Glassy

CHEERS: Yesterday evening and this morning, our latest art project involved doing a project for a neighbor. The neighbor had posted to our local Buy Nothing group, asking for help making a custom gift, etching a wine glass, for a wine aficionado. 

Christian and I had done some glass etching before, and I knew Annabelle's Cricut machine wizardry could make it possible, so I volunteered us.

The neighbor came over and we selected a font. It was an all caps font - and if you look at wine bottles, it's amazing how many of them are all caps. Like 80 percent plus, I'm guessing.

Annabelle programmed the Cricut to cut out the words, and then carefully 'weeded' them to get the stencils ready.

After that was the trickiest part - applying the stencils to the wine glass. Just saying, trying to put a linear stencil onto a rounded surface is really not easy.

 Fortunately, Annabelle made it work. After that, it was time to apply the etching cream.

Mercifully, the process worked just fine, and she churned out a pair of custom glasses in good time. Hooray!

BLUE BIRD: A couple of months ago, we were in Costco and saw some pretty, big bird feeders. I impulse bought one. We have had it out back for about eight weeks now and have really enjoyed the steady stream of feathered friends who frequent it.  (We have less enjoyed the squirrels and occasional rat. Shudder.)

Anywhoo, we often have black-headed blue birds out back. We learned that those are called stellar's jay.

But yesterday morning I saw a bird out back that was not one of our black-headed friends. I took a photo with my cell phone and used the Google lens feature on the image.  It almost immediately told me the backyard visitor was a California scrub jay. 

Pretty cool! We're enjoying learning more about our feathered friends.