I live in a small town

Above: A stained glass window located in the library. I find myself drawn to this window every time I go to the library. Isn't it beautiful? I wish I didn't have the glare from the camera. Maybe one day I'll go back and try taking the picture again.

I live in a small town in Ohio. The middle of town has a town square where sits a town gazebo. During the summer time, on Friday evenings, groups of people gather at the square to be together and listen to a band play in the gazebo. Since I have yet to experience this event, I'll leave the imagery to that and tell you more about it when I've been to a Friday night at the square.

The square is lined with small buildings and shops. The red building is where a fire station used to be housed. It no longer houses firetrucks but it's still a really cool building for my picture.

Kitty-corner from the square is this tall, beautiful church. I love looking at it when I'm driving by and luckily, I have to drive past it frequently. I live is such a beautiful, small-ish town.

Baby Blanket

I love this view from my back deck. Look at all those colors! Unfortunately the pink is already gone but was replaced with a dark maroon leaves so I still have color, just not that brilliant color. I love the beauty God has placed on this earth!

I'm still plugging away at crocheted edges on baby blankets and burp clothes. I really liked the eyes of the turtles in this blanket. They are so happy and alive! Perfect for a baby's blanket.

I did three kinds of edging. The very top one (on the right) is called a triangle edge, and then I did a block edge and the bottom one is a small rainbow edge.

Took a small trip to see the country

SM and I went to see the Ohio countryside on Saturday afternoon. The weather was overcast and nice (we were supposed to have lots of rain) and the drive was very relaxing. We went to several towns that have lots of Amish tourist spots. What a fun Saturday activity!

The only pictures I took were these from the car. I'll try to get some better pictures next week but no promises....it looks like rain again in the weather forecast.

I love the countryside. SM says that he'd like to live near the countryside but not actually there. I think it would be nice but it would be a lot of work unless we only had a small piece of land...but then why live in the country? So, we'll just continue growing our small garden's where ever we can and enjoy the journey of our lives.

Spring Flowers

I love the whole picture, meaning the whole tree or the whole yard or the whole Earth, but when taking photos, I love being really close and getting a little bit of that whole picture. I don't know if you understand what I mean, but I love the close-up pictures. Those that show the veins in the leaves or petals.

And even though this isn't a picture of flower...it's of a brand new leaf. And so beautiful! As an artist I really enjoy seeing the beauty that God put on this earth for all of us. We are so blessed!

I had to throw in this shot of the sky. It was so beautiful and so I just had to take a picture of the sky...and a tree.

I love that this picture has the green grass in the background. With the spring rains, we have neon green grass with wonderful, brilliant, bright flower colors.

Watercolor painting

This is the latest picture I painted. The photo of the painting doesn't really do the picture justice...and the little purple dot in the upper right hand corner makes it look a little sloppy. I need to find some "white-out" and get rid of that purple dot. I was opening the tube of paint when it exploded out and got paint on the picture. One thing about watercolors is that you can't really remove color. So, I'll get that fixed someday but for right now it's there and it's okay.

I painted this picture two or three weeks ago. In this painting I was using masking...which is something very rubbery that you paint onto the picture in the places you'd like to keep white and then you can paint without worrying about painting it that spot. And when everything is dry, you can rub off the masking and do something it the white spots. I used masking to make all the white dots in the purple background and also for the beads in the fairy's hair. After taking the masking off, I painted the beads, which are hard to see in this photo...but they are there.

Pics from Cincinnati

Here are some random photos from our trip to Cincinnati. Above is a picture of some spring flowers.

In our hotel room we had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room area, kitchen and dinner room. I think before a hotel room, it was an apartment complex. This place had a lot of room.

Here we are in Newport, Kentucky on our way to walk across the Ohio River. The sun is just beginning to set in the distance. What a wonderful day!

Here we are on the bridge above the Ohio River, looking into Cincinnati as the sun sets in the distance. Beautiful!

I love the flags flying over the water!

Another picture of the river, bridge, sunset and Cincinnati!

This waterway has ferries that are used to transport people if they do not want to drive on the bridges.

Mitchell's Fish Market is where we had dinner. SM had Yellow Fin from Kona, HI and I had Atlantic Salmon...both flown in fresh that morning and both very yummy!

Trip to Cincinnati

At the beginning of this week we had an opportunity to go to Cincinnati. Before we left I spoke to a lady in my ward and she said that we needed to visit the bridges of Cincinnati...and here I am. In the background you can see one of the bridges and I'm standing on the Purple People Bridge, a pedestrian bridge from Cincinnati to Newport, Kentucky.

And here's the name plate showing the name of the bridge. The bridge really is purple...kind of a lilac colored bridge.

Further down the bridge you can see SM walking on the right side. We actually walked across the bridge and ate dinner in Kentucky and then crossed a different bridge back into Ohio to return to our hotel.

Here's a man made out of maps holding the world on his shoulders. We found these statues on a main square in downtown Cincinnati. It was fun to walk around and look at everything.

This is Grater's Ice Cream. It is a very well-known ice cream made in Cincinnati and it is delicious. One of the cool facts about the ice cream is that in the mixing process, they do not stir it so that air gets into the ice cream. The ice cream stays dense and rich and creamy. As we were eating our ice cream we did get a few comments from other people saying that Grater's was a really good ice cream.

As we were walking toward the bridges we found ourselves surrounded by people wearing red clothing. And soon the stadium made an appearance. There was a Cincinnati Red's Baseball game that night. In fact, we weren't able to walk on a certain sidewalk because there were fireworks set up for later that evening.

Here's the main statue of the plaza in downtown Cincinnati.

SM walked over to this homemade "statement" of a bird in the cage. I think he read the plaque on the cage...something about freeing birds.

This was a water fountain and statue together. It was outside the downtown library. The statue is of books and water. This library was several stories tall and right across the street from our hotel, in fact, I could see into the top floor of the library from my hotel room.