A Little Imagination and a Pile of Junk

drug addict epileptic

I've been busy. Working on some new papers, mailart, and a few packages that needed to be sent out yesterday. If you are waiting on something for me, please don't give up hope! I don't know what it is with me and why everything takes me so much longer to do than it would any normal person. I am a perfectionist to be sure, but even I know when to say it's done--I think. I started scanning these papers to post literally 5 hours ago. Is that normal??? I know my way around a computer so it's not that. No wonder I'm exhausted.

But I said all of that to say in my oh-so-charmingly-witty and abundantly-wordy-way, to those of you waiting on me, I am really working on it! I'll admit that I do obsess over the smallest things. You won't believe it , but it takes me at least an hour to package, print label, and ship everything I sell on Etsy. And that's if the universe is cooperative. No savvy businesswoman here. She whines: But I like to make things special! I'll just say, It's a good thing I enjoy what I do. And I guess the up side is that if you receive something in the mail from me, you can rest assured, it was significantly obsessed over and fiddled with and whatever else it is I do to drain away a perfectly useful day. Oh, look. I've given myself a headache.

Is that complaining??

elk join

I always wish I could skip the day before leaving town and just go straight to the leaving. The day before leaving is always filled with worry, tension, forgetfulness, anxiety, running errands, running in circles, making piles, sorting piles, loading piles, forgetting and remembering too late. That was my day today. Now, yesterday was a good day. Since we are going out of town for a few days to visit family and we have a 10 hour car ride--ugh--I organized and packed my art-journal-on-the-go-bag and painted a ton of backgrounds for new journal pages.

In my art-journal-on-the-go-bag:

• alphabet stamps (2 or 3 sets) and Staz-on black ink pad
• baby wipes
• fat glue stick
• AOL box of found words clipped from old books
• envelope of photographs
• alphabet stencil
• water soluble oil pastels
• date stamp
• pouch full of pens, markers, paint pens, etc.
• sharp pointy scissors
• bag of inspiration cards, some of my own and some of these
• tin of bird stickers
• paper carrier stuffed with random collage bits (scented soap wrappers, painted tissue paper, sheet music, interesting text pages, magazine cutouts, shards of scrap paper, bits of daily paper ephemera, lots of stencils, crumbly old book illustrations)
• paper carrier full of hand-picked favorite papers, stickers & rub-ons
• package of mini ink pads

I'll be gone for a few days relaxing, journaling and maybe some thrifting. Oh, how I love going to the big city. Before I go, here are a few of the backgrounds from yesterday. Each one is very different. I never know what mood I'll find myself in. Hopefully, they will be finished pages by the time I get home. See you next week. Not if I see you first.... (First one to tell me where that last line is from will be sent a few goodies.)

   

whaler radish

I've been working my butt off on some new art journals that I'm afraid I can't show you yet. Thankfully, they will be all packed up this morning and I will be moving on to something new. It is always when I have to work on one particular thing that all the new ideas come flooding in. I have a new skirt to make, jewelry for a few friends, journal pages to finish, summer clothes for Maisey, new painted fabrics because I used every last scrap in these last journals, some paperwork to send, and a few studio touch-ups I've been having to put off. Because all my creative energy has gone into these books, my journal pages have been pretty simple lately. But that's not a bad thing.

I finished up the background I shared earlier. Hopefully, I'll get to more later today. But now I've got to get started on school before the kiddoes start thinking Mom has forgotten about school. Now why would they think that??

Art Tip #2

I originally had hopes of posting arts/crafts tips to my blog every once in a while, but like many of my grandiose ideas...well, you know what happens. I'm going to give it another shot, though, and thought I'd start with Cheap Tricks, which is also the theme for Michelle Ward's Crusade #8. My tip is this: don't think that you have to have expensive art supplies to make "real" art. Top quality products are great but, let's face it, the term "starving artist" didn't come from no where. When you feel compelled to create, you've got to use what you can find or afford. So here's a little secret: Art products made for kids rock!!! There are so many products made for kids which are awesome resources, particularly for journalers and anyone else who makes art on the go.  Here are two of my new favorite things.

1. Crayola Slick Stix - These are very similar to oil pastels but way more creamy and smooth. They are not really meant to blend as well but you can't beat no mess on your hands, portable, and cheap (about $5). What I love most about these is that they dry completely without leaving the oily residue of oil pastels and--are you ready?--you can write over them! Joy in a twist tube. The only thing they need now are sets of 48 colors. Here's a background for journaling I made using them.

2. Blow pens - You just blow through the tube for your own mini airbrush! This set is particularly cool because it has a Magic Blo-pen Activator that turns each color into a new one. Lots of versatility. I've seen them bigger, but these are a perfect size for sticking in my already fat art bag.

Here's another background. They are super fun to use with stencils and masks.

And there are so many more.  But here is one more important tip: if you have kids, buy two of everything. It is so much easier to give them their own set then trying to explain why they can't borrow your cool art supplies. And since they're cheap, no problem.

• Air dry clay in natural colors like terra cotta
• Sidewalk paint!
• Cool effect markers
• Paint brush pens

exacting flea

Just in case you were wondering--I know you were!--the title for the last entry did come out of the spam box. Wasn't it perfect? Who would have known...such wisdom. Anyway.

Something occurred to me after last night's post that I've still been thinking about. When I was a youth, for lack of a better word (school age thru early college), it took so much for me to have a good time. So much for me to feel really happy. (Contentment was not even a consideration.) I always had to get more presents, party a little harder, stay out later, have one more guy attracted to me. There was never enough. It was trying to jump from one high to the next and avoiding the lows at all costs. Today--dare I say, as a grown up?? You can say that at 34 right?--it is the smallest things that blow me away. I couldn't get the glow of Soren's wildly happy face out of my mind all night. I found 2 or 3 delicate pieces of shell that I excitedly protected all the way home. John and I have had the best time for the past few nights staying up late cracking up to  YouTube videos. Distinguishing the songs of the birds. That kind of contentment. The ability to experience the beauty and the joy in the simplest things. Maybe that is part of the definition of adulthood, or is it childhood?

My heart literally leaps in my chest when I hear, "Oh, Momma! Isn't it a beautiful day!?" "Momma!! Come quick! The cactus is blooming!! Let's count the flowers...1, 2, 3...there are three new flowers!" "That was a fabulous time playing with our friends today." "Momma, I made a new friend on the slide! I just love making new friends!" Did your heart just leap, too?

The lesson we are working on lately is that you don't have to own something to just enjoy it. You don't have to bring home every dolly or summer dress for your very own to appreciate it and get joy from it. Hm, I'll need to run to Target later today. I might need to review that one before we go, ahem.

Yeah, um, here's today's creative work.

relax and take the time

Today we celebrated my sweet Soren's 6th birthday. My loving, brilliant son. My first born. The one who started it all. I won't even go into the "I just can't believe he's 6 already". We had a wonderful day. We got up early and spent the day at the beach. It was clear and a bit windy but not too hot. And I got sunburned sitting under the umbrella. How does that happen? The sun is fierce nearer the equator. The kids dug in the sand and rode in the kayak. I relaxed in the shade, just me and my art journal. I'm glad I brought my fat selection of paint pens, etc. Cut and paste is a little harder than usual at the beach. And I even got to create for about 30 minutes total--if you add the quiet snippets together. All this for only 4 hours of preparation and set up plus another 2 hours take down and clean up. What a day.

The sweetest part wasn't the chocolate cake with fudge and cream cheese icing but the round of sincere and loving hugs that we all received after each present Soren opened. I hope I never forget that look on his face, brighter than the sun. Strangely, amidst all of this joy and love, the song that ran through my mind all day, even now:

When did my heart get so petrified?

When did it get so hard to feel?

When did my heart get so afraid to love?

When did it get so hard?

Strike this rock with your love,

I’ll take the blow,

Until your living water begins to flow,

As it flowed from the man of sorrow’s side,

On that day when his body was torn for the twelve tribes.

I forgot the camera at home today, but I'm actually glad I did because I got to soak it all in without the distraction of recording every adorable moment. But since I don't have any pics to share, here are a few new art journal pages.

Well, the dog's noisily pushing the dog bowl around in the kitchen so I guess that's my signal. Plus, having fun is exhausting, I might not make it to 10pm tonight. I hope your day was blessed with even one-third of the joy that mine was...bliss....

scoreboard sacreligious

I'm slowly rising to the surface from the murky depths of numbness. Keeping my art journal with me at all times has helped tremendously. For better or worse, depression and I are life-long companions and I've learned to cope with it for the most part, but feeling nothing is harder to bear. It just doesn't feel alive. At least the depression I'm used to hurts, then you know you still exist.

The past few days have been warm and beautiful. The kids and I have started working in the yard in the evenings, trying to take advantage of the cooler (85-95 degree F) weather before the summer heat arrives.

Soren and I have been doing mainly nature studies for science this year. I threw out the science experiments early on. Forgive me if you disagree, but he has plenty of years left to study chemistry, etc. and it is only kindergarten for goodness sake. I'd rather encourage his natural wonder of God's creation and cultivate a love for nature early on. So, birds are the big thing for us right now. Living in the Rio Grande Valley, we are blessed to see some of the most beautiful and rare birds right in our back yard. This is not my photo of one of them--hopefully, someday I'll get some good ones of my own.

   

The Plain Chachalaca is one of the most common birds around. To the locals, they are mainly a nuisance, but we love them because they are so funny and obnoxiously loud. Families of chachalacas chase each other around the yard in the mornings and a single chachalaca can wake a neighborhood more quickly than any rooster. Until you've heard it, you have no idea how loud a single bird can be. The coolest thing is that I ran across this amazing sketch artist, journaler and birder (is that right?) online today. Her bird sketches from 2003 are all online and are so inspiring!

And speaking of things beautiful and inspiring: Pakhuis Oost bird bookends! And coat hanger apples!! Atelier Lzc Matriochka dishtowel! And children's notebook!! The world is full of beautiful things.

jet-lagged untangle

I've been thinking about digging out my old journals for days now, but haven't quite made up my mind. I've literally been journaling since I could write ("Chad is a buety boy" is one of my first entries, the first of probably hundreds by this boy-crazy girl). For every stage in my youth, there is a journal. Some more sophisticated than others. I think I filled a dozen composition books in high school alone. I would write pages and pages every day--what did I have to write about?? It's mostly curiosity that makes me want to dig these out. There's a part of me that wants to see where I've come from to motivate me in my journaling now. But that was not a happy time in my life. I'm not sure I want to resurrect it all.

For some reason, I completely stopped journaling my first year of college. And it has been hard to get back into it. Journaling had become so self-indulgent. I came to realize there was not much gold to be gleaned from obsessive introspection. But now my reasons for journaling have changed. And I've grown a bit, so I might actually have something to say.

Did I mention that my journal was partially responsible for my hooking up with my future husband when I was just 16? Remember I said that I wrote pages & pages every day? Around that time, there was a split between me and my best friend since childhood. We began moving into different directions, making new friends, etc. as teenagers inevitably do. Even though we still went through the motions of friendship, there was a lot of hostility there and my constant journal writing just added jealousy and suspicion to the mix. To make a long story short, my best friend conspired with some other mutual friends to steal my journal out of my locker. For a 15 year old, this was pretty much the most horrible thing I could imagine. It was a rough time.

But eventually, my friend and I kissed and made up, though we never talked about what happened. And later, she started dating my future husband. And since we were such good friends, she talked about me all the time. And for some strange reason, she actually showed him my journal where years before I had written how cute I thought he was. And that he looked like Philip Oakey, the lead singer of the Human League--swoon. So, naturally, he began to notice who I was and that I was pretty cute. So he stopped dating her and asked me out. Ha.

Ah, the stories of our lives. Here are a few pages I've been working on lately.

texture everywhere

I'm back but haven't much been in the mood to post. Some sort of funk I'm in. I actually feel more normal today so we'll hope it is gone. Our little trip to the Big City without kids was wonderful--as those of you with little ones know. John was in conferences all day so I had two whole days to myself. I went thrift shopping, visited art supply stores, book stores, drank vanilla bean frappucinos, and parked my butt and my art bag at Barnes and Noble for hours and hours just working in my art journal and listening to music. I have a playlist of  "journaling music" full of melancholy songs and a few upbeat ones, too, but songs that make me feel something, make me think, and get me in the mood to create. It's a pretty broad mix.

• When I Go/Over the Rhine
• Tender the Sky/100 Portraits
• Hurt/Johnny Cash (his remake of the NIN song)
• Mockingbird/Derek Webb
• How Come/Ray LaMontagne
• When It Doesn't Come Easy/Patty Griffin
• Take, Take, Take/The White Stripes
• Goodbye My Lover/James Blunt
• Summersong/The Decemberists
• Little Moments/Brad Paisley
• Dirt/Chris Knight

These are just a few. I have enough to keep me shuffling along for several hours. (By the way, if anyone is interested in a copy of my little mix, let me know and I might be persuaded to send you a CD.)

One day I just walked around downtown and enjoyed the beauty of the city (I miss it so much). I took a ton of pictures to use in my art journal. Some of them I fixed up in Photoshop, like the palm tree at the top.

The last one is a self-portrait that I've been experimenting with since reading Randi Feuerhelm-Watts' new book/inspiration deck. She gives lots of ideas for out of the norm self-portraits which are a lot easier for those of us who are a little squeamish about taking pictures of ourselves. Or maybe that's just me. Speaking of pictures and journaling, I'm off to bed for a few minutes with my art journal before I fall fast asleep.

I guess my brain isn't completely mush

It's Haute Handbags 2! And yours truly is inside (bottom photo and caption). This book is really beautiful with so many interesting techniques: beading, felting, altering, collaging, polymer clay work, quilting and more than you can imagine could be done with a purse.

At this stage in my life I've found that I am more drawn to art forms that are purposeful as well as meaningful. Not necessarily utilitarian, because I believe strongly that art is its own end; the process of making art is its own end. But I am enjoying art that has a practical use and can be incorporated into everyday life. Some might take this distinction as the difference between art and craft, but I hate the connotation that sometimes comes with the word "craft" as if it were for amateurs only and something "real" artists don't do. But then I also believe that every one of us was created to be creative, use our imaginations, turn ashes to beauty, and leave the world better (which can also mean more beautiful) than we found it. I guess I just don't think that art should be for the stark walls of galleries alone. It comes from the human soul and belongs to everyone.

So, art in my home, on my children, dangling from my ears, thrown across the couch, sent in the mail is nearer to my heart now. I think, despite myself, I am slowly narrowing my focus artistically which is one of my goals for this year. This might not even be something anyone else can see or understand, but I need to settle some things inside myself or I feel I cannot grow much farther. Confessions:

• When I begin working on a blank canvas or paper mache or wood or chipboard or whatever surface I use as a foundation for mixed media, I am keenly aware of the audience peering over my shoulder and I can never fully shake its influence on my work. The only exception to this seems to be my art journal.
• Somehow I've managed to keep my art journal closer to my heart and (mostly) free from the harsh judgments I make of my own work  and the fear of what others will think (or not think) about it.
• I've kept the commitment I made to myself to work in my art journal daily this month and I think doing it keeps me more mindful of the real reason I do what I do: because I have to. Because like Lazarus, I have been made alive and all I can do is simply be who I was made to be. There is not as much choice in the matter as I sometimes think.
• I love to see the work of my hands bring beauty and joy to my children, my home, our friends and others who--to my amazement--want to bring things these hands have made into their own homes.
• And finally, who I am has no bearing at all on whether or not anyone else ever reads this blog, or buys my stuff, or likes me, or thinks I'm pretty, or thinks I'm talented. This is a hard lesson to learn.

This afternoon, my lover and I are packing up for a little trip away from the kids and from all the things that weigh us down and cloud our vision. Well, unfortunately, John also has to attend a conference, but this is what I'm planning for myself. I'm bringing my art journal, my jewelry supplies (because I got some new beads that I'm ga-ga for and can't bear to wait until we get back to play with them. I'll share pics next week.), a Sudoku book, and a few cooking magazines. I finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula earlier in the week so I'm also planning on spending an afternoon at Half-Price Books looking for my next read. And seeing 300 which gives me chills every time I see the trailer. So, friends, have fun being creative and I'll be back later in the week.