clearly obsessed with trees at the moment!

Okay I really have no time today from what I can foresee to make anything at all. I have a landscape design project due today at 6:30pm. I have no idea what I am doing and I haven’t started. So I need to be working on that right after this until I am done. So I will cheat and show some pictures I took a few days back of some of my balcony plants. I have no idea what this vine is called. An older women who had an unkept garden gave me some plants and this vine was one of them. She had no idea what it was called.

I like the little flowers or seed heads it’s been putting out. The leaves have an interesting design on them too. It has grown like crazy in it’s container since I got it back around october.

Greetings. My thing today is the end result when you combine a block of ice, your average desk lamp, a pretty winter leaf (or two) and a Canon 300D. The image editing was all done in iPhoto (unfortunately, as my computer is really in no mood to run Photoshop) and it was photographed with a 28-105 lens, which was not ideal, but I am at least interested with the results. I hope you enjoy! The full 10 photo set (along with all my other photos, well, at least the most recent 200 - I’m cheap like that) can be seen here.   

since it was a little warmer outside (40 degrees!) today
i decided to go out and do a little location scouting for
a possible wedding ceremony. something that was on
my to do list. on my walk through this wooded trail, i
came upon a tree shedding giant sheets of tree bark –
almost looked like a giant snakeskin! so i took a couple
of snaps. here’s 2 of them. enjoy!!

For todays thing-a-day I decided to go take some photos. I have been slacking with my garden blog New Sprout. This was the perfect opportunity to go and take photos of the plants on my balcony (my only garden). For once I tried to just take things at weird angles and make something more artsy. I really loved how the photos of my wanna-be bonsai tree came out. Most are my Peruvian Myrtle and one is my Dwarf Crape Myrtle Sacramento. I’m hoping these will grow once spring hits and that I haven’t killed them during transplant. Both of these two lost all their leave and haven’t shown sign of any new growth. My Jacqueline Hillier Elm didn’t lose it’s leaves and it got some new ones during around November. I played around with photoshop to get some funky colors. I always wanted to do that but on my garden blog I like to keep my photos more true to what I really see.

I took a photograph of this wonderful root system of a tree in the Colorado mountains. It occurred to me that it looks like a wheel so I decided to make it spin…

I have to say I’m really excited about this. I hope I can catch up on some unfinished art projects, like this one. It’s a badge for a friend who has an oak tree for a character.