Happy Halloween!!

I thought I would share this wonderful tag my friend Dana sent me. I LOVE the distress inks she blended here in the background along with that spooky glowing moon! And the Cat is sparkly!! Thanks Dana for letting me share this here on my blog!! As I did not get one Halloween card made this year!

If you can believe it I still have photos from our trip to share!! Since Ive been home I have not created anything to share here on the blog :-(  I have been trying to create something using some of these photo's as inspiration but I just can't do them justice! I guess my Mojo is still on vacation, lol.

I never knew there were so many types of clown fish....I felt like I was finding Nemo.

Thanks for stopping by!!! And Happy Halloween!!!

Hugs!!



More Creatures from the Deep

I hope everyone is enjoying these posts from the deep blue sea. I'm enjoying re-playing my dives through the photos.

We saw eels on almost every dive. You really have to look for them, they live in holes in the coral and really don't come out. In fact I've only seen one swimming though the water once back in 2003 in the Cayman Islands.

My nephew says the eel's look mad and ugly, lol.

These 2 sharks were hanging out under a ledge and really didn't want to be bothered. They were small white tipped sharks.

These next few fish are called "Stone Fish", can you see them? They are hard to spot, they blend into the coral and on two separate occasions both my husband and I almost grabbed one when we had to hold onto the coral because of the current. We each stopped the other just before we grabbed onto the rock.

 As I'm looking things up on the Internet to tell you about the things we saw I've come to find out that these stone fish can be deadly!! I ask my husband "What the HECK?" His response, "that's why I made you wear gloves". Then he got a pillow in the face, lol.

Well tomorrow I'm going back to posting safe & pretty pictures of our trip!  LOL!

Until next time!
Hugs!

The amazing Octopus

There are many different species of Octopus. I don't know much about them but I've been told that in this area Mimic Octopus are very common. I also need to give credit where credit is due, these pictures were taken by our friends that were on the trip with us. While I love to take underwater pictures and I do often get some good shots my camera is older and I don't have a strobe so at times my lighting isn't as good. These Octopus pictures were taken by Derek, Karen W. and Padoy. Awesome job guys!!!

I love this little guy sitting in his shell. He wasn't very big and he really didn't want to leave his shell so as his space was being invaded he put his legs around the shell and scurried across the sand.

I love the color on this one, and again whoever took this one put their hand in to give a reference to the size.

This one tried to hide in the sand, but we were able to coax him out.

 To me this one looks Alien like....or maybe the makers of the Alien's got their inspiration for the deep blue sea. LOL

I thought I would also include a few pictures of the spotted bat ray we saw. The blue was so vibrant, truly amazing.

I was surprised that we didn't see as many sting ray in the Philippines as we have in places like Mexico and the Cayman's.

Thanks again for stopping by, I will be back again with more tomorrow.

Hugs!

I'm Back...

What an incredible trip!!! 10 days of diving in the Philippines. I'm still a bit jet lagged but it was worth it. I thought I would share some of our photos here over the next couple of days, there are sooooo many :-)

This photo gives a pretty good idea of the colors we saw. Some photos the colors aren't as crisp because of the depth that we were at or if it's a close up.

This was my favorite star fish. It reminded me of a Christmas cookie, with frosting on it! They are very large, in fact this one is being held in our Dive Master's hand which you can't even see!

These star fish were also very big. You can see my hand to the left of the frame. I did this to give an idea of the size. The color of blue doesn't even compare to the picture. I thought of bright play dough blue when I saw it. These star fish are everywhere.

This little guy here is called a "Nudibranch" pronounced "nud a brank". I had never seen these anywhere else we have dove and they come in many colors. I don't think they get much bigger, my husband says typically 3 inches is about the max. These were all about an inch. (It's the blue thing at the bottom with the yellow dots)

 This one is longer in white with blue stripes and a bit of yellow on it's head. (In the top of the frame is a fish, I should have cropped it out)

This was the most colorful Nudibranch I saw. It is black and white with red/orange antennae looking things. The blue part is a type of soft coral. It looks like he has his head in the coral, but I'm not really sure where it's head is at.

This is another soft coral without a Nudibranch.

This is a sea snail, still in the Nudibranch family. It totally amazes me the fluorescent colors on some of the sea life we saw. And that it actually came out in this picture is even more amazing.

There were 13 in our group, here are a few of us getting ready to head for the boats. The 2 small guys with the darker skin are our Dive Master's. Super great guys!!!

This is my husband and I at a sight called Cathedral. According to our dive master they actually have wedding ceremony's there!!! The day we were there the current was pretty strong so I had to hold onto the cross to get the picture.

I've always said scuba isn't the most attractive sport, LOL!!!

Thanks for stopping by, tomorrow I will share some photos of the Octopus and more of God's amazing creatures.

I hope I will get back in my craft room this week as well. It's been taking me a while to just get caught up on house stuff and of course the job hunt was first on my list when I arrived home.

Hugs!!!



Hero Atrs October 2011 Challenge

Hero Art's has a new challenge for October, which includes 3 sketch's.

Here is my take on one of the sketches.

For this card I started off by punching circles 1 3/4 inches, nine times. Using repositionable adhesive I laid the cirlces onto a 6x6 card and used distress inks to create the blue background. (Broken China, Tumbled Glass, Faded Jeans, Chipped Sapphire). Using the cling snowflake stamp I stamped using a Pearl Paint dauber. After I lifted all the circles off I stamped snowflakes into the white spaces...

Next I took the circles that I had removed and added them to another 6x6 card adding brown snowflakes ontop of the ink and pearl paint. It was so fun getting 2 cards out of this technique.  

Thanks so much for stopping by. I will not be posting for the next couple of weeks but hopefully when I get back I will be able to give these other 2 sketches a try. Have a great couple of weeks and check out the Hero Art's blog to join in on the fun.