It was so easy to blog every day when color week was going on…having that prompt made it more necessary in my brain, I guess. Today, my brain is just misfiring, so there shall be no cohesion or effort toward such in this post. You’ve been warned.

Last week I had a little knitter finishing spree and I finished up 4 older projects. Do I have pics? No…but I was feeling very accomplished and most of the items will end up in the gift/sale bin. I did manage to cet a scna of the Traveling Woman shawl.

I started and finished this on our trip to South Africa. It’s knit from Colinette Jitterbug sock yarn and it is a nicely saturated mix of denim blues. It was headed to the gift pile, but Elizabeth put a stop to that, gently suggesting we keep it. The pattern was quick and relativelt easy and I think I am going to knit it agin, maybe in some Malabrigo silky merino.

In lieu of finishing up a few things, I finally cast on for another Lady Eleanor wrap. I will leave musings on LAdy E to her own post because really, she deserves lots of eye candy. I am using some Noro Silk Garden Lite that I bought a few years back just for her.

I am a little concerned about the Round robin Journal project I started in one of my Ravelry groups. I make every effort to not be attached, and this doesn’t feel like attachment as much as just wanting it to progress to its conclusion. It should be over already, and I have only gotten 4 of the 9 journals, one of them my own. It seems to have stalled out and I am at a loss for how to nudge it along. All things in time, I guess.

On another journal note, I am getting ready to participate in a Frida Kahlo round robin journal swap. I am mostly ready and still have about a week and a half before my journal must be mailed. I am trying to not be intimidated by the project. I sort of feel like I don’t knw enough about Frida to do a page in 11 journals, but I think it will evolve for me as I go so I am not stressing about it or anything, but it is on my mind.

I am also trying to keep momentum with my online journal class and really the only thing for that is just doing the artwork. I find a spurt of desire around it every few days and have just been going with that particular flow.

Maybe now that some of this has spilled out ontot he page so to speak, my brain might get back on track…maybe…

I finished the spread for Tina’s journal in the RRJ2010 project with the Simple Living Ravelry knitters. I used some images from a holiday article on nuno felting (the penguin and polar bear) as well as a prompt from the Life Made by Hand online journaling class and the shoes and Buddha from a class collage sheet handout from Kelly(buddha is cut off in the thumbnail, but if you click through I think you can see the whole thing, if not, I don’t really understand the image choice settings and will have to work on that).

I hadn’t used the writing prompts before and picked one blindly. It was number 60: How lucky are you? I had been thinking about choices and merged that with feeling lucky to have them and wrote several pages in Tina’s journal about just that.

I also laid down a few more backgrounds in the sow journal. Four new spreads follow. There are four thumbnails that should all click through to a full size of the image.

I also managed to finish my Lady of the Lake sweater this weekend. It will be finctional and warm, but beyond that, I am not too sure what I think about it. It might just need some blocking, but it also might reside in my office, never to see the light of day. Time will tell, and really we are sort of leaving sweater season (except in my office which is pretty much always sweater season. Yay for a finished object!

I feel like I have been on the go again more than home, and with good reason. Two weeks ago, Elizabeth and I went to visit our friends Lisa and Harry in Hastings, Nebraska. It was a 16 hour drive and really, as long drives go, it was a pretty easy straight shot north. We met Lisa and Harry about a year ago while on a 37 days retreat given by Patti Digh and David Robinson. The work they do is pretty amazing and I was glad to have been a part of it. The friends we made there are priceless. Like Lisa and Harry.

While traveling, I tend to collect receipts and other various ephemera, and I decided I would do a journal spread using them. It makes for a pretty boring background, but it does serve to document the journey and also offers a lot of white space for journaling, which can be a nice respite from the more artisticly crafted journal pages. I wasn’t thinking to keep the papers from a certain trip on the same page, so for now I have labeled them as the town in which I glued them down.

This page was started in Nebraska. There is a receipt from Buc-ees as well as a piece of the Buc-ees beaver logo, the Perfect toilet paper wrapper, and a paper strip that was wrapped around the toilet seat when we arrived at the XL Motel. It saddens me that we were unable to get a photo of the XL and it’s neon at night. The place is old with very dated decor, but it was clean and Sanitary! Even though Lisa sisn’t believe us, it really was an adequate place to lay our heads at night. The facing page remains unfinished, but was also glued at the same time.

Next up we have Birmingham. Birmingham was the first stop on the road trip last week moving the chef back to upstate NY(so he can keep the Jeep). When Elizabeth and I first made the reverse drive, moving me from VA to TX oh, some twelve years ago now, we were towing the Jeep and the last thing my friend Mike (who helped with the packing) said to us was very sound advice. “Make sure that everywhere you go or stop affords you the ability to pull through.”

We were very diligent in this. We pretty much drove straight through, stopping as needed for gas or food, and little did we know that the exit in AL that said it had all sorts of amenities really didn’t. Before we got too far from the highway in the middle of nowhere at 2am, we thought it best to just turn around and go a little further down the highway. As soon as Elizabeth started the turn where presumably we would just drive around the block, I saw it, the “No Outlet” sign. Sigh. We would be backing up to turnaround, a feat which proved exceedingly difficult, and took us more than an hour. That is when it became Alafuckingbama, and silly me for not remembering this when we needed to get gas and find a motel. I think we were in the bowels of Birmingham. s c a r y. We got back on the highway and went an exit or two further to find a lovely Comfort Inn. That was the end of the first day.

The next day took us to Staunton, VA. There, we stayed at a Budget Inn. This particular Budget Inn made the XL Motel seem like a modern resort. But as with the XL, it was indeed a clean place to lay our heads for the night. This page also has an image from a brochure for Wilmington, NY, our final destination.

I was gluing these down last night and was interested to see that Staunton is the Queen City. Umm, why? The trips have all sort of mingled together on this spread. The Virgin strip is from the South Africa trip and I pulled it off the suitcase and stashed it into the ephemera folder.

From Staunton, we drove on to Califon, NJ where my Aunt Patty lives. Elizabeth and I were just there in December, and I couldn’t help but think how nice it would be if we could visit there going forward with the same frequency. While there, Chef Will made some ribs for dinner at Aunt Patty’s request. She might still be nibbling on the leftovers. They came out pretty good. We were going to be off by 8am, but Aunt Patty asked for a Ravelry tutorial and obsessed knitter that I am, I absolutely had to oblige.

We were on our way north to Wilmington, NY by 10am. We drove on a little ways and stopped at the Brookside Diner for breakfast. I think this was in Whippany, NJ. We came across it by accident as we were looking for gas and something quick, but after getting a few miles from the freeway, there it was, and we pulled in. It was Easter Sunday and I was glad it was open as it afforded me my pork roll fix (even if the menu pretentiously called it Taylor Ham, I knew). Then it was to Wilmington by dinner time and Easter dinner at the Wilderness Inn. Yawn.

I flew home on Tuesday and managed to read most of Olive Kitteridge on the plane. I totally enjoyed it. Last night I got to work on the cover of the journal that is mostly recycled (pictured recently plain white). The cover is a tyvek bubble mailer for CDs. My mom had used it to send me some photos and It was in out reuse stash. The pages are mostly recycled from work and the first two spreads pictured above are from inside this journal. At this point I am hoping that the papers stay on the cover. I haven’t and prior experience with glueing onto Tyvek, so as with all these pages, there is a learning curve. The camera and tag pages are from an arist I have linked on the left for her Collections blog. She is doing a collection a day for this entire year and I find her collections interesting. The idea of documenting them, in particular. I also like her artwork and at some future point, hope to be able to get some.

Last night I also got started on my third journal in the Round Robin Journal swap I am doing with some members of the Simple Living Group on Ravelry. I started that journal swap with art journaling in mind, but what I have seen so far is mostly text journaling. It is still an interesting slice of life, I suppose. Tina’s journal is a small book, about 5X7 and my spread is decidedly symmetrical. I glued a few pages together to give them a little weight, and then used all light papers to not make it too heavy. The felted penguin and polar bear seemed somehow appropriate for a knitter’s journal.

I did some pen work while watching some TV last night and more embellishment is to come. There are images from a collage sheet I got from Kelly’s class, too, as well as just some colored magazine ads. I think I might use one of the class prompts for text on this one.

Last week I was working on a spread for the Round Robin Journal exchange project I started. The journal that I was working in was a simple composition book and I was a little leery about doing a collage page on such flimsy paper. To get around this, I simply glued a few pages together to make a sturdy base. It worked really well and once it dried, I went on to do this spread…

This image is before pen work and eventual text was added. It is worked using layout templates from the online journaling class A life Made By Hand with Kelly kilmer, both linked to the left. The class has been a great inspiration and totally worth it.

The success of this got me to thinking, since the paper is going to be covered by collage anyway, why not use the paper I have to print for various work things that gets tossed in the trash anyway. I have a stack of it that I reuse in various ways already, but not nearly as fast as it is piling up.

I then jumped my thoughts to recycled covers. I had a padded cd mailer that my mom hd sent me something in and I just cut three sides of that off to make aninstant cover. I am not sure if glue will stick to the cover as it is somewhat non-porous, but I think sharpies will work on it at the very least.

I then folded some of my recycled pages in half and trimmed them square with the paper cutter. I will stitch them up into a book when I get home tonight and then I will glue some of the pages together to have the beginnings of another art journal.

Not to be discounted are the trimmed pieces. I have a stack of *bux coffee sleeves sitting on my desk. I cut them open along one of the sides and stapled in some of the trimmed scraps, again trimming to the appropriate length. I got 4 little notepads out of the scraps from the journal pages.

I like making the journal books from the heavy watercolor paper, but I also like the totally recycled from waste version. Most of all I guess I like that I can choose to make either. Need one?

I am going to take one on a trip with me this weekend and with any luck, fill it up with some beautiful shared art…time to play with pens!!

I just put my second RRJ2010 (my own being the first) journal into the mail. I had fun working with the pastel pots again and plan to use them more in the near future. The spread, or rather creating it, went a long way toward averting (hopefully cutting off and not just postponing) me being in a bad movie. I have come to accept that they just happen and it is better to just go a long for the ride than to fight it, but it can be disconcerting to feel a bad movie coming on and feel helpless to prevent it. So if playing with bright pastels is a bandaid, who am I to argue.

I just reread that and it sounds way more dramatic than it really is. But it is, nonetheless. Allow me to present HermitCrab@Sunrise…

I did a little more doodling after this scan, and I entered more text, some thoughts on bad movies, and sent it on its way. One down and 8 more to go.

The other things in the mail (and it’s only March 5th) are wood cut puzzles we bought the nephews while we were in South Africa. We have almost been home as long as we were gone, and they are already in the mail. This is a real accomplishment.

Tomorrow is looking to be a full day. I have a knitting class from 10-3, Continental immersion. I know how to continental knit, but only knit. In this class I will learn to purl, increase and decrease. It will force me out of my comfort zone and into a learning zone.I have heard nothing but good about rose’s class, so I am looking forward to it just a little.

Other potentials on tomorrow’s to-do list include the farmer’s market before class (depends on if I get up early enough), and a visit to Texas Art Supply after class (to pick up a few more colors of the pastel pots), as well as a desire to go to the First Saturday Heights art market(depends on the weather and my energy level after class). Oh…and I have a groupon for Metaphysical Matrix that expires soon, so I have to go by there, too, and Spec’s…  I think there is a pretty good liklihood that I will at the very least get to the art supply store, and maybe even do that tonight.

Stuff is in the mail. Almost all of it. the only remaining thing that needs to be in the mail is a sample of some yarn I have to send to Fleece Artist for them to match and send me back enough to finish a Lady of the Lake sweater I am working on. It was almost done. It was almost going on vacation to South Africa with me. I ran out of one of the yarns just before I finished the second sleeve and still need some for the collar. Truth be told, I would like the sleeves to be longer, too, but I can live with them the length they are (about 3/4) if I only get enough new yarn for the collar. time will tell. but that is what isn’t in the mail.

What is in the mail is the first few items for my ongoing Gratitude Project. Last year I did a meme which I took from Annie Modesitt’s blog. The first 5 people to reply get something handmade by me. They, in turn, post the same offer on their own blog, and Gratitude ripples across the water ad finitum. I really enjoyed participating in that, and since then I have had an ongoing Gratitude List stuck on my keyboard at work. When someone or something strikes me in a certain way, I add them to the list. The list itself is a little one inch Post-It note, so it never gets out of hand, and I just crossed 4 names off it which makes room for four more. So far, it is a good outlet for my knitting obsession.

This quilt square is also out the door. We participated in a group quilting project with some lovely ladies in CT. The only rules were that we had to use 100% cotton fabric, and we had to incorporate a sample provided to us. The two chicks are the incorporated fabric. It’s finished and in the mail. It even has a tracking number!

I also got something in the mail yesterday, a book I had ordered called The wonderful Weekend book by Elspeth Thompson. So far, it’s lovely and I am enjoying it. The focus is on reclaiming the weekend for personal relaxation and balance. The author is English, so it’s rather…Brittish…maybe a tad pretentious…but it is what it is and I find it somehow delightful.

I almost forgot to mention the journal project I am doing. I started a round robin journal project in the Simple Living group on Ravelry. 9 of us are participating and as it is my first time doing such a thing, it feels rather loosey goosey in terms of guidelines. Basically each person starts a journal, whether written, collage, painted pages, whatever, and we mail them to each other every 2 weeks or so. Eventually, if the universe is being kind, your original journal comes back to you.

Time to flee to the Island. Maybe more later, maybe not.