Off to the Wilderness

In the morning I'll be off to Yellowstone for  a week.  We'll be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary which is the 5th.  There is a grizzly with 4 cubs this year and we are hoping to get a chance to see her. The weather looks good so I hope it holds for the whole week. I have my art supplies and books and knitting packed just in case the weather turns. Soon I'll be back rested and relaxed.

The Heart of Art

I just found out about this new class offered by Tam at Willowing and Artist Friends  I first found Tam with her early videos long before Ning was even around. She is a talented artist and has a wonderful art group. She is offering this class free. There are so many classes out there and many can not afford any of them. I applaud her for taking her time to give to the mixed media art community.

Over at her ning site there is a video on the class and information on signing up. It starts October 18th and will go for four weeks.  Come on over and join in the fun. I have signed up and would love to have all my friends come over and play.

Wishcasting Wednesday - What do you wish to step into?

Every week Jamie of Jamie Ridler Studios poses a question. Some weeks I like to play along.  Her question this week is: What do you wish to step into?

As usual Jamie gave us a great question to answer. At first I thought of this is easy, I want to step into my new life. The problem is I just do not know what that new life is. Sure I have these vague dreams that I want to be a published author or a better artist but then what comes after that. I really do not know what my dreams are anymore.

So maybe I want to step in to my dreams, I want to be excited about something. I want to fall into bed exhausted and wake up with excitement. I want to know true bliss. I want to explore the possibilities out there and I want to dream big and then live that dream. But alas where to begin...

To see what other wishcasters are wishing for go here

Lots of Different Creative Projects

I haven't done a Creative Every Day post in awhile so with the hodgepodge of things I have done in the last few days I thought I would group them together. If you want to see some awesome work check out what other creatives are doing at the above link.

I have been spinning. This is a silk boucle yarn I made yesterday. I had the silk singles all spun and just did the two plying steps required for a boucle.

Here is the yarn close up. I love the texture of it. Its not a color I would normally use for myself but I will come up with a use for it. It feels wonderfully soft.

In today's journal page I had layers of paint on the page but still didn't like it so I sewed to the page this spray painted background. I added the house image from a card from a friend.  The crow on top was from a tag by Violette.  We had been in a charm swap and she added the tag to her charm.  I cut the crow out and then extended the image with markers and embellished it some  more. The walkway way is to represent leaping into the unknown and I had stamped the word leap but it came out messy so I covered it with a butterfly which symbolizes change and growth to me. I had a lot of fun making this page.

Here is another portrait on watercolor paper this time.

I worked on this over the weekend I am  not sure I like the background.  I  think this one needs to sit for awhile.  I have the urge to paint over the entire things so its best if it sits for awhile. With fresh eyes I may know better what to do with it.  I found the words stand with might in the background but then when I went to print them out I printed 'stands with strength' which I think  is what she is doing.  She was found art.

Reflections on Eat Pray Love

I finally got around to seeing Eat Pray Love and yes I loved it. It really made me sad in some ways.  What woman doesn't want the time and money to be able to truly explore herself.  I thought here Elizabeth was in her thirties when she did this, how lucky was she.  I am so much older and I haven't had the opportunity to truly find out who I am. I couldn't help thinking just when will be my time. Most of us do not have the time or funds or guts to take a journey like this.

Then it came to me that I could find a way to do this without leaving home. I can explore pleasure, spirituality and balance right where I am.  So the first thing I am tackling is the pleasure part.  I went out and got one of these.

I had gone to the grocery store for a pastry since there are no decent bakeries in this town. They were out of almost everything but this apple turnover. I also picked up a bottle of blueberry pomegranate juice. I sat in the car eating every precious bite and enjoyed it to the fullest. There was the flaky crust and the burst of apples and then the juice was so fruity. I felt a little like Elizabeth eating all that wonderful food in Italy. The next day at the Farmers market I saw these.

I enjoyed every delicious bite, the apple was crisp and juicy and the caramel was soft and chewy. Now I decided I could really get in to this pleasurable eating... I thought I would try to eat something this way on most days for a month and see how that feels.

I have been leading myself to a deeper spirituality too. I have added yoga to my life and now attend a Spiritual book group that meets twice a month and a meditation group that meets weekly. So those are beginnings in that area.

I think that I will not focus that much on balance just yet. I need to see where the other focuses will take me. After all in her journey Elizabeth did one after another. Of course this is my journey so I can choose to do it any way I want. Since my word for the year is Bliss I truly can experience that in many forms with this experiment.

So the next time you envy someone's travel or experience realize that you truly can have your own version. If you want to travel you may not be able to go to a certain location but you can immerse yourself in the culture by reading about it, studying its art, by cooking the foods of the region, by learning the language and so much more.

Magical Housekeeping

I have been reading this book. Its all about de-cluttering and feng shui and using scents, blessings and much more for your home.  I found out about it at a monthly healing circle that I go to. It is a fun read and the author sounds like she would be great to meet. The group here is doing a Skype event with her next month.  I think that will be really fun to take part in.

I also have had Sarah shows me some things on my computer programs.  I now have the cd covers loaded into iTunes for all my music.  That was so satisfying to have done.  Its great having a computer wiz in the family.

Then I realized over the last few weeks what I have been doing is de-cluttering my computer. I had cleaned up my download files and my documents.  Then bloglines is closing so I moved everything to NetNewsWire which I like even better. Then I changed my email address to gmail which is so much better that yahoo was.  Its a lot of work but oh I love the new results.  Plus iTunes is all fixed, I got rid of a lot of duplicate files and its all pretty now.  I have also unsubscribed to a lot of newsletters that I just never read.  Try de-cluttering your computer it makes your life easier in the long run.

I started a new journal, I know its insane I have 4 different ones going now. When I was at my friend Jolene's she was working in an old book. I hadn't tried that so I went to the thrift store and found a a book called B.F."s Daughter written in 1940. I thought that will do. I glue 3 pages together to make it thicker paper and gesso before I began to play. First I painted the border and then used oil pastels on the background which then I covered with collage.  When I was editing the photo is photoshop elements I thought I'd play a little

Look how the collage looks in aqua.

Or perhaps blue....

Or even purple.  I think it would be interesting to print out these different pages and reuse on other pages.  That is what I love about art journaling, ideas can come out of anything.

Wishcasting Wednesday -What do you wish for an abundance of?

You can be a maker of magic and a tender of wishes. That is what Jamie says every week and this week is no exception.


This Week she asks; What do you wish for an abundance of?   Well my first thought is money. Sorry to be so materialistic but right now it just seems like it would be wonderful to have enough to take all the classes I want, to travel if I want to not have to weigh the fact if I take this class then I am taking money away from something else. What am I willing to give up to do what I think I might want to do? Its a hard dilemma and one I struggle with. 


Then I thought oh I would like an abundance of time too! I have been mulling on how I want to spend my time now.  When you have a serious illness and its now over with you really start thinking on how you want to live your life differently. 

Now last week I started doing my Yoga DVD and I did it 6 days out of the 7 of that week.  That told me if I really commit to something I can do it.  Now by doing that I was to tired to go for a walk, but I want to be able to take walks too.  Then I really want to start meditating again and have free dance sessions at my house.  I also am doing some bit of Art everyday. Then there is the sewing I want to do and the little kimono quilt to finish and working on a novel and what happened to that creativity book I was going to write. All of that doesn't include that my house needs a major cleaning and I want to reconnect with friends and yada yada  it goes on and on

I am sure all your lives are pretty much the same. It all comes down to choices, we make choices everyday for the time we have.  Some days I feel the time just whisk on by and others it seems like I have done quite a few things on the list and I am feeling great. I don't know what the difference between any of these days is.  Do I really have more time or is my time more focused or am I putting the gremlins at bay on those happy productive days.


It seems like both of my wishes for more money and time are all about making choices and it seems like if I had these things the choices would be easier to make.  Perhaps I just need to be grateful that I have choices after all.


To see what other wishcasters are doing go here

GPP Street Team #44 In a Scrape

I decided to play along with Michelle Ward and company and get out the credit card but this time no charges apply. I use scraping tools in my work quite often so this was an easy challenge for me. I use credit cards, putty knifes, palette knives, cardboard or anything that is lying around in my studio.    I forgot to take pictures in progress of the steps so it mostly finished pages.

On this page I scraped on paint and then added stamping. It was so bright I wasn't sure how to make a page ouit of it so I just drew my hand on top and added some words.

This page I had scraped on paint and then tried to scrape over a mask but I kept having disasters so I  just painted over it again. I used stencils and stamps after that. I had this silhouette all cut on and colored with stamp ink.  She seemed to want to be part of the page too.














This next one I remembered to take a pic of first.  I scraped paint and then put a circle of paint over the sections and then scraped that paint into the piece.  I like this technique because after I scraped you could still see the circles.  I got this idea from a quilt I saw recently.  It had all these rectangles of different sizes with circles appliqued over them.  It was a stunning piece and an idea I want to pursue on paper.














After I found these images I just highlighted the circles with charcoal and made some additional ones for words I added.












This piece was done at my friend Jolene's house and its a combination of using my intention word for September from Creative Awakenings: Envisioning the Life of Your Dreams Through Art   and scraping.  I had all sort of colors underneath but did like what I had so I just put gesso  over the whole piece. Then I juist statred adding all sorts of fun stuff to the page.
















This is a tag that Jolene made me. When we first met I had given her some supplies from my stash. She incorporated the embossed wallpaper into this tag along with some metal work. The words follow your heart are added which was so appropriate for me. Since my surgery I have been wearing a necklace that I bought in Montana this summer. Its a heart with the words Follow your heart ingraved in it. I wear it to remind to do just what it says. This tag hangs proudly in my studio where I can see its message.

To see what other GPP team members are doing go here   Or better yet maybe this is the month you  choose to participate.