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.