June favourites

 In spite of ongoing stress and a heatwave,  June was quite a productive month.

The first two cards were for a sewing/stitches challenge. I made the Tyvek one and then remembered I had wanted to revisit a challenge where you stitched a grid on some paper with the sewing machine, then soaked it briefly in warm water and then distressed it gently between your fingers till some of the paper came out, leaving a lacy like (more or less according to your taste) panel. I'm still not happy that the purple ink I stamped the sentiment with is a totally different tone to what I used to colour the aquilegia, so I might yet stamp it again in a dark green...

The last two were for a technique challenge - I had decided last year not to feature it myself because the lovely examples I had scene all used scenic DP which is something I have very little of. But I looked through what I had and reckoned this paper pad would work well, just meaning that I had to cut my strips narrower than most people did. And with the wonders of hindsight I realised after I had made them that of course I could have just stamped a scene and used that.  Stress and tiredness are what I blame...

The header photo this month is from when I visited Ballybeg Priory in Cork with my sister last year. I thought I should have had more photos from Doneraile Park, but I know it was a very hot, sunny day and it wasn't the best for photos, and the one I would most like to have used wouldn't really work for a blog header. 

One week, two walks

 Last Saturday we picked C's niece up from the Luas terminus ( light rail network) and went for a walk in Phoenix Park before lunch. First thing we saw after parking was a group of people with large nets, and when I looked back, it was four years ago less one day that I had also seen a similar sight, and it was people looking for the young fawns to tag them.

Mallard with chicks on the bank of one of the ponds, hen tufted duck with chicks on the Quarry pond (they're hard to see, but if you zoom in you'll see the chicks are still so small that one of them is standing on a lily pad)... When C's brother and all the family were over here 20 years ago we also went for a walk in the park, and when the girls first saw the deer, they were so excited that they were finding it difficult to hold their cameras steady to take photos. So it was nice to see a large herd of deer again this time.

We've been having something of a heatwave here - not as extreme as the UK and mainland Europe, but still hot by Irish standards. Last night we went for a walk along the canal in the evening.

The foreground in the heron shot is one of the houseboats moored along the bank. There were two adult swans and four cygnets down at the 12th Lock. And walking back I spotted a hen blackbird gathering berries to bring back to the nest.