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.

I’m waiting for Carin to get here so we can dye things pretty colors (after doing about six pounds earlier today already), so I dove back into Collage Unleashed AGAIN.  Three in one day!

My sewing machine’s being all funky, though.  I’m clueless about the whole tension thing, but I’m pretty sure that’s what the problem is.  The back side is all thready and loose, and pops through to the front.  When I mess with the tension, though, it gets all funky and weird and the thread snaps, so I’m thinking it may be time to actually read the manual or something.  Meh.  (The next two are sewing things, so I do need to get it fixed, or be happy with not doing any fabric stuff in the book.  Not that I’m above doing that, but I’d like to dip a toe into the fabric world, and I figure with this, at least, I won’t question it too much if it comes up looking like crap — it’ll just be par for the course. :>)

So without ado, the washed photocopy collage (a really, really bad picture, but artificial light was my only choice and it just wasn’t coming out.  It looks better than this grainy thing.):

I do kind of like a collaged background of photocopies, but next time, I think I’d use a titanium buff wash, mixed thick so that it de-contrasts a bit.  All the contrasty bits give me a headache.  (Oh, and it’s coincidental that it’s all lime and violet — those were the random two colors I picked out of the basket o’ paint.  Seriously.)

And then, the only thing I’ve sewn other than curtains in the past six months…a fabric flower brooch that isn’t a brooch at all — it’s made to be mounted on the front of a journal, which will make it heavier than all get-out, but I like it anyway.

For some reason, that photo came out just fine.  Go figure.

That’s dyed paper towel, scrunched up over some heavy interfacing, stitched down randomly.  Embellished with  glass marbles, freeform crochet flower, buttons and a fabric yo-yo.

I think that’s my favorite of the things I’ve made from this book.  I’d like to make some smaller ones, but not until the machine’s working right — the back of this is a giant mess.

Three posts in a day.  Wow.  This won’t happen all the time, I promise.  It’s just that I’m really re-energized on this list again, now that I want to go to Portland in October.  (And yes, Michelle, seeing you and nabbing those letterboxes is on the list of Must-Dos. :>)

Eight gesso backgrounds.  Two washes with acrylic glaze, color added in with oil pastels, since I don’t have the other tools Traci talks about.  I like them, though, so I don’t really care if they’re not quite to specs. :)

I *believe* these are then cut up to use as book covers and the like, so it should be kinda interesting to see how they look in chunks.  Adminnie just cut me another stack of papers for today’s exercise, which is something about washed photocopies (actually, the next is about textured papers, but I don’t have any and have decided not to cry about it. :>).  Sounds like fun to me. :)

Squeee for getting started on the list again — only 12 more exercises to go before I’m done and can move on to the next item on the list.   Which is good, since I think I *really* want to change my reward for 50 items completed to “go to Art & Soul in Portland in October”.  Juliana Coles will be there, teaching both her extreme journaling methods AND doing a project class called “Circus Circus” and, really, how perfect for me is THAT?

One Sideshow Wife, reporting for duty. :)  (Plus, then I could tick off the list items for both Seattle and Portland letterboxing, and probably stay in a Yurt AND the Madrona Inn on the coast before heading back to the flatlands.  It’d be like List Check-Off Central.)

Must get busy.  Dyeing roving today with Minnie, and yarn tonight with Carin, so I’ll be ticking a bunch of line items off on THAT list item too.

Caffeine, apparently, makes me chatty.  Ahem.

I did that, above, yesterday. It’s a carved stamp, of course, and the logbook that will travel around with it, based on a true story of a goose who was born without feet and the farmer who loved him so much that the farmer made the goose some little shoes to replace his feet. Adam, the goose, wore those shoes everywhere, until he was abducted and murdered in 1989, despite a ten THOUSAND dollar reward that his fans ponied up.

You can’t make this stuff up, people.

Normally, I don’t show my letterbox stuff here, but since this is going to be a hitch-hiker (a mini-stamp/book that travels from box to box and has no set location as “home”), I figured I’d out myself. If you run across it while letterboxing, you can totally email me to squee. :)

Other than one stamp a day (today’s is in the gallery already), and The Cooking Of The Dinner, I’ve really been doing only one thing: Spinning.

I have a good reason, though. The Woolee Winder I ordered, that I’ve been drooling over and wanting FOREVER….arrived today. From the minute it arrived and the box was opened, I was ready to chew off my own arm to spin something. I had a moment where I thought I might wait to put it on until after I finished the regular bobbin I already have started. A feeling that lasted, oh, say, about TWO SECONDS.

There was a bit of a learning curve, but now, I’m spinning like crazy. It’s still slow, since I’m doing very thin singles (not as thin as I get with my regular bobbin yet, but I’m learning), which takes forEVER to finish, but not having to move the slider bar is soooo worth the cost. And the bobbins are bigger, so I should be able to get all four ounces of any given color onto one bobbin now.

It’s swoon-worthy. I’m really sensing a week where the only list items being worked on are my netflix queue and the spinning. But since those are both big, fat items with lots of work to be done, I’m okay with that. It *does* mean that I’m a kind of boring blogger, though — most spinning-in-progress pictures look exactly the same. (“Look! Fiber singles!”…..”Look! Fiber singles!”….”Uh, look? Fiber singles!”….”Fiber again!”….”Oh, screw it, you know what they look like.”)

“Collage Unleashed” is still sitting here on my desk. I keep thinking I want to make more of the japanese-style gluepapers, but there have been Big Fat Work Things to do (and spinning, duh…), so it’s beginning to languish. As a result, at some point this weekend, I plan to do some embellishing per the end of the exercise I’m on, and moving on to the next one, considering this one finished for now. The next three are pretty simple — collaging with words (which I do already), collaging with textured paper (which I’m skipping because i don’t HAVE any textured paper, since I kinda always thought it was a little tackylooking.) and collaging with washed photocopies.

I think I’ll aim to do all three (if I can find textured paper tomorrow somewhere around the studio) by Sunday. And I still have Jen Worden’s exercise from last week to do, so that’ll probably end up as some ATCs.

This is kind of turning into a State of the Art post, so I’ll quit for now. Considering my wheel + woolee winder are calling me again. Spinning’s fun again, though, so I want to ride the New Toy momentum as long as I can so I can cull that fiber down a bit.

It’s all good, right?

I have been remiss in my postings. I know this. However, I have a good reason:

I don’t have jack to say.

Well, actually, that’s not quite the case. There’s plenty to say. The problem is that I’m on those particular parts of the list/project right now that are either a) multipart, and thus, are only half-done, b) a single part, but take a looooong damn time to complete, or c) belong to the letterboxing requirement, and thus, I can’t really post too many pictures of them, due to the secrecy involved. (Letterbox stamps are usually kept quiet until you actually find the box, see.)

I HAVE been posting every day to the Thing A Day blog, and have been updating the carved-stamp gallery here, for those that are never going to look for a letterbox ever, no way, no how. There are spoilers for the first four of the Weird Nebraska series, plus some other stamps that aren’t series-related. I’m pretty determined to hit that list item of 50 total by the end of the month, so most of my artsybits have been in that direction.

And I’ve also been working on the Collage Unleashed book item. Thing is, I’m on the project with the Fusion Collages, and I can do them one at a time. They’re big, see, and even though you’re essentially just making your own decorated papers, they’re too big to have more than just one or two at a time. I’ve got three done right now, with a fourth drying, and I figure I need five or six total to be able to do the rest of the projects in the book. Ferinstance:

The first one I did, which pretty much decimated my stack of dyed paper towels. So when Nikki came over and we dyed a metric butt-ton of them (the first picture up there is the now-HUGE stack, by the way), I got this one done:

Excuse the weird lighting. We’re having Weather here, capital-W. It’s snowy and icky outside, which means the light inside is So Not Fun for pictures.

I haven’t done any embellishing on the completed papers yet, but I really like how they’re looking thusfar, and the finished papers, which are kind of a low-rent version of a Japanese orizomegami technique, have an absolutely awesome hand to them…and they’re translucent, so you can have images BEHIND them, all ghosted and neat-looking.

I was really dubious toward finishing this book before this, but now? Now that I’m getting to see how some of the seemingly-unrelated projects are used in the creation of larger, more involved pieces? Okay, I get it. And I like it a lot more. I’m glad now that I didn’t give up and get a different book, because even if the rest of the book sucks, I’ll be making more of these orizomegami papers, for sure. They’re going to make awesome book covers.

The other list item I’ve been working on (after deciding to rest a bit on the ATCs of Doom, since I was getting a little burnt out on them, honestly, after forty straight days of doing one-a-day or more), is cleaning out the damned kitchen. There was SO much stuff in there that wasn’t ours — stuff left behind by the previous tenants that was ‘gifted’ to us. Most of it was in iffy condition, and has been clogging up the cabinets to the point where we don’t have room for any of it anymore. Or, for that matter, stuff we DO use.

Add to the problem by making the cabinets sit there in various stages of disrepair and grime, and you’ve got a recipe for Crazy Me.

So last night, I tackled one of them. I got the biggest box I could find, and dug into this:

That’s the left and right sides of just one of the cabinets near the floor next to the oven. The bottom of it is disgusting and still needs to be lined, but, after getting rid of everything left there by the previous owners, or anything of ours that was beyond saving or was missing parts, and voila:

Three items left. THREE. (The stack of plates is being washed and will be in with our plates, but I moved them after this was taken.) And one of them, the bowl in the upper left, is iffy. It still might go. But it’s all 1960’s fantabulous and has an avocado and blue handpainted flower on the bottom, and I kind of love it a little, in that I-heart-kitsch kind of way.

Scarier still is the stuff we got rid of:

Those boxes weigh around fifty pounds. Seriously. Probably more, even. Two sets of mismatched dishes. Old tupperware. A non-functioning crock pot. A food processor that’s missing a crucial part. An old blender that hasn’t worked in more than fifteen years now and lit on FIRE when we tested it. THREE DOZEN teacups of dubious origin. (Don’t worry — I checked ebay first. Nothing in that box was selling for more than $2 a set.) FIVE glass pie plates. FIVE. Even I do not eat that much pie.

Of all of it — only the food processor was ours. Everything else was already here when we moved in. And now we have at least one cabinet that can breathe again, and I’m starting to get motivated to fill up the dumpster before tomorrow’s pick-up. I’ll hit that 50% marker before long, I’m sure of it.

Which, aside from being healthier and less crazymaking, is also a list item I can actually cross off the list. Woohoo!

So this entry is longer than I thought. Oops.

And here I thought I had nothing to say. Go figure. :)

I am flippin’ exhausted.  There *is* a new image in the stamp carving gallery, but only because I finally just sketched something up and carved it out while we had company — no real time for scanning the other artsy stuff or taking pictures of the day.

But (!) OMG….what a fabulous day.  Long.  But fabulous.

From the beginning, in a nutshell:

1.  The mail call this morning was nothing short of overwhelming.  Two rovings from Creatively Dyed Fiber.  A pair of appliqued shoes from etsy.  A sheep card from my friend Looloo.  The Vintage sock kit from vanCalcar Acres Farm.  The new ATC Quarterly zine.  And best of all — a tin of Coccoina glue from Silver Crow Creations since my old one dried up.  I thought I’d died and gone to postal heaven.

2.  After peeling up the book experiment from last night (more on that tomorrow when I actually have pictures), I LEFT THE HOUSE.  No, seriously.  It warrants all-caps.  I never leave the house anymore — I’ve got enough to do right here at home.  So leaving the house = A really good thing.

3.  Got the “Wildcat Pride” letterbox.

4.  Stopped in at the new Half-Price Books that’s opening for real on the 18th.  (They’re buying books right now.)  I looove that store.

5.  Zipped through Hobby Lobby to pick up black ink, Elmer’s glue, some UHU glue-sticks (it’s been an adhesive kind of day, apparently), some glue brushes, and some disposable cups for dye-mixing.

6.  Went to look at cookware.  Boggled at the $1200 price tag on a few sets.  Ended up modifying my original plan to buy a full set, and just bought the one piece we really needed — a giant cast-iron enamelled pan with a snug-fitting lid.  I figure if all my pieces don’t match, that’s fine.  I’m still getting rid of the duplicate or really cheap stuff, but this pan rounds out what I needed and replaces four (!!!) cheap-ass pans that are all scratched and nasty, and which probably have been leeching teflon into our bloodstream, causing madness and eventual death.  I’m speculating on that last part, but it’d figure.

7.  Got dinner made (not a new recipe, sadly), and no sooner did we finish eating than two of our friends came over.  Nikki and I sat upstairs and sniffed glue (the Coccoina, which smells like heavenly almonds, seriously…) and giggled our asses off and dyed an impressive number of paper towels (for the project I mentioned that I need to photograph…it’s coming.).  Nikki needs to go into the tie-dye business.  I hadn’t even explained all the directions before she was whipping out these elaborate paper towel creations that I kind of want to frame as-is.  Totally a natural talent.

And now I’m uploading the last of the scans of the stamp I carved for the second day of Thing A Day, and collapsing.  My body’s profoundly pissed off that it was such a good day — it’s reminding me that I AM OLD.

Tomorrow, pictures and scans and lots of faux-orizomegami papermaking, and more letterbox-stamp-making.

Some days are kind of ploddy and slow, it seems, and others, a total creative whirlwind.  Today was one of the latter.

I like those days.

And as promised, I’m adding the stamp to the gallery at the right instead of posting it here, because this puppy?  Totally going to be a letterbox.  It’s based on actual Nebraska history, albeit weird history.

See, apparently, there was this guy, Alfred D Jones, who acted as Nebraska’s first postmaster.  There wsan’t an actual post office, though, so he would carry the mail around in his hat, delivering it whenever he happened to run into you.

Thus, “hat post”.  :)

I think I’m going to do all 29 about Nebraska/Iowa’s weird history, because the NE Historical Society has a *ton* of crazy facts about this place.  We are a weird bunch.  Not that I probably had to mention that; you likely already know.

That said, I dug into the next exercise in Collage Unleashed, which is pretty much like the  “write all over a page” exericise, but this time, she calls it “graffiti”.  Okay, fine.  Done:

This time, I used one word.  Inspired.  And I used two colors, though it looks like three here, since the watercolor crayons came out much darker than the rose-colored ink I used on the background.

I like this one better.  not as chaotic, due to the duo-chrome.  And I got to play with my calligraphy pen nib, which I haven’t done in a while and forgot how much I kind of like it.  I still think it’d give me a headache after a while, which is fine — I don’t have to look at it all day.

The next two exercises use some kind of heated transfer paper that I don’t have and don’t plan to buy.  Feeling a bit frustrated by this, I went through the rest of the book, counting up the number of exercises that I can’t do without buying something new, and X’ed them out on the list.  I’m just not getting enough out of it to justify an expenditure at this point, and while I’ll look to see if there’s something I can substitute when I cruise on by them, I’m thinking just getting through this book would be the best course of action, then starting another.  Easier, and less frustrating for me, I think.  (On the plus side, there are five handmade journals at the end of the book, so I’m going to have some fun with the ones I can do, I’m sure.)

Also, one last ATC for the day:

It’s called, “Define ‘weird’.”

Heehee.

It’s a funky scan — I scanned it with the stamp, so it was off the scanner bed on the corners due to the paper’s not being 100% flat yet, so I’ll re-scan when I get some time.  I like this one, though.

Tomorrow — more stamps!  More boxes!  More weird Nebraska. :)

Okay, so I was a little dubious at first.  I kind of had the whole thought that coloring in someone else’s doodles was going to be a ginormous waste of my time, since I wasn’t really creating anything, just playing with someone else’s art.

But seriously?  I had fun.  It’s been a long time since the pressure to MAKE SOMETHING PURDY was off me and I could just play around with color and mediums I own and have here, but don’t use most of the time.  And all of those little faces were colored in with colored pencil, then gone over with water soluble oil pastels (which I usually only use for backgrounds) and highlighted with neocolorII caran d’ache crayons.  Go over the whole thing with a light brushing of water to make them all smeary and watery, and voila.

I think that, if nothing else, I’ve had a blast, and at best, I’ve got a new way to combine media on some things.  I kind of like it.

Speaking of playing:  I’ve got these Inktense watercolorish pencils (I say watercolorISH because they’re not actually watercolor pigments — they’re like ink more than watercolor in that they stay where you put them, but still blend at the edges.  Really unusual behaviour that I really like, actually.) that I haven’t used much.  So I dug them out, and played with those for a while on some more ATC-sized stuffs, all emboldened by the coloring pages.

I have to say, this first one didn’t quite come out as planned.  Due to the weird blending nature of the pencils (that is to say: not much, but some), I ended up making a kind of ghoulish character that doesn’t look at all like the apron-wearing housewife she was intended to be.  More zombielike and weird:

Yipes.  Like a housewife with an anorexic potbelly.  Not quite the effect I was going for.

But once I got the hang of how the pencils react vs. watercolor, I set out to make a modern medusa, and did a little better:

The hair’s a little more green.  Again with the scanner bitchiness disclaimer.  Blues are seeming to disappear again.

Other than those, I’ve been doing a bit of artjournaling in the book I’m trying to fill up, and honestly, it’s a little more personal than I’m going to put up here.  I’m pretty open, especially if I like the look of a page or two, figuring I can make the pages display small enough that they won’t show the words, but the last three have had big words and iffy visuals (not in the mood to draw, really), so I’m keeping those to myself.  No sense in displaying my Freak Flag any more than I already have, right? :)

The Thing A Day challenge starts today, and my thing is going to be a letterbox a day.  Sometimes that’ll just be a stamp carved, and sometimes that’ll be the stamp and logbook, depending on whether I’m going to do a really customized logbook for it or not.  (Some of them will need to be in smaller boxes due to placement concerns, so an elaborate logbook just won’t cut it.  Practicality and all.)

I figure that way, even if there are some I don’t place right away (thanks to Mother Nature deciding to BURY US IN SNOW…), I’ll have more done on both my stamp carving list item AND my letterboxing item.  And I’m participating in the Thing A Day, which excites me to no end.  I love it when creative people all get together to play.  The stuff produced is just endlessly inspiring.

I’ve got most of the weekend free — Carin’s coming over on Sunday to do a bunch of dyeing (yay for the list!), but other than that, it’s going to be all housecleaning all the time, I think.  My poor kitchen needs that 50% decluttering so badly that it’s crying at me.    Which means I’ll probably also buy the Really Good Cookware this weekend, too.  With as much as I cook, I really need better cookware because I’m wearing the cheap shit out pretty quickly.

My goal this month is to post every day with the letterbox of the day.  WHAT THIS MEANS, though, is that there might not be actual photos of the stamps, other than over in that gallery listed in the right-hand sidebar.  (Some people prefer not to see the stamps in letterboxes until they go get ‘em, and it’d be like posting a spoiler otherwise.)  I’ll still be posting logbooks and ATCs and book exercises, though — so the entries will probably get pretty long this month.

Just fair warning and all. :)

Another entry upcoming with the first letterbox and stamp!  SQUEE!

I woke up this morning to snow coming down sideways.  Apparently, it didn’t snow much, but the high winds turned the world into sideways-snow-world for a few hours.

Ah, the midwest.

It also went from being almost sixty degrees yesterday to having wind-chills below zero.

Let’s just say I stayed inside, rather than running the errands I thought I’d do.  Because sub-zero is a climate best suited to penguins and polar bears, of which I am neither.

So I dug back into the book.  Today, Traci had us doodling what she calls “Girlie Glam” faces, in a prescribed way — long swirly-looking eyes, swirlier hair, colored in with colored pencils.  Oh, but seriously.

But I did it.  And in a second here, I’ll show you.  I just have to mention that tomorrow?  It’s all about making a photocopy of HER doodles and coloring them in.  No kidding.  Like, coloring them in.   Don’t get me wrong — I’ve looked at the page.  I love her doodles.  Her style.  But her style?  Totally HER style.  Should be interesting.

Anyway, after doing it as prescribed, I starting looking around at other artists I admire.  Copying bits of their style, just to see if there were things I could incorporate and make my own.  Because really, that’s what this is going to end up being about — finding parts of this method, this way of doing things, this type of mark-making…and making it my own, right?

Let’s just do a little comparison:

Exercise from the book (a.k.a. Her style, touch of me when I got annoyed with swirlies):

Contrasted with these three ATCs that sprang into being while loosely copying parts of other artists I like:

Um.

I really like the ATC-sized stuffs….

I spent the rest of the day fighting with my (hopefully soon ex-) domain registrar, who is holding this domain hostage, it seems.  (They keep turning on the “domain protect” feature arbitrarily, keeping me from transferring to another, better host.  It’s annoying me, needless to say.)

I’m almost at the half-way point for the ATC’s.  Then it’s on to journal pages and mail art and the thing-a-day project, which starts in two days.  I’m still not quite sure what I’ll do for it, other than the ATCs and such.  Maybe stamp carving.  30 stamps in 30 days, maybe?  (It gives me the happyshudders thinking about it.  That’d be almost 40 letterboxes ready to go when the snow stops going sideways.)

Stay warm, everyone.  Thanks for all the comments and emails — they really do spur me to get back to drawing when I kind of just want to curl up with the dogs and watch the snow fall….er…blow.  :)

See how one side of this puppy decided that it was going to randomly shift to the left for no apparent reason?

Welcome to my life. I think random left-shifts is pretty much commonplace for me these days.

Speaking of Left (most horrid segue ever…), I got this book on Saturday with my giftcert monies:

The Left Bank Look by Anne Hubert.

Oh, holy crapola. I’m not a big sew-your-own-clothes type (remind me, if you ever come to my house, to show you The Skirt of Dastardly Proportions. Bad things happen when I sew.), so I picked it up intending to kind of glance at it and leave it be, but it’s SO NOT THAT BOOK.

Instead, it’s all about the perception of French style, which I’m sure isn’t how people in France actually live, but that’s okay. It’s how we think they live, and even if it’s not true, I still like it. (Full disclosure: It WAS actually first printed in France. But the french edition may be different. Like what they’re doing to yarnstorm Jane’s book — re-editing it for American eyeballs.)

It’s got bed linens and table linens and refashioned T-shirts and messenger bags and transfers and curtains and….do I really need to go on here? It’s making me a little swoony.

It’s a small, cheap book. Ten bucks at Amazon (link above, where I get, like, a nickel of your ten bucks. Again, full disclosure.), non-glossy paper (which I *love*.), lots of patterns.

The cover even inspired this:

Shoes are cool.

So in an effort not to be totally un-list-worthy today, I made two new recipes for dinner (an appetizer and the main course…crab cakes and stuffed potato skins. mmmm.), updated all my blogs, and set to work, as I said I would, on Collage Unleashed.

Okay, so. We were up to #6, if we were following linearly. Which we’re not. But that’s beside the point. I dove in at #6, with the intention of getting through another two or three exercises.

The problem: It’s all about transparencies. I have none. And while the weather was good enough to go get some, I said I wasn’t going to invest a lot of money in this, nor was I going to go out and buy a bunch of crap … er….supplies, since the whole point of this thing is to use what I have, and use it a LOT. Like, use it UP if I can.

The next problem: There are transparencies in the next THREE exercises. Layering them and painting on them and blah blah blah. *facepalm*

The attitude: Screw it. I think I picked the wrong book for using up my current supplies. But we’ll get to that in a second.

The solution, part deux: Move on to the next one. Which is more my style, I thought. Doodling.

I can doodle. I doodle a lot. I post my doodles for the world to see, in fact. DOODLING, I CAN DO. I have a PhD in DOODLEOLOGY.

True to form, however, this book has you do an exercise whereby you write an alphabet, then layer more text in varying styles over the top of it about your day, then doodle on top of THAT with geometric shapes.

Can you see my eye twitching? It is. Right one. Eyelid’s twittering like a caffeine-addicted chipmunk.

I am Simplicity Girl. I like things like White Space, and the gentle use of color. The nuances of shade against white. The starkness of text on its own, or of the play between pen lines and nothingness. I even get crazy sometimes and fill the whole page with text and marks, but it’s ordered marks. Readable marks. With places for the eye to rest. Paragraphs, because my inner copyeditor gets the bends when it has to deal with improper use of run-on paragraphs.

Like that last one, for instance. Ahem.

Thus, my eye begins to twitch when I produce things like this:

It gives me a headache.

Now, I know, if I’d done more layering (…..*TWITCH*….), and maybe lit it on fire, it would look better, I’m sure. And as the background for some other kind of collageybit, sure. You could think of that as a single-note background. (….*TWITCH IF YOU WERE ON CRACK TWITCH*….) And if I’d worked larger, or with more contrast, maybe. (…*TWITCH*…)

But it so ain’t me, man. One day, someone’s going to find these journals, and they’re going to see all the pages and then see this one and wonder if I’d suddenly been struck colorblind and possibly been struck by a moving vehicle. (Which would be true, but that’s not what caused this mess.)

I’m having serious reservations about the rest of this book. I haven’t been able to do more than half of the exercises, due to the ridiculous amount of supplies necessary to complete them. The other half have sucked quite mightily. (Other than the bookbinding, which I like, but I’m still not sure why each signature needs its own cover. I’m thinking that will be revealed when I need to attach some other kind of visual puke to it later on down the line.)

It IS interesting to me to work in someone else’s style, even when the finished result makes my eye twitch. My own style has evolved a lot over time, kind of organically, so doing all this stuff that’s waaaay out of my evolutionary path is reminding me what my style actually IS. It’s defining it for me, by showing me what it is NOT. And yes, that’s valuable.

I’m going to finish it. Everything other than the stuff I don’t have the stuff for. And then I can probably even get rid of it, I think, from where I’m standing now. If it gets exponentially better for me from here, I’ll keep it, but really….I’m doubtful, based on the experience thusfar.

Which is the SECOND big benefit I’m getting from it: Before this experience, I bought every new alternative arts book that came out. Like, the SECOND it came out. And I’d flip through, oogle the pretty pictures, and put it back on the shelf, for the most part. (I do the same with knitting books. I should be court-martialled by the knitting police.) And better, I WOULD KEEP THEM FOREVER. This is evidenced by my shelves, bowing under the weight of about eight zillion art/craft books.

Now, though, I’m getting to learn what it is that I’m getting by having that object around. I’m learning what, if anything, that object adds to my life, other than bulk and one more thing to dust. I’m figuring out that I don’t have to keep things that aren’t helping me/enriching my world and work/that I love. And the only way to know that is to work with it and see if it works/doesn’t work.

I’m sensing a change coming in the way I buy art/crafty books. I’m starting to see them as tools, rather than a collection.

And that, alone, is worth the cost of a few pages of eye-twitchingly bad art.

(p.s.  No, I’m not going to stop drawing every day.  I just got to check it off the list.  It’s a habit now again, thankfully.)

(p.p.s.  Yes, I realize the irony of the lesson about books being tools to be used when I just bought yet ANOTHER craftybook and reviewed it, not two paragraphs above my revelation.  I am a living contradiction.)