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.

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.)

I’ve been looking for a good way to segue back into keeping a blog over here.  After the long, flu-filled absence and subsequent recharging, all I’ve really wanted to do is hide from the world for a while.  Get some things done.  Check some stuff off my list, or at least make a dent in it all.

And most of that stuff has been soooo behind the scenes and boring to the outside world that there was no point in taking pictures.  I mean, really — how many pictures of a sweater in progress can you see before you start wishing the blogger to get hit by a bus, just so they’d have something interesting to talk about?

Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway…

The past few nights, I’ve been up late, due to a weird bout with insomnia.  And all three nights, I’ve gotten to a point where I couldn’t stay in the chair and knit quietly on the socks I’m working on — I had to MAKE SOMETHING, and I had to make something RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW.

And who am I to say “no” when the call’s that strong, right?

This is the third day.  (above)  It’s technically a collage, due to the King County Metro transfer stub I found in a pocket and glued down, but all the rest of it is drawn/painted by me.  It’s a repurposed piece of wood I got from a local dollar store about two and a half years ago, intending to paint over the existing “art” on it, and I’m just NOW getting around to actually doing that.  (I love that it’s already got picture hanger stuff on the back and the sides were pre-painted…it’s literally ready to hang when it’s dry.)

I have some pictures from my month off, and I’ll probably edit those tomorrow if the weather doesn’t improve around here.  (It’s raining like mad, and they’re saying that parts of my state could get *snow* tonight.  SNOW, people!  It was EIGHTY DEGREES here today.  Seriously.  Mother Nature = Needs an Intervention for her Obvious Crack Addiction.)

I missed blogging.  I missed y’all.

We’ll talk again soon.

So in the mail today was my wacom tablet.  And you KNOW I had to try that out.  New toy, duh.

It still feels like I’m drawing with the mouse.  And I can’t quite get used to the whole idea of looking at the screen instead of my hands for the relativity factor.  It’s very, very weird.

I know it’s just a matter of reframing how I’m seeing things, and developing a new way of drawing.  So it’s a little like riding a bike, I’m sure — my first few attempts are going to be odd (like this one), with weird perspective and crazy lines and wobbly hands, but I figure if I practice a little, it’ll be as much a second nature as the real, non-bamboo pen.

I’m sure it was that way with the physical pen, too, but I don’t really remember all of that so much.  I’ve just been drawing what I see for so long that I just *know*.  I look, I draw, it doesn’t always look like what I’m seeing, but I figure it’s going through my own perception-filter anyway, so I just draw again.  And again, and again….

It’s a busy day for me today, so the practicing will have to wait.  But I’m really looking forward to doing it all again.  Seeing whether I can’t match up paper drawing and tablet drawing.  It’d make life a lot easier, in some respects.

Today, there are houses to be cleaned, guest beds to be made up, dinner to burn…er…cook.   There’ll be a housefull of people after 4; weekend guests by ten.

I’m surrounded by new stimuli, old friends.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Well, now. That didn’t take me as long as I thought it would. (Usually, editing pictures takes for-freakin’-ever, but there were only three, so t’was quicker than I remembered.)

This week’s Worden Challenge, on the topic of Simplicity:

Her challenge was to do a piece on Simplicity, but in 3-D if you usually do flat stuff and vice versa. So I found one of my old boxes that was splitting a bit on the sides and the black and white paint, grabbed some river rocks and a copy of Walden, and here she be.

I’ve been really drawn to the whole idea of simplicity and simplification lately. Paring down things to just what’s needed and called for, and burning the excess. Ironically, paring down and simplifying…? A lot of very hard work.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to continue to de-clutter the studio, for instance. Which, in theory, shouldn’t be all that hard. Just find the things I don’t use, and either use them and throw them out, right?

The problem isn’t in the THINGS, per se, but the MEANING of things. Or at least that’s where I keep getting hung up. I have a bunch of soldering supplies, for instance. I’m never going to use them. I know this about myself — I don’t have the time to perfect that particular technique to the point where I could make things I’d be happy with. And even if I did drag it all out and make a bunch of stuff, it’d be largely useless, because I’m just plain ol’ not interested in making jewelry or frou-frou decorative stuff. So even IF I got it out and played, I’d end up with a bunch of half-assed charms with no purpose.

So it should be easy for me to just ditch it all. I should be able to drag the garbage bag to that side of the room, throw it all in there (or in the donation box), and call it good, right?

Not so, kimosabe. Because I learned how to do the whole thing when I was still making a lot of altered books. And my friend Jill showed me how. We sat at her place (or maybe someone else’s; I can’t remember now…) during an Artgirls meeting, and made these charms with glass slides and soldering guns, and mine came out pretty good, for altered booking purposes, at least. I remember driving home through the blue light of Seattle’s evening, and thinking that if I could just get a soldering iron of my own, I’d totally make a bunch of these things. But I was broke-ass at the time, and couldn’t afford to think about an iron for very long, much less buy one.

So when I finally saved up and bought one, quickly making a bunch of charms that, quite honestly, stunk…I remember my friend. I remember that day. I remember how good it felt when I finally had the cash to buy it all. I think not just about the applications of those little charms, but also of home.

Aw, damn.

Can you see why the decluttering is going so slowly? (Unless there are several shots of Ouzo involved, making things much simpler….? As in, “if it’s sitting still, it goes in the bag” simple.)

I know my THINGS are not my MEMORIES. And my things aren’t me, either. As I’m getting more time and distance from experiences and things, I’m much more likely to get rid of them, in preparation for my life *now*, which needs a lot more space to do what I want to do and am good at. I may be reclaiming a lot of myself that I’d abandoned in the years hence, but where I am now is nowhere near where I was *then*. In order to be open to the possibilities, I need to put to rest the things that happened before and have a little honesty about what things really mean.

I still have my friends. I don’t need the supplies to prove it. Not even to myself.

If you need me, I’ll be in my studio, shuffling off those soldering supplies.

(eta:  I mentioned selling off most of my books.  I forgot to mention the link to see ‘em, if you’re into knitting or artstuff.)

Okay, before I even start this, I want to add a disclaimer.

Kerrie, the girl behind these journals, is a friend of mine.  In fact, if I ever get back to Seattle, I’m probably going to ploy her with much coffee and probably some cookies to come over so I can keep her and make her play with me.

But that said, i wanted to relay a little bit about art journaling, and mention a book that I’m really, really digging:

I’ve been using the Treehugger Books journals as my art journals for more than two years now.   I’ve got a couple of the sketchbooks (on thick-ish cardstock pages) that I’m down to my last four pages in, and a little smaller one (I think it’s 5.5″ x 8″, but don’t hold me to that — I’m bad with measurement estimation.) that i’m about to start in when this one’s all full up.

They’re fabulous journals.  No, seriously.  The one I’m using now has been in my bag on more trips than I want to count, and it’s held up like a dream.  The coils aren’t all bendy (they’re some kind of squishy plastic rather than the metal ones that I always seem to destroy and bend out of shape), the cardboard covers are mostly blank so you can tart ‘em up however you wish, and the pages have held up to all kinds of crazy crap I’ve stuffed in there over the years.  And trust me — my art journals get a workout with water media, colored pencils, strange things glu-sticked to the pages.  I don’t just buy blank books.  I use them to death.

I love the fact that they lay flat, so I can work in them either one page at a time, or on a two-page spread.  I love the way they take color and ink without bleeding through, even when all I’ve got with me is a bunch of sharpies.  And best of all, I love the philosophy behind them.

They use 100% post-consumer recycled paper.  Which means you’re not just keeping a journal, you’re also saving the earth, one blank book at a time.

(picture shamelessly stolen from the treehugger site.  pretty, isn’t it?)

According to their website , in the first 2.5 years of production, they’ve saved 4.269 gallons of water,  5813 BTUs of energy, 455 lbs of solid waste, 29 lbs of water-borne waste, 883 lbs of atmospheric emissions, and a FULL 25 TREES.   And considering that it’s a relatively small, two-person company, that’s saying something.  Just imagine if everybody used them for their blank books…?  We might *all* have better air and water, just from journalling on something that’s awesome to journal in ANYWAY.

There are two sizes to choose from (medium and large) and two weights to choose from (sketch, with heavy duty paper like cardstock, or journal, with lighter weight paper that’s still pretty darned heavy), and all the covers are that thick cardboard-like stuff.  (All recycled, too.)  The medium sketch will set you back $12, while the large one comes in at $20, and unless you’re one of those every-day journalers (I wish I was you!), they’ll last a couple months, easily.

One of these days (shortly, hopefully) I’ll get some scans of some of the pages in mine and put ‘em up.  With Lime & Violet’s relative fame, I’ve been a little reluctant to get too overly personal in some places, though.  (Yes, I realize all the listeners know far too much about my girlparts for me to be too concerned with privacy at this point.  But you know how it is.)  But since re-finding letterboxing and all its related hoopla, I’ve also been finding my way back to the pages of my paper journals, and the pen fetish that ruled my life for so long.

It’s kind of nice, too.

So go buy a journal, save a tree, and write or collage or draw yourself some brilliance already. :)

I’ve been watching the Ripple-Along group at Flickr for some time now, waiting to get a copy of “200 Ripple Stitches” before starting. I had this lot of Naturespun Sport sitting around here in red and aqua and brown and pink, and used a random stripe generator to figure out how many stripes of each color would look good.

The book arrived Monday; I’m about four inches into it now. It’s so relaxing to sit there and count 1…2…3…decrease… over and over — meditative, really. Since my knitting projects have been relatively challenging lately, this is like a break for my brain while still getting to touch wool.

And some days, that’s exactly what the doctor ordered.

I always have this feeling that I’m being watched. Not in the weird, creepy, stalker-sense. But in that On Display kind of way, where someone, somewhere, might be seeing everything I do.

I know precisely when this neurosis started, too. Back in the kindergarten bible study indoctrination when they lured you in with Jesus Cake, one of the teachers said we had to be good, because God was watching us all the time.

I. freaked. out. Wouldn’t pee for something like two days, until my parents had the teacher call to tell me that no, God didn’t watch you in the bathroom.

To this day, I go into the bathroom if I want to be alone. And it’s why I get really annoyed when anyone interrupts me while I’m showering or just laying on the floor reading a book — because it’s the ONLY place that nobody can see me.

And, of course, to my adult mind, that’s all just a little bit silly. But when you’re five, and hopped up on cake and kool-aid, and you’re completely freaked out by the fact that someone is always watching you…well, it carries for a while.

I’d like to think, these days, that God politely averts his eyes. But that might be the cake talking.

And that’s not where I was really going with all of this explanation, since I’m not really that worried about the guy in the sky being concerned with how long my showers are, but it’s funny where free-association will take you.

I’ll just let you pick your own meaning for this one.

Maybe I should fly away home…

I can’t tell you how many times a day I feel like this little metal bird.

I drove to the store today to get a new scanner (the old one keeled over and had had enough, choking its last breath in pink lines and fuzz instead of actual scans of things), and just looking around, knowing that nowhere in a zillion miles or so were there actual mountains…it was about enough to make me crawl out of my skin. Shed it and find some wings, so to speak.

Just wings enough to fly away home.

Soon, I keep telling myself. Soon.

After the other day’s re-finding of the art-a-day pages from the old book I gessoed over, I had the thought that maybe I should do something like that again, just to get myself back in the swing of creating something visual and non-yarn-related every day. I’ve been so disconnected from that part of myself for so long that it almost feels, just thinking about it, like I’m stretching muscles that are atrophied and stiff. Like my brain SHOULD be able to “go there”, but isn’t able to, for one reason or another.

I got out an old Reader’s Digest Condensed volume that I bought because I liked its cover. Ripped out thirty pages. Gessoed over the text and left the edges where they were.

Like riding a bike, they say. Even if you haven’t done it in a long time, you’ll remember, in your muscles, when the time comes to pedal. I put brush to paper, and it was like that whole two years of occasional journal entries and the odd drawing here and there just disappeared, and there it was: the Flow came back, naturally.

This was the result tonight. I’m planning on doing seven a week, like before, and popping them on the etsy shop at the end of the week. It might work, it might not. We’ll see.

In other, related news, one of the other things I found when I was poking around the remnants of Old Life on the hard drive was a 3/4 completed book I was doing. SPARKS! was a book of creative prompts (not your typical prompts. seriously.) for artists, creative writers, and journal-keepers. I had it set up to be a year’s worth of weekly themed creativity sparkers, and with everything that’s gone on in the past year, I hadn’t finished it.

And I may never finish it. :) I had the idea to put the weeks up here, available for individual download, and make a flickr group for people to share the results. Like an online class, but self-guided. Really fun stuff. The flickr group is up, and the first few weeks are almost ready to go. I’ll post about it when it’s available here on-site. (Downloads are going to be cheap — like, around a buck or so. I need to check and see how much it charges me for hosting downloads and paypal fees, but I want to keep it all as cheap as possible. I figure more downloads = more impetus for me to finish the thing rather than just letting it sit.)

I feel like I’m finally moving in the right direction again.