Sugar Ann sweet peas

 Coreopsis in the garden

emerging Staghorn sumac

 pink tulip

 male sycamore flowers

 a tree

Houstonia pusilla or 'tiny bluet' or 'least bluet' leaves

Minecraft mod updates

Our Minecraft mod doesn't have an official name yet.. we have been working on it for a few months.  I've added a lot of new textures and several new biomes with special woods and features.  It is a mixture of reality and fantasy, magic and artisan crafting.

There is a way to use many of the resources in the game as 'fiber' to make reed mats, wool items and string etc.. so nothing is wasted and can be used.  Also, many of the things can also be turned into coal bits that can be combined to make coal so you will never have anything useless sitting in your inventory.

The mod also has orchard trees, lots of different crops and cooking techniques.  We made it so it could stand alone without Harvestcraft, but we love Harvestcraft - and tried not to copy it, but to make sure many of the same elements of keeping a nice garden and making all of your own foods were implemented.

 

Below is the new cherrywoods biome.  I really like how the textures turned out on it.

 

 The upper left is vanilla brick, and all of the variations that can be made in this mod.  All of these textures can be made in survival.. but some of them of course are harder to make in quantity.  The upper right are the new fiber mats that can be made out of seaweed, jute and other fibers and used as flooring or building materials.  It can be dyed in some ways. 

The bottom left are the cabinets made from vanilla woods and special woods to go in the houses.  Most floor cabinets are nine spaces and most wall cabinets are four spaces - but.. there are a few that do not follow that pattern.  The bottom right are a variety of other textures that can be made - but not all of them.  There is a wide array of floor patterns that can be made with the different woods that are not shown yet.. that is a little 'dollhouse' feeling but I really liked some of the textures and wanted to include them for the 'feel' of it.

A sample lodge made with some of the texures and vanilla woods.  The 'golden sapphire glass' is slightly luminescent, like glowstone.  

 A kitchen

A living room

dogwoods in forest and nature as it happens

 the light in the beech was beautiful this morning

 the light in the beech was beautiful this morning

 beech tree... leavings from the nuts of last year.. female parts

 Beech tree.. male 'leaves'? catkins et al?

 black cherry

 

 this shot of the viburnum (snowball bush) makes me happy

 some antics happening next to me when I was taking pictures of the viburnum

 Daphne at the lake, completely ignoring the geese

 a  miracle type shot.. he landed next to me when I was taking shots of the land behind there

 geese at the lake

 geese

And my actual goal today.. to find a dogwood beginning to bloom and take some shots of it for future artwork...  That is what got me out and moving.. and without that idea, none of the rest of the images would have happened

 

woods violet

forest

 It was foggy this morning.. the colors seemed a bit surreal.  I walked all the way back home, grabbed the camera, and went back out into the morning to capture a bit of it.

ink

 It rained yesterday, and it is raining again today.  Hunted all over for this yesterday, and found it.  Then sat down to try my hand out at it again.

This morning I made a basket.. but off to work now.  Picture of that some other day.

 As mentioned, basket.. and spinosaurus.
A basekt of spinosaurus.
Ha

bits o

 Callie cat up close and personal

 

Used some rescued clearance tile to make a tile tray... a little scrap of rough wood out of the garage and a little paint and it's done.  I found the tile more than a month ago, and liked the way one piece is slightly 'cracked' on the surface... and these four pieces were the only ones there...so they called to me a little....

sketching at the new desk... dog sketches off of pinterest stuff I was looking at and tried a bit at some honeysuckle and a tree and a little shed I see on the way home every day.

This is the plan we've developed for rearranging the downstairs.... Esme and Mark and I all contributed.... now to just do it over the next few months