Fox Mandala to color

I hope you enjoy this mandala, it was a lot of fun to draw it! Foxes, flowers, trees and stars form 6 sides to this one.

Click on the images for larger versions.

Small JPG version:

Large transparent PNG version:

This weekend I decided that this week I'd re-read the Harry Potter books. So if you see a lot of wizard-y stuff in the next week or so, that's the reason why! Yesterday was year 1 and 2 and half of 3. Today I plan to finish 3 and possibly 4. Yay!

Buy the Don't Eat the Paste Mandala Coloring Collection! It has this and 49 other mandalas from this site.

Tree Flake Mandala

I hope you enjoy today's snowflake mandala to color. It's fairly intricate in parts, so you'll want very sharp pencils or fine tip pens to color this one.

Click on the images for larger versions. The small JPG version is above. I didn't do a colored version because it's family movie night tonight!

Large transparent PNG version:

I took this photo this morning and posted it to my Facebook page. Sunrise at 10 am. Click on the image if you want to see a larger version.

Photos from this past month

Earlier this month, we stayed at the hotel my husband works at for the weekend. I took some photos that weekend. Click on the images to see more detail.

Alaska's flag. I flipped this photo to show it with the North Star in the upper right hand like it's supposed to be. Alaska's flag against all that snowy white!

This handsome raven was just perched up there yelling for attention. So I took a bunch of photos! 

Thanks to one of the people on my Facebook friends list, I know this is a a gray-crowned rosy finch. The little sweetie also seemed to love the camera.  I took a bunch of photos, and really love the contrast between the bird's coloring and warmth and the frost on the tree. It was munching those berries like a frozen treat!

If you ever come to Anchorage, on the corner of 4th and Barrow is a used book store that's been there since I was a kid. The owner, Cathy, has told me she's not going anywhere because she doesn't want to leave her books. The books! 300,000 or so books in this shop that's been there for so long. They are on shelves with narrow paths between them, in boxes next to the shelves and just stacked by the shelves. Stacks of books surround the front counter area, piled on, behind and in front of the counter. You have to reach across these piles of books to pay her, and she's always ready to talk to anyone who comes in. It's called C&M Used Books, and it is the very definition of used book store in my mind. It's the prototype. 

Other than the signs, one old, one new that say C&M Used Books,  look for ravens and magpies. She and her assistants toss out their leftovers for the birds, and there are lots of fat, happy ravens and magpies around the store waiting for treats.

These two photos weren't taken that weekend, but I wanted to share them anyway.

Sunset, at about 3:30 in the afternoon!

Trees all lit up at Anchorage Town Square.

Winter around my house- snowy photos!

The other day when I went down to check the mail, I decided to bring my camera with me. It's a half block to my mailbox. Click on the images for larger versions.

If you look to the east, you see the Chugach mountains. I've lived in Anchorage all my life, and they still make me breathless sometimes. The sharp edges, the weather changing there first. They aren't particularly high mountains, but they seem very high because they don't have the long slow slope other mountains have. They come up sharply and suddenly.
We call the snow on them "Termination Dust", the phrase comes from the days when people got their termination notices for seasonal jobs, and seems to be a very Alaskan phrase. When the termination dust comes halfway down the mountains, it's going to snow in Anchorage soon.

You've seen lots of photos I've taken around this wooded lot that's across from my mailbox. Well, if you had a wooded vacant lot that pretty and close, wouldn't you take lots of photos?

The lot has a path through it. From there it looks gorgeous. Unfortunately, just as you hit that clearing you can kind of see in there, you find that people dump things in there. Big appliances and the like. However, it's still nice to walk through there during the summer because it's a habitat for lots of birds. You can hear wrens sounding lovely (and hardly ever spotted), get scolded by ravens and get the gossip from the magpies. My husband and I will walk through there hand in hand, and I'll stop every so often to snap a photo of a magpie or a wild flower. Looks gorgeous all snowy doesn't it?
About a half hour later, at just about 4:45 pm, it was sunset. Check out those colors! Aren't they beautiful?

I also put the snowy path photo through Paint It just for fun. I love using Paint It on snowy photos.

Corel Paint It! Photo is only 9.99 from Amazon.com (affiliate link) and it only makes painterly effects from photos. I think it's a fun little graphics application.

Since we decided to give Black Friday a skip, I told my daughter we would go to the thrift store today. I scored very nicely on the 70s craft books and magazines I love, she was thrilled to find a fantastic holiday dress and a bag of fabric scraps. We also picked up shirts for William and Michael. Michael liked his shirt. It's the same basic style as his favorite black and red shirt in black and gray. William's shirt is another genuine Hawaiian shirt for his collection.  Thrift stores are so full of awesome.

Christmas Tree coloring page

I hope you enjoy this coloring page. As usual, you can use this for any crafty use. Coloring, embroidery, etc.

Click the image for a bigger PNG version of this swirly Christmas tree coloring page.

I also posted instructions for this pressed penny bracelet on Beadwork at BellaOnline. I also opened a topic on the beadwork forum to trade pressed pennies. You do have to make an account to leave a comment on the forums.

Fox Box!

I hope you enjoy this little box. I've been working on drawing a fox, and liked how this little cartoon one turned out.

Click on the image to get the larger version. Print to 8x10 inches or to fit page.

Rabbit printables

I drew this rabbit and tree for the current Spoonflower contest, Year of the Rabbit. It's voting now if you want to go look at LOTS of rabbit themed fabrics and vote. I'd really appreciate the votes if you vote for mine!

The name of the design is Elephant Under a Pineapple. Because while I was working on it, I asked my son how it looked. He said it looked good, in a whimsical mood I asked "So you can tell it's an elephant under a pineapple?" Later, asking my husband the same question he said "Your elephant looks like a rabbit." And I said "What about the pineapple?" and he replied "I can totally tell that's a pineapple, but your elephant looks like a rabbit."

Click on the images for the full sized versions, the box and the printable art are both 300 ppi. The coloring page (which can also be used for embroidery) is 100 ppi.

Moon through trees- gift boxes

Taking a short break from beading, knitting and other "OH! It's only 19 more days?? Really?" frantic rushing.
For these boxes, I took a photo and cropped it down to fit one of my favorite templates, then ran that through Paint It (affiliate link), and cropped those to 1 inch and made tiling backgrounds with the images so the colors matched the photos.
First, the pictures and backgrounds. Feel free to use them for non-commercial projects. Click the images for the larger versions. The first one is the original photo, unretouched except for cropping.

Now for the boxes! 300 ppi, click on the images for the full sized printable versions. I hope you enjoy them.

Well, back to beading, knitting, cutting, gluing and all those other things that have to get done.

Hey, if any of you play guitar, can you give me a recommendation for a good electronic tuner for a beginner? I gave Michael his Christmas present early because there was just no way to hide it. He's been wanting an electric guitar for a while. Anyway, then he started to tune it. And he can't tune by ear. After about an hour of listening to him tuning it, he said "I think I need an electronic tuner." I replied "I was just thinking the same thing." He laughed very hard. So.. if you have a recommendation, I'm all ears.

Cold November Morning- card

On Black Friday, as we were coming back from the mall at 9:30 am, which happens to be about sunrise right now in Anchorage, I snapped this picture for my beadwork newsletter subscribers.

That's taken fairly close to my house. When I took it, I remember thinking "I hope that pretty pink shows well." 

I also recently got a suite of applications that included one called Paint It (affiliate link). Fairly inexpensive as a standalone product, just over 20 dollars from Amazon. It is a program I thought my daughter would like. It only does one thing, but it does that one thing fairly well. It creates painting effects of your photos. Running this photo through the application turned out pretty, and also fairly well got rid of that street lamp in the background without me fussing with it. It has 10 different effects and I like all of them except the pen drawing. That one doesn't pick up enough detail. The first image below using the detailed watercolor effect, the second uses my favorite effect, illustration. 

I thought the first one looked like a pretty card image, so I put it on a card! 

300 ppi, click the images to download the full sized versions.

The card measures 3.5 wide by 5 inches tall. The envelope is just over 5 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall, which makes it an okay size for mailing.Print the envelope on paper, and the card on card stock. Here's the blank templates to design your own. Gif format, so you'll have to increase color depth, the envelope is horizontally oriented for designing, so print on landscape settings or rotate it 90 degrees to print. Pixel drawn, 300 ppi. 

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