Blog Description

A French-Inspired Garden and Home by Judith Stringham

April - The Blue Hour

Friday, April 1, 2016

l'heure bleue en avril 
the blue hour in April 

Because of its beauty that makes time stop for an instant, the expression l'heure bleue has come to describe a variety of special times and events, not just a description of a special blue glow at dusk. Each month in 2016, I am sharing a collage of blue images that create a little l'heure bleue for me. 

Sources: large bee - The Graphics Fairy
bee hive atop foliage and bee cluster - Victoria magazine free printables (2011)




Bees 

In north Texas, April is filled with bees actively collecting nectar from blossoming trees, shrubs, wildflowers, herbs, cultivated flowers, and grasses. Seeing several bees recently flit from bloom to bloom on a large clump of rosemary was fascinating. 


So much so, that I STOPPED (time stood still for a l'heure bleue moment) to watch them. As I drew nearer to them, the rest of the world faded into a soft blur on the edges of my vision. I was equally fascinated by hearing the low hum of their buzzing as they merrily went about their task of gathering nectar to create honey for their queen and themselves. 

Focused, and not frenetically, they calmly, purposely set about their purpose in life. Of course, we all know that bees CAN sometimes become frazzled and frenetic when disturbed. However, most of their lives they ignore what is going on around them and remain focused on their own purposes. 

Bee calm and bzzzzz on... 
is a motto I am embracing as I set about the purposes in my life. 

Mother's final income tax return, MY income tax return, clean-up from the past two thunderstorms with hail, cleaning house, doing laundry... after a trip to Alabama to do Mother's taxes.... fill my days. I will BEE calm and bzzzzz on. 



Creating the l'heure bleue en April collage... while the bee images are free from The Graphics Fairy and Victoria magazine, none of them were blue in the original.  Each image was re-colorized using Preview and Microsoft editing tools. Each image was converted to a jpeg format and inserted into a Powerpoint slide to create the one-page collection of images.

Just this year I discovered that Microsoft software has an option for editing "pictures" that changes the outline shape of a picture from a rectangle. That is how I created the hexagon shapes of each image in the collage.

The individual bees scattered across the page were "cropped" from a separate copy of the beehive-atop-foliage image. Using rotation, resizing, and recoloring tools in Microsoft, I was able to place the bees across the page.

Here is a sneak peek at the next blog post that also has Bzzz Ezzz Ezzz S.



Would you like to see the other l'heure bleue collages?