My crafty creations corner
Just managed to fit in an entry for this week. My Dorset Adventure posts are taking so much time and I haven’t even found time to think of monochrome!
As a Christian the first meaning of the word ‘cross’ that comes to mind is obvious.
This is from the archives and was taken on the hill above Lourdes when it was very, very misty up there. 
The above is actually a monochrome version but you could hardly tell the difference from the original colour version. 
Now when I was about five or six I would lie in bed at night and work out what was my favourite flower, tree, bird, animal, …………. because I felt that it helped me understand the sort of person that I was. However I have not played those sort of games for a long, long time and have come to appreciate the amazing variety that life offers. After all, although blue is my designated ‘favourite colour’, I am a Rainbow Junkie after all and even if you say ‘blue’ which shade of blue?
However I did realise that over the years I have often had a favourite mug. Of course favourite mugs don’t stay favourite for ever; they get knocked against the tap or the handles fall off!
I do have an awful lot of mugs but when I began to think of favourites I realised that at present I have two sets of mugs that are a bit special. One was a set of china mugs that I bought in Salisbury market which have a theme of teddy bears. There are the ‘breakfast bears’, ‘teatime bears’ and ‘bedtime bear’s, and also ‘playtime bears’ and ‘musical bears’. More recently I have bought the latest Disney ‘original Pooh’ mugs.
In both of these sets, although I like them all I do have a favourite.
So here is a photograph of those two favourites. 
And as an aside: my favourite shade of blue is probably somewhere in this photograph.
This is the third of the photographs I talked about taking.
This one taken on the way home from the Common.
I did later find a similar poster not far from my home but I thought the very fact that this poster is a bit worse for wear added to the poignancy.
Checking that I had the correct meaning of stationary (and not the paper variety) I pondered what one might take.
I came up with this. 
Also taken on the Common after I had photographed the bicycle for last week. You can see that bicycles were still on my mind as the previous photograph might also have counted as ‘Stationary’.
There were two bicycles but then it would have been a very low wide photograph.
I don’t seem to have much time for photography lately but I went for a walk to the Common on Saturday and managed to take photographs which will do for the next three prompts!!
Here is the one for ”Cycle’. 
Not very imaginative perhaps but so many meanings for the word ‘cycle’ are abstract!
There not being a lot of visible birds round here this was the best I could do.
I hear lots of blackbirds morning and night and there’s evidence of birds flying over my paving, probably big ones like pigeons, but no birds hopping around.
However on Tuesday when I was sitting in The Hawthorns Café on Southampton Common after the walk I remember the local Robin. I wasn’t sitting at the best table for seeing him but I got up and followed him as he hopped around the paving looking for crumbs.
This was taken with my phone while he was under a table. He didn’t like me getting too close so this is pixel for pixel what the camera took: hence the quality!
Ah! how to encapsulate nature in one photograph?
Of course one cannot, but instead of giving you a collection of photographs that show different aspects of nature, I will share just this one photograph that seemed to me at the time to encapsulate the true beauty of nature as found in Britain. In this case in Wales, near Tywyn.
I took it when I was on my second holiday in the area when out on a walk.
This is the photograph I have chosen for this week’s challenge. 
It was taken when my daughter and I were on the Danube cruise at Durnstein. It is one I have not shared with you before.
I had so many other arch photographs to chose from though that I have used before.
There was this 
another one taken at Durnstein.
This one from Esztergom
that is quite a collection of arches.
And a lovely flowered arch from Mottisfont
taken when I visited the rose garden one June.
When my daughter and I were on the Danube Cruise I only took one picture of a lunch we had. It was towards the end of the trip, the day we arrived back in Budapest.
It was this. 
Porkholt with salad and I can’t remember what the white stuff is. Quite delicious!
Always one to be pedantic. I looked up the definition of pond to see how it differed from that of a lake.
Google gave me this for pond:- “a small body of still water formed naturally or by artificial means.”
THIS gives a detailed explanation of the difference but basically it appears to be about depth rather than size.
So in order to be on the safe side I chose this picture that I took recently in London. 
This ornamental pond is in Victoria Embankment Gardens, the part next to Savoy Place, near the north end of Waterloo Bridge.
I also took a picture of this little chap that you can’t see in the above photograph because he is hidden by the tree fern. 
