back yard

I think we’ve already established that I might have a little problem.

Well, okay, so I have a few problems.  Not the least of which is that whole can’t-have-the-toilet-paper-roll-toward-the-wall-or-I-go-INSANE thing.  But I’m not talking about those problems.

I’m talking about books.  And the way that my book collection is probably bigger than my fiber stash.  Which, really, is kinda sayin’ somethin’.

Psychosis aside, I have this tendency to buy art books and then be unable to go all the way through them.  Like with Traci’s Collage Unleashed, which is still sitting there on my 101 list, waiting for me to get off my duff and have the sewing machine fixed so I can finish some more projects from it.  I either hit a place where I don’t have the “right” tools/materials, or I get so overstimulated that I get nothing else done until I get up and DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW.  Which is kind of okay, in a way, but tends to mean I forget about the book once I’m off and running in my own direction.

Which is why I’m claiming Addiction is to blame for these two I’m going to share today.  Because even though I really kind of wanted to not buy any more art/creativity books until I finished the Collage Unleashed list item, I sort of went a little nuts without my fix and bought a whole lot of them.  Like, refill-my-recently-cleared shelves type “a lot”.  Oops.

We’ve talked, you and I, about art journaling before.  And how I do it on a fairly regular basis, even when I’m not doing any other art stuff.  When I don’t, I tend to start to feel a little overwhelmed and skitzy, so anything that helps in that arena is always A Good Thing.

Enter book #1, True Vision: Authentic Art Journaling, by LK Ludwig.

This was one of those books that I kind of vultured on pre-order.  I don’t  usually *actually* pre-order books, because I know when they come out, and I’m already refreshing amazon.com a few days before the release date so I can order it THAT VERY SECOND.

(We can talk some other time about my obsession with being First.)

I really liked a lot of LK’s other book about nature journals, though I was a little dismayed by the way it seemed more project-based than process-based.  (Nothing at all wrong with it, mind you.  There are some who are more comfortable learning how to do a specific something or type of technique than they are being led through a process of creation, and I get that.  It just ain’t me, man.  Inspire me and point me in a direction and yell GO! and all’s well.)  I worried a little bit that this one would do the same Here’s A Picture, Here’s How To Make That Picture thing.

But oh-ho-hoooo, dear readers.  It does not.  In fact, this book may be my new favorite on the subject, and I have read THEM ALL.  (No, really.  I think I have.  Wrote one once…THAT’s how much I’ve read on the subject.  I IS A EXPERT.)  And here’s why:

Not only is it a book that has good ideas for some techniques the intermediate art journaller may not have yet tried, it’s also got pages by art journallers who aren’t the Same Old Names — you know.  The ones you see EVERYWHERE, that you may or may not be just a smidge sick of seeing at this point.  Not that this doesn’t make them fabulous artists, but I like some variety now and again, and I swear, there are some people who are in EVERY SINGLE BOOK.  EVER.  And I like that this book has a good mix of known and not-so-known artists who are all, every one, AMAZING artists, whether you’ve ever heard of them before or not.  (And it helps that some of them are friends of mine.  Just sayin’.)  There are also *interviews* with the artists, who talk about *their process*.  Did you see the buzzword there?  Process of journaling.  This makes me squee.  A lot.

The eye candy alone is worth the book’s purchase, but the interviews and “insight exercises” that are scattered throughout make it priceless.  Not to mention the prompts for writing/creation that are on every fore-edge and bottom of most (if not all) pages.  LK Ludwig *rules* and I now want to be her if I’m ever forced to grow up.  Which may never happen, God willing.

Second book, which is a little self-explanatory, is 1000 Artist’s Journal Pages, edited by Dawn Sokol.

I have to give the little disclaimer here that this one?  Totally makes me kind of sad.  Because I was supposed to be IN this one, or, at least, my pages were supposed to.  But sadly, my scanner wasn’t of a high enough resolution and the only other option was to ship them my books, and OMG THE POSTAL SERVICE SUCKS.  I had horrible visions of losing my Seattle visual journals to the postal gods, because things?  Totally disappear in the mail, whether insured or not.  And when something’s that priceless?  Oh, but no.  I will clutch those books tightly until someone pries them out of my cold, dead fingers.

Disclaimer aside, this is sitting next to me on the desk RIGHT NOW.  Not because it’s all that fabulous for reading (as in, there’s really no words or explanations at all), but it is amazing for eye candy.  Need to get inspired in a hurry?  Need to see a bunch of other people’s work and flickr’s down?  No problem.  Heft the book, flip the pages, and you’ll be off and running before you can whistle for the Muse.

There are a TON of styles represented (which I absolutely LOVE about it), from the collagey, very-very-finished type pages, to the simple pen-and-ink type ones with words and a little color (or not).  If you’re one of those that thinks you can’t “art journal” because you don’t keep journals that look like the Very Very Finished thing that people sometimes show online?  This book will smack you upside the head and remind you that, just like artists themselves, art JOURNALS can be just about ANYTHING, and that ALL of those styles are just that — styles, not a judgement type thing.

For the record, this is one of the ones that was totally going to be in this book, but nooooooo.  (Not bitter at all.  Ahem.)

I weep for things that could have been.

Okay, not really.  But it sounded good.

So go buy books.  You know you wanna, so here’s your permission slip — these two are fabulous and I highly recommend them both.

A few weeks back now, a friend of mine sent me some polished rocks with a story.  They were from Seattle, had been carried back to the midwest, and when she inherited them, been polished by her and some of them were mailed to me.  I squeed, a lot, and then arranged them on my desk in an arrow facing west.  Figured it was a nice reminder of which way to go when things get squidgy around here.

I kept looking at them, and this one, with its mottled greenness and one flat side, kept asking to be picked up.

(No, I’m not THAT insane…er…yet….but it was the one that felt best in my hand, with a space for my finger. :>)

Figured I’d make it into something to carry with me to remind me of home.  A couple of pieces of 26-gauge wire and six beads later, there we have it.

Do I even need to mention I haven’t taken it off yet?

And in windfall-type-news, yesterday, a listener and new friend sent me a package of four ginormous rocks from just downstream of Mt. Si — the first mountain I ever climbed, and probably my favorite place out there.  Other than Denny Creek — that trail’s *hard*, but so worth it, too.  She sent pictures from where they were taken, and I can *almost* smell Washington on them if I put a drop of water on ‘em.

I think I might be a little homesick.

Or just itching for another road trip.  (Despite the fact that, as I get older and older, the prospect of two days in the car to get there is becoming less and less appealing.  I’m impatient and I get tired quicker than I did ten years ago.  Go figure.)

Maybe I’m just looking back to try to find a missing piece of my heart somewhere.

I’m really not sure what happened to me.

One minute, there I was, all happy and perfectly fine with my yarn and my fiber, fondling it at will, knitting all wrapped around my brain like kudzu on a lamppost.  I thought about patterns and colorways, and about plies and wpi, and what evil things Ravelry.com does to a wallet and my free time.  In other words, there I was, being all knitterly and stuff.

And then, the Soap came.

Blindsided me a little, actually.  I bought a bar of soap from MagicalOmaha.com’s retail store, mainly because I liked the smell of it and that particular manufacturer doesn’t make perfume oils.  A couple entries ago, in the Before Virus Time (which seems like FOREVER ago…that virus was a GIANT pain in my backside for more than a MONTH.), I think I mentioned the Great Girly Phase of 2008 was ramping up to be a major source of obsession?

Um, yeah.  Ahem.

Guess who might have bought a few (zillion pounds of) supplies?  And guess who might have, as of the time of this writing, made about 315 bars of said soap?  And guess who just ordered six more molds and came up with this little bit of love to wrap them in?

If you guessed “you, dunderhead, because this is your journal and you could never resist adding yet more things to do every day until you have bent time and space to its full capacity of Crazy”….you’re right.  On a whole lot more levels than I’m comfortable with admitting, actually.  Ahem.

Once I have 25 different soaps and scents that I’m happy with, I’ll be popping these up somewhere.  Soap, when done cold-process like these are, takes roughly four to six weeks to cure and become soapy.  (All soap, no matter what kind, is done with lye, and if you use it too soon, it will dry out your skin, even though the lye itself is inert at that point and has been transformed via chemical process to soap.  The pH balance of the stuff slowly cures into a nice soap-like range, and THEN it’s ready to use.  I’m giving them the full six weeks, because I want ‘em to be *good* right off the bat for y’all.  End of July or so.)  Either etsy or the L&V store.  One of the two.  Maybe a store of its own, for simplicity’s sake.  I’m not sure yet.

I have 5ml bottles and sample-sizes of all the perfume oils, too.  I like them all, but there are a couple that I’d buy even if I didn’t make ‘em, so I think I’m doing pretty well, actually.

Because what I really needed?  more than anything else in the whole wide world?  SOMETHING ELSE TO DO.

Just sayin’.

On another note:

I’m a believer in Big love.  Not the HBO series about scarily un-freaky polygamists.    But capital-B, Bigass love that makes your chest fill up and your knees quiver.  The kind where all the external world bullshit doesn’t matter anymore, because you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that if it all went away tomorrow and it was just you and the Other and an empty mountainside, you’d be just fine.  The kind where you sleep deeper just knowing they live.  The kind where you are a better person just for knowing them.

I thought I had that once. I was very young, very stupid, and my hair was very big.  (No, really.  Pictures exist.  Bigass hair.)  It was brief, as things tend to be when you’re 17 and very stupid.  (And no, not all 17-year-olds are stupid.  But I was.)  But it was bright and deep and burned.

If you’d asked me three years ago who the great love of my life was, I’d have said I had one once.  I loved other people in the interim, and still love some of them very much.   But I’d have had them on a little sliding scale, put up against that one, and all the others would have lost big.

I have it now.

SO.

I cleaned out all the stuff in the templates.  We talked about that last time I popped in to strangle the crap out of figure out what was happening with the bloggybits.  (On all sites, not just moderngypsy.  I think, at last count, I have like eightybillion wordpress blogs for various reasons.  Which might be a little exaggerated.  Or not.)

Turns out that upgrading and such was just TOO LATE, because I’d been hit with something called a SQL Injection attack, which is where virus-writer asshats put code into something that injects itself RIGHT INTO YOUR DATABASES.  Not just onto the wordpress parts, but in the main part of your chunky blue db.

Now, listen:  I know more than some do about how this whole thing works.  And I’m a pretty smart cookie when it comes to picking it up.  But OH MY GOD I HAD NO CLUE.  I took one look at the MySQL thingeedealiedoo-hah, and burst into tears.  It was kind of par for the course for yesterday, but still…Frustration Central, in a can.

Luckily, thanks to my new best friend evar, Dani, we were able to figure out where the jerks were getting in at and what they’d changed that was displaying on all the blogs even though all the malicious codeybits were removed from the footers.  And it’s FINALLY FIXED.

I know.  I’ve said that before.  But this time, we got the databases, we got the places in the back-end/root code they’d affected, and I have decided to start sharpening pointed pieces of bamboo to shove under the fingernails of any virus-writer hacker asshats that I might meet.    I kind of hope I never meet one.  There would be blood.

OKAY, so…clear your cache, run an antivirus scan thingee, and all should be well.  Tons of stuff going on here at Chez Eliza, so hopefully, NOW I can STOP with the virus talk and get back to the Art, which is what most of you are here for anyway.

Whew.

First of all, imagine a very long string of cuss words here.  Invent some new ones.  Scream them at the top of your lungs.

There’s my week for you.

My entire website was hacked, be-virused, and infiltrated with malicious code that would give *every visitor* a virus.  And not just THIS website, either.  ALL the websites under my control, since they’re all on this account.  All of them.  And there are quite a few.

My to-do lists and artmaking and even my knitting sat in the backseat of this road trip to crazytown.  I *finally* got the last iFrame removed this morning, though I think there might still be some code issues with scentistas.com.  Avoid that one for a while yet.  I’ll let you know when it’s safe.

I’m just so tired.  Code makes my head hurt.  All I’ve wanted to do is make bars of soap and pretty yarn, and instead, I’ve been doing another kindof cleaning entirely.

All I want to know is this:  why aren’t we doing something about these people?  Yes, some of them are in Russia, or China, or somewhere.  We need amnesty from the conventional rules so we can go get them and stop these thieves from doing this to people.  I’m generally a pacifist, but dude, seriously…I’d be the first one standing in line to kick these asshats in the nads for what they’ve put me through this week.  I’d jump at the chance to pour fire ants on them, or to keep his eyeballs as a souvenier.

Something *has* to be done.  (Anybody think it’s ironic that we’ll bomb Iraq for oil, but the chinese government pays for backdoor viruses to steal all your money, and we sit by and brush it off?  No, really.  The *government* paid for the virus infiltrating software hack thingee that hit my sites this week, and that’s beyond wrong.)

More when I’m not exhausted and bitter, because I’m sure this makes for completely unexciting reading.  Just wanted to let y’all know that it should be safe now, and if you *haven’t* run a virus scan lately, OMG….DO.  Do it NOW.  Stop reading this, update your definitions or pay for a new antivirus program, and SCAN YOUR SYSTEM.

Because this?  This giant pain in the drain?  So not worth it.

I have about two seconds of DSL before the storm knocks it out again, but I wanted to touch base and tell you that today?  Fired.

This morning, I found that my wordpress got hacked back in April or so.  I mean, I knew that part of it.  Dreamhost (my webhost) fixed it pretty quickly, but told me a bunch of stuff to do with the upgrade, blah blah blah that I fully *intended* to do at some point, but kind of forgot about with May’s time off.

Turns out that when my WP got hacked, the spammer asshats put some kind of code in the page that was A VIRUS.  I’m not sure why or how or why it chose this past week or so to come out from being dormant, but those of you who have visited and have no virus software?  Find some.  Apparently, there’s a popup that was coming up that plays on your active-x commands or somesuch, brought on by a .jpg file that *I* sure as hell didn’t know about that contains a NASTY virus that makes cockroaches eat your screen.

No, seriously.  It blanks out your browser and images of cockroaches start eating your browser.  Very cute, viruswriter asshats.  Go die.

So just now, after cleaning my system all freakin’ morning and dealing with TORNADOES all evening (no, really — we’re talking THIRTY FIVE of them in a line from Minnesota to Kansas, with at least nine of them here in our area, including one that wiped out a Boy Scout Camp just north of here and killed four boys. It has been A DAY.  And not a GOOD DAY, either.), which has been prompting our DSL line to just randomly go out for fifteen or twenty minutes at a pop before coming back online….I find that WordPress issued a big post thingie that says that even IF you upgraded, you have to do all this code crap to make sure that you’re not passing virii on to your unwitting visitors.  Like, YOURSELF.

*shudder*

Let me just say it now:  I am soooo not a codehead.  If you’re visiting right now, you’ll note that the blog looks a little different.  It’s going to for a little while — it’s the default settings — because I have to get in there and muck around with the code AGAIN to get it back to where it was before.

Right after I change all my passwords again and hope that this fixed the virus problem.  Some days, I swear….just *fired*.  Today, YOU ARE FIRED.

p.s.  I have pictures of a funnel cloud forming from a sunken wallcloud.  I need to get out of tornado alley.

While I was ‘gone’, so to speak, it’s not like I was a TOTAL slacker.

Okay, yes, for the most part, there was much slackage.  Or what a lot of folks would probably read as slacking.  It was more “creative loafing”.  Ahem.  Lots of puttering around, discovering my stash again, knocking things off the personal to-do list, spending time with the family, as small as it is.

But I made a bunch of art, too, so all’s well, right?

Above is part of a two-piece collage series on 8″ squares of wood.  It’s called “Sweet” and it’s my favorite of the two.  I think the other one, “Home”, may not be done yet.  It needs something.  I’ll figure it out at some point.  This is Home:

Actually, looking at it now, I think I know what it needs.  I’ll get on that straightaway when I’m done babbling at you all.

I also carved a whole metric buttload of stamps.  I’m over half-way on the List Item of Fifty Stamped Doom now, in fact.  For those not planning to letterbox in/around the Omaha, NE area, there are images of those over there in the sidebar under the list item name.  (They might be letterboxes, so rather than spoil it for anyone, I’ll just leave them there.  I know there aren’t many of us out here in the hinterlands, but you never know…) :)

Speaking of the hinterlands, we totally had a tornado warning last night.  The sirens were going off just after J got home from MCing a show over in Omaha, and because of the accoustics of the river, we can hear them here if it’s quiet.  And folks, it was QUIET.  Like, all the wind stopped, the rain stopped, and all of a sudden, there was this godawful wail, all disembodied and freaky.  Took me a minute to realize what it was, in fact.  So I pulled up weather.com, and there t’was, bright red and blinking:  TORNADO WARNING.

Now, for those of you not from the hinterlands of grass and cows, let me explain:  There are tornado *watches* all the time.  The conditions are right for a tornado to occur ALL THE TIME.  We even get really weird skies sometimes that are freakin’ spooky — all green and roiling and you can just feel the balance in the air…if one little thing tips just right, one butterfly flaps a wing just a little too hard, and that sky is COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA.  Zombie clouds, out for brains.

It doesn’t happen all that often, though.  This year’s been worse than most (GLOBAL WARMING, ANYONE!?  DUH.), but even on a bad year, the destruction isn’t all that widespread versus, say, a hurricane, because it’s so localized.  At most maybe a path a mile wide and thirty miles long.  (Which is a *lot*, don’t get me wrong.  But in the grand scheme of things, a tiny fraction of the whole midwest with each storm, unlike the bigger disasters like floods that take out entire swaths of states.)

So when I saw the WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! going across the screen, I may have freaked out just a little bit.

Okay, fine, I freaked out a lot.  Grabbed Emma because I can carry her fat little behind, and got J out of the shower (his head was all soapy), and we hightailed it to the shelter, where we tried like hell to get the laptop to connect for updates.  Let me just say that four panting dogs and a still-dirty-but-wet husband in a damp bathroom shelter in the middle of an already-dirty building?  Aromatic.  To say the least.

We didn’t sustain much damage.  The storm had already lifted by the time it got over the river (as usually occurs), and we lost a few tree branches, but scarily enough — garden was totally untouched.  Even the trailer-trash bed I put in two days ago.  (Planted some of the radishes in it to get them out of the mystically growing pot of them.)  Tornadic winds are weird.

Speaking of the garden….

OMG!  TOMATOES!  I MADE FOOD!

There are seven or eight of them on the bush now, and I. am. chuffed.  I can kill plants just by looking askance at them, and the tomatoes apparently didn’t get that memo.  The bush has probably doubled in size since that last picture I took, and there are little flowers all over it, each of them starting to develop a little green bit of love right there in the middle of ‘em.

I get all puffed up looking at them.  J’s completely stymied, because he comes from ranch stock and doesn’t get that I’m finding this all to be some kind of weird alchemical type magic trick.  Take dirt + plant + sun + water, wave a magic wand, and PRESTO!  FOOD!

I expect I’ll become obnoxious about it all pretty soon.  I already make people admire the Miracle Tomatoes before they walk in the door.

In the spirit of Obnoxious:

I took lots of pictures of the little pot with the peppers and radishes, too.  (See how dense they are?  I thought maybe one in ten would come up, due to my crappy gardening skillz, but noooo.  I’m transplanting now.)

And one more gratuitous shot (only one, and only because the pictures of the flowers on the jalapenos and anchos didn’t come out well enough…ahem.):

One of the shoe garden shoes is getting little spikes on it!  And a couple of them have little purple flowers, despite them being out there in the elements all the time.  In the shade.  It’s just boggling to me.

I have more to talk about, but this is getting long.  Remind me next time to tell you about the community-wide garage sale that we went to (O! M! G!  SCORE!), and the knitting that got done and the spinning pictures of a zillion pounds of handspun (finished another 8 oz last night) and a couple of good book recommendations and the re-surgence of my favorite mailing list Evar, and the soap thing.

Oh, man.  The soap thing.  Obsession x100.  That’s all I’m sayin’.

I’ll leave you today with another little bit of Art Playtime.  I found Zentangles via the aforementioned Favorite List Evar, and the concept is simple — make a scribble in a square, and then start filling it in with small, repetitive patterns.  The point isn’t to make things that look good, necessarily, but to get into a Zen state of mind where things flow and you’re empty and at peace.  Those of you who are artists know what I’m talking about — that mindspace where time just STOPS and you are just a pen, making marks on a page, and when you come out of it, you look up and an hour’s passed somehow.  Best feeling in the world, that one.

Anyway, I tried it after the discussion on Belle Papier, and this was it:

Obviously, it was part of a larger journal page.  But it really worked — I had no idea how much time was going by.

There’s a kit available on the site with some high-quality paper blanks, a pen, a book, and some other stuff.  It’s $50, though, so it might price out some folks.  Suffice it to say that you don’t *need* the kit in order to make Zentangles.

It kind of reminds me of the psychochicken, actually.  (If you don’t know what that is — I’ll look for it and post it next time.  It is what occurs when Eliza meets Vicodin on an up-close-and-personal level.  Oh, but seriously.)

More soonish!

(this is why I should not let more than a few days go by without updating, obviously.  Sheesh.)

Hi, y’all.

I just want to warn you, up front, that this is going to be the most EPIC POST EVAR, unless I run out of steam, which I might, since it’s about a hundred degrees up here and I am a delicate rain forest flower that can’t deal well with sweat.  But there’s pictures (a whole LOT of pictures, sorry if you’re on dial-up…) finally, and while I was being a giant slacker on the bloggy front, I was totally NOT being a slacker on the Doing Things front.  Which equates to OMG BLOGGERPOSTEXPLOSION.

See how I am?  I won’t let it go this long again.

Let’s see…where to even start?

I took a month off from all my real-world duties, in order to heal up a bit and get back into The Grooooove.  I didn’t realize how worn down I’d been, going at a frantic pace before my appendix decided to poke me a little and say “Oh, yeah!?  Watch THIS!”  *boom!*.  And I almost didn’t make it the full month, even.  My poor brain, unaccustomed to slowing down for five minutes, tried to rebel and move to Florida.  (Not really.  It’s also a delicate rainforest flower.)  But still…

During that month, I started doing a lot of things that weren’t connected by wires to the Grander Scheme Of Things.  In other words, I disconnected a lot.  Turned OFF the computer and went *outside*.  I know, I know.  It’s shocking, for me.

The big thing I did outside was this:

Which doesn’t look all that impressive, does it?

What it is, though, is my garden.  Or, at least, part of it.  (And dog butts.  Because those are EVERYWHERE around here.)  Our soil here is full-on clay.  Rock-hard, no oxygenation, no vegetable matter, nothing.  Trying to dig holes in it requires, at times, *jackhammers*.  No kidding.  (Remember, though — Adobe is made out of dirt.  Our kind of dirt.  I have, essentially, a ceramic back yard.)

While weeds tend to grow in proliferation here, grass takes the next train for Elsewhere, and J’s mom told me point blank when I moved in that nothing would grow here, ever.  That if I wanted to have some homegrown vegetables or anything, I should find a good market, because it’s like Plant Death came here to crash on the couch and never left.

This, my friends, seemed like a nice little challenge to me.  Double-challenge, really, since even with good soil, I can kill an otherwise-healthy plant at fifty paces.

I thought about square-foot gardening, or raised beds, but I wasn’t sure if all the work of ripping up the yard would be worth it if I just exercised my black thumb.  So I got a whole lot of containers of varying sizes, and put in seeds.  Lots and lots of seeds.

And we promptly had a windstorm the next day.  The farmer next to us is really going to wonder where all the radishes in his cornfield are coming from.  *sigh*

Determined, however, to not be foiled by this, I bought plants instead.  Put them in the pots.  Gave them water.  And lo! and behold!  I have green.  I’m not sure if I have the right kind of green or not, but hey…it’s growing, whatever it is.  My tomato plant even has flowers on it, which, I assume, means I’m going to have actual *tomatoes* at some point.  So does my jalapeno plant and my ancho chilipepper plant.  And the cilantro hasn’t yet died, either.  It’s scaring me a little.

See, I sort of did this thing and I’m going to need to fix it pretty quickly.  I put a leftover packet of radish seeds in a circle around the rim of a smallish pot, and dumped some green pepper seeds in the middle.  I thought that maybe one of five would actually grow, since, again, I have the blackest thumb on the planet.  But ALL OF THEM CAME UP.  I have a very green pot right now, and if I don’t replant them elsewhere, I’m going to have a problem.

But not as much of a problem as I’m going to have with five zillion radishes and bell peppers, too.  Hope J likes stuffed peppers.  And roasted peppers.  And stir-fry.  And and and….  Ahem.

Who knew?  Just water them and leave them alone, and voila! :)

The one part of my garden experience that isn’t a vegetable:

This is a shoe garden.  I think I gave the link already.  If not, I’ll post it later.  It’s a free PDF file on how to create a garden of shade plants in *shoes*.  I was intrigued, and bought three pairs of shoes at a garage sale and planted small little shade plants in them, and they’re doing quite nicely.  So I think I’ll end up collecting worn out shoes and expanding this as time goes on.  Adding moss and such.

And that middle part? That’s concrete.  I know.  Pretty.  It’s holding a place for some Washington state rocks that I ordered to make a cairn.

Hey, I was homesick, okay?  :)

Other than playing in dirt, I knit a lot while I was off.  A couple pairs of socks, a sweater, and this monstrosity of leftover handspun:

It’s a shawl, roughly 9′ wide.  Just cast on 3 stitches and do this:

1:  k1, yo, k1, yo, k1 (5 st)
ALL EVEN ROWS, purl.  Or knit back for garter ridges.
3:  k1, yo, k1, yo, k1, yo, k1 (7 st)
5:  k1 yo, k2, yo, k1, yo, k2, yo, k1 (9 st)
7: k1, yo, k3, yo, k1, yo, k3, yo, k1 (11 st)

See the pattern?  YO after the first and last stitches, and before and after the center stitch.  That’s ALL THERE IS TO IT.

Simplest shawl EVER.  Every so often, I’d vary it between garter and stockinette, just to add a little interest, but it’s the easiest pattern out there.  As in, not really a pattern at all, but a formula.  I know I’m not the first to come up with it (was it Wendy that posted a formula once for it?) — I saw it somewhere else several times in different places, but it’s such great comfort knitting.  Just the right mix of mindless and long.  Movie knittin’.

That one’s done on US11s, by the way.  Or 13s. I can’t remember which right now.  But big needles = one fast shawl that’s warm and had been worn quite a bit around the house before it got all tropic out here.

I have more knitting and fibery stuff (OMG! the spinning!  five POUNDS in May!  No, seriously.), but I’ll wait on that until I can get a good picture of the new handspun.  There’s a lot of it.  And socks.  Lots of those, too.

But let’s talk Other Obsessions, shall we?

My yarn and fiber is a collection.  I know this.  I’ll probably never get “done” with it all, because in the interim, I would have acquired more.  That’s how collections are.  Obsessive.  Pretty.  Not really all that practical.

Now, understand something before I say this:  I have never been a girly-girl.  I was much more into tree climbing than learning to put on my own eye shadow.  (Much to my grandmother’s chagrin — she was convinced my scars would make boys not want to dance with me.  Not true!  I just had to find boys with more scars than me.  Problem solved.)  I’ve never been the pink-dress wearing type, and honestly, I generally prefer my soap to smell like…well…soap.  I’ve used the same shampoo for years, and if there’s a part of me that requires some kind of Special Product for cleaning or pretty-ing, it’s going to get ignored.  (I never understood the whole Three Step Facial Cleansing Systems, for instance.  IT’S SKIN.  PUT SOAP ON IT AND RINSE IT.  DONE.  Duh.)

So it was as much a surprise to me as to the world when I started getting into BPAL again.  Perfume?  Scented oils?  Huh?  I’d been exposed to them before, and J even bought me a 10ml bottle of one for Christmas in 2004 (when they still had 10 ml bottles), because they were kind of gothy and stuff, and he was, I think, trying to encourage that.  But it came and went, and I’d occasionally look at the site and think about ordering more, and would get distracted by some Shiny and wander away.

Then it was like a switch being thrown, around Halloween of last year.  There were these really great-sounding limited editions, and a whole series based on a carnival sideshow, and how could I resist THAT?  Bought a few.   Found the forums.  Found out that BPAL wasn’t the only independent oil blendery.

And the rest, as they say, was all downhill.

*sigh*  Collection, it is.  (top shelf Arcana and Cobalt Blends, middle shelf BPAL, bottom shelf is Possets, Cremoso, Superbad, Wylde Ivy, Velvet Moon Bathery, Mythos Mixtures, and a few random ones.)   Those shelves, by the way?  Four FEET LONG.  *facepalm*

And I’ve even bought soap.  Handmade cold-process soap.  Smelly soap. Soap that does NOT, in fact, smell like soap.  And *lotion*.  Good heavens.

I think it may have just gotten hotter in here, and my husband is back home with cold coffee and lunch, so I’m going to have to end this here for a bit.  We’ll continue the catching-up next time.  I kind of feel like I’ve been ditching y’all for our regular coffee-date or something, but I’m making the resolution to knock that off now.  No more long absences.

Thanks for all the wonderful comments and emails while I was gone, too.  Even when I was only checking email once a day, I was all over those emails first.

Thanks.  For those *and* for being here.  Happy last day of May to all.

So CraftChi had this awesome tutorial for making your own photoshop frame brushes and such, which is something I’ve ALWAYS wanted to know how to do, but thought was one of those Big Technical Heavy Things(tm).  You know, the kind that require things like software and knowledge of ancient acronyms like AJAX and COBOL.

Not so! says she.  WOOT!

I was headed out today to start in on getting in my Farmer’s Market list item checked off the list, but apparently, Mother Nature thinks that “Saturday” is synonymous with “Rain Like Crazy”.  Which is fine with me — I have some other things to do that don’t involve sitting in the rain.  Like, say, getting a new camera cord dealie at Target, and picking up lots of old shoes at Goodwill so I can make a shoe garden, based on Sassafrass Hill’s awesome tutorial.  No, seriously — go look at the link.  I’ll wait.

*insert hold music here…doodeedoot, doot doo dee doo doo…..*

Is that not the coolest garden idea EVER!?  I have the perfect little shaded corner of my yard for it.  My yard looks like a junkyard ANYWAY, so having a bunch of plants in old beat up shoes will fit right in.  Look natural even.  I’m not sure if that’s a positive or not.  Ahem.

Unrelated:  I love the smell of grapefruit.  I have no idea why.  I’m not a big fan of grapefruit, the *fruit*.  But the citrusy grapefruity smell?  I’m all over it.  Go figure.

Just found out that there’s an Heirloom Plant Sale going on in the next town over, right now.  Maybe I’ll go there, too, since the Farmer’s Market’s out the window for the time being.

I can’t wait to show you pictures — there’s a robin’s nest just outside my office window, and the fat mother robin just came back to sit on the nest for a while.  I think she knows I’m here (can’t miss the overpowering smell of grapefruit coming from the open window, most likely), but apparently, I’m nonthreatening.  I’m going to be able to see baby robin heads in a few weeks, right from this very chair!

I love Spring.  I missed it.

More later, with photos and photoshopped frames!  Squee!  (Anybody have any interest in a set of knitting frames for scrapbooks and/or blogs?  Or maybe just hand-drawn elements one?  I’m thinking I could put a couple of these in a .zipfile for y’all if there’s interest in ‘em.  Let me know!)

Y’all are going to totally laugh at me.

I keep meaning to update this sucker, but I have misplaced my camera cord and can’t figure out how to get the important stuff OFF it so I can show YOU all.  And as such, I keep putting off updating, because an entry without pictures is no entry at all.

Ahem.

Things I have pictures of:  several shortish hikes for letterboxes, for those that wanted to see.  My handspun knit comfort shawl of doomy-doom, and the pieces of Nottingham, not quite yet seamed, but I’m okay with that.   Some gratuitous dog photos.  Pictures of the beaded jewelry that all of a sudden my brain seems to want to make.  A photo of the Insane Perfume Oil Collection that has sprouted up in recent months.  Pics of the back yard (the real one, instead of this figurative one) and the little bits of garden-planting I’ve been doing to try and make it not-so-junkyardish.

There’s a lot to cover, see.  That month off?  Well, it wasn’t really a month, and I didn’t really take it *off*, but a whole lot went on.  We almost bought a house.  I relaxed and did a lot of creative wandering.  We fixed most of my car, which means I’ll be independently mobile again soon.

Just a metric TON of stuff.  Seriously.

I’m working on the camera-cord thing today.  I’ll be back with some pictures once I find it. :)  (To be fair, I rearranged my whole office to make room for J’s computer in here, and you KNOW how things disappear when you clean/organize?  Yeah, it’s like that.)

Soooon.  Very sooooooon.