Yellow Flowers and Fall is on its Way

Here in Toronto the last flowers to blossom in the annual cycle are a lot of golden-yellow ones.

The first picture above is the only one that came from my own garden. But a trip through the neighbourhood brought forth plenty of specimens of this glorious colour. There is no denying that once this many of the golden hued beauties are showing their cheerful faces, fall is well on its way.

(I got these pictures on the same walk that I got the shots of the Red Winged Blackbird that I posted about on Tuesday.)

Handmade Bookmark : Felt, Paint Chips and Embroidery

Thinking that it might be nice to paint an accent wall in our living room I brought some paint chips home from the hardware store. But after re-thinking the idea, and seeing this recent entry posted by Rooth of the blog A Miusme, of a gorgous home that featured all white walls, I decided to nix the idea of adding colour and decided instead to freshen up the creamy-white paint that covers every all the walls in our home except the bathrooms.

This left me with a tidy stack of paint chips that, being the paper lover that I am, I just couldn't toss. The colours and texture of the cards were so beautiful and I racked my brain to come up with something good to make with them. Certainly I could have gone with one of the many other projects using paint chips that I've seen on the internet, but nothing quite grabbed me.

Then, while reading, I noticed the bookmark I was using ... a ratty piece of card-stock promoting the Toronto-Dominion Bank, asking "How long are we open?" and then featuring a woman jumping in the air and declaring "This long" on the flip-side. Sheesh, I don't even bank with the TD Bank. Clearly it was time to make myself a pretty bookmark! And those paint chips would be a perfect supply to use.

This is what I came up with. Wanting to use the brightest colours on the strips, I used two, cutting off the pale shades and attaching two of them together with a bit of tape on the back.

Then I carefully and randomly cut circles in a piece of black felt, so that the colours would show through the holes, but none of the typing or dividing lines. This was the hardest part of the project because I had to keep lining things up to make sure I was cutting in the right spot. I started with a small hole and gradually made them larger.

Red Winged Blackbird in the City

I am quite thrilled to have this special guest modelling for today's post! He is a Red Winged Blackbird and I know he is a he because the female of the species is a plain nondescript brown.

It is relatively rare to see one in the city, especially lingering around long enough to be photographed as this one was. Up here in Canada these birds are migratory so they fly south to warmer climates for the winter. This guy would have been born somewhere north of the city (possibly as far north as Alaska) and I met him as he stopped for a bite to eat on his way south.