Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all my readers.  I don't tell you often enough how much I appreciate you spending time reading my blog and wading through all my photos.  Thank you so much.

Speaking of which, although it's now 2015 I wanted to finish up 2014 with some photos of Tenerife.

We arrived in Tenerife and rather than taking the motorway route to the hotel we took the  road up through the centre of the island.

 

And here was our first view of the volcano - El Teide.

 

The lava field.

We stayed the whole week in La Orotava.  This was the view from our bedroom window at the Hotel Rural Victoria.  It looks grey and cloudy because the island was covered in a thick sand cloud from the Sahara.

 

La Orotava is built on the hillside and here you can see down to Puerto de la Cruz by the sea.

Tenerife is famous for its balconied buildings.

We saw several crosses attached to buildings.

Another view to the sea in Puerto de la Cruz.

 In Garrachio.

On the Friday the cloud had mostly gone so we went back to El Teide

 to go up it on the cable car.

There was snow at the top.

 And this was the view with still some sand cloud remaining.

In the afternoon we went to Los Gigantes and took a cruise on this yacht.

We shared the yacht with a Lithuanian family that live in England.

We saw lots of dophins and mostly I watched them rather than trying to take photographs.  I did manage to get these two photos though.

It is possible to walk all day from the top of this cliff to the beach at the bottom and get a water taxi back to the marina!  Not for me!

Another spectacular valley.

Los Gigantes are several enormous cliffs and the rock structure was amazing.

El Teide as the sun was setting.

The view from the hotel roof was great.

 Right down to the sea.

And of course to the ever-present volcano.

When we had come down from the volcano the whole area was over-run with tourists so we came back early the next day to walk.

The walk warned of the 60% incline at the end of the walk.

The beginning of the walk looked so innocuous.  A beautiful level path.  With of course El Teide in the distance.

And then we met the first of the areas where you needed mountain goat skills.

Solidified lava.

Looking down into the crater.

The path down.

And the path back up.   Can you see the small figure standing at the top - that's where we had to get to!

And my reward for finishing the morning's walk.  You guessed - another walk.  However this was described as easy.

And this was the view half way round.

 And guess what!  El Teide

Our last day included a visit to the village of Icod to see the Dragon Tree.

A hair-raising ride along hairpin bends on roads that in some parts weren't wide enough for 2 cars to pass and yet was a bus route!

And our final port of call (deliberate pun) where we saw boats.

And then back to the airport and our flight home.

Thanks for stopping by.  Thank you for all your lovely comments over the past year.  I hope you have a great 2015.

Bernice

Starting work in my 2015 Journal

Regular readers will know that I am using a Dylusions Journal for a monthly calendar, my Take Me Deeper devotional and my word for the year.

I described how I prepared my journal here.

I started with the January calendar.   I found some scrapbooking cardstock and cut narrow strips.

I stuck the strips down on the left hand page and on the flap on the right.

I put some clear gesso through a snowflake stencil.

I used 3 colours of Distress Ink over parts of the pages and took the colour off where the clear gesso was.  This technique works better with spray inks!

Using a punch I cut 31 flower shapes and then stamped the days of the week.

I stamped snowflakes with Archival Ink.

I stuck the flowers down and wrote the numbers on.   There isn't much room to write something for each day but to me that's a good thing!

Take Me Deeper and logos365 don't officially start until January 1st but I thought I would do my main word page.

I started by putting gesso over the page.  When that was dry I scraped 2 colours of acrylic paint onto the bottom third of the page.   I pressed a spider's web stencil into the wet paint in the hopes it would dry to look like parched earth.

At the top of the page I scraped modelling paste through a raindrop stencil.  I put a thin coat of two tones of blue acrylic paint over it.  However I forgot to take a photo of this stage.  The cracks didn't show up very well when the paint was dry so I stamped on it with Sepia Archival Ink.

I printed out the word thirst and stuck the letters front side onto a page of a Bible that I bought from a Dollar Store for the express purpose of using it in  my artwork.   I cut them out and stuck them onto my page.  When the glue was dry I drew turquoise lines inside the letters.

I printed out the verse from John 4:13 and stuck it onto my page.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice