30 Word Thursday: Watercolor Doodles

I wanted to share the newest project tutorial that I wrote for the Bella Crafts Publishing blog.  If you have a few minutes, check it out on their blog here.

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The premise of 30 Word Thursday is simple... take a photo, write 30 words (no more, no less) and post it each Thursday.  This is a blog hop hosted by Erin Prais-Hintz over on her blog Treasures Found, pop on over there to see her post for this week as well as links to the 30 Words from everyone else.

Summer In Northern Idaho...

Hello!  We just got back on Sunday from our family vacation to my folks' lake place at Priest Lake, ID.  What a beautiful place!  The lake is just shy of the Canada border in Idaho, is glacier-cut and is really deep.  The weather was amazing (definitely better than the 110 degrees plus of Arizona), and everything was so green.  I thought I'd share some pictures with you all:

My three boys tubing - Shawn looks terrified, doesn't he?

The boys and their girlfriends

Beautiful sunset

The dock

Tons of wildflowers - these are clover

Love the texture in this leaf

Wild roses

Wild daisies (my favorites) EVERYWHERE!

Not a huge fan of spiders, but this one was beautiful

A view of our dock from the neighbor's lot

I love the graphic quality of this petal-less rose

MORE daisies

Mom's gorgeous pots

That's it for now.  :-)

Ahhh...Arizona In the Spring

Here's a quick glimpse at the riot of color in my backyard right now:


It won't look like this in a couple of months, but I will enjoy it while it lasts!

Flowers...

I was stumped today about what to write about, so I asked my son to give me a word to get me going...flowers it is!

When we moved to Arizona, I was a little apprehensive about landscaping. I envisioned miles upon miles of brown nothingness and cactus, without a flower in sight. We have lived all around the country, and I have had amazing flower gardens and planters everywhere we have lived, and I wasn't sure where I would get my "flower fix" out here.

I am a fan of English gardens: winding trails of roses and ground cover, growing seemingly haphazardly yet perfectly choreographed into an ordered disarray of pastel and primary colors. We had roses the size of dinner plates in Washington State, hot pink azaleas in Northern California, purple, green and rosy hydrangeas in Virginia and enormous bright red and white geraniums in Texas. So what would I do with all the brown nothingness here in the Southwest? There was no way that was I going to have even one cactus in my yard...they are so "not me".

So I read, researching what I could do to fix my "brown problem", and that is when I learned about the Painted Desert. Did you know that cacti flower? Well, I didn't expect them to be this beautiful, but here they are, blooming in yellows, pinks and purples. (I still don't have any cacti in my yard, but I do admire them from afar...)

Actually, the opportunity to put color with flowers in my yard is tremendous here. I just have to make sure the rabbits don't eat them (not pets mind you...wild jackrabbits from the wash behind the house who, I believe, count on me to provide them with their own personal salad bar). So I put in yellow lantana, purple verbena, fluffy red and pink fairy dusters, always green - and now unbelievingly enormous - trailing rosemary that blooms with tiny little light blue flowers a few times a year and makes my yard smell delicious, and lavender plants that have grown and grown and add to the lovely herbal smell of the yard.

Oh yes...and bright red geraniums...