I suppose I have to consider the years we did Emerald Pillows when I think of being a published artist, but I am officially a published visual artist!

Yesterday, I received my artist’s copy of Four Word Self Help by my dear friend Patti Digh of the blog 37 days. I answered the call for artists and am honored to have been chosen.

I used one of my dad’s photos from the 50s and created the piece RIP Stella. The pic is from Stella Podharsky’s viewing and when I asked my dad who Stella was, he said “Probably just some immigrant my mom and pop knew from the old days.” I have subsequently asked other family members about Stella, and no one knows (or remembers) who she was. And now she has been memorialized in printsome 6o plus years later.

Awesomeness.

I am on my way. I started the Little Sheep rug hooking kit this week. I reserve my official opinion until I am done, but it is a much slower and deliberate crafting experience for me.

It is pretty straight forward in terms of process: insert hook, pull up loop, repeat. My challenge lies in finding a happy point of focus. My glasses are tri focal and I absolutely hate them. Well, hate might be too strong a word. I don’t find they work as they are supposed to. Rather than shifting my eyes to find the correct focus for the part of the lens I am meant to be using, I still find myself sliding the glasses up and down my nose or moving what I am reading closer or farther away. It’s no more a pain in the ass than my old single focus lenses were and honestly, that the focus changes in the lens isn’t a help at all.

For my rug hooking effort, I can manage the loops at what you might think is the obvious standard way to use the hoop, at arms length or in or around my lap. But then there is the backing material with its tiny grid pattern. To be slear in how I am using that, it is a bring it close and look over the top of my glasses thing. So the hooking goes much slower than I thought it would, and it becomes something needing a very deliberate concentration. There is a Houston group that meets the third Saturday of the month and I might join them this month to see if I am maybe overlooking the obvious.

All in all, it isn’t unpleasant, it is just slower and requiring more attention that I thought.

Green paper, a blog I discovered recently and linked on the left, has issued a collage challengeand provided a collage page as a PDF download for the challenge.

I am not sure I am finished, but for purposed of this challenge, I need to call it finished and get it posted. I might do some further embellishing with pen and stuff.

I used one of the beer six-pack panels on my ring journal for this because I sometimes like the stand alone nature of a piece not bound into a journal. The heavier weight of the cardboard as a base offers a little more freedom to accessorize.

If you go to this link you can scroll down a bit and see what others have done with the images. The images in my post are thumbnails and you can click on them for a bigger view.

It’s what’s for lunch.

I worked on a second Remains of the Day journal. This one is 99% recycled materials. The cover is made from a piece of junk mail and an old blouse, embellished with stuff from the stuff stash. The pages are made from security envelopes salvaged from the mail trash and scraps of paper from various other projects. It isn’t what I want as an end product, but much closer.

Time to eat my cake.

For the past several months, I have been taking Kelly Kilmer’s A life Made by Hand journal class. I definitely like the process of creating something and have several journals from that class going. They are all in process and will be for some time. A lot of my fellow students work a little more deliberately focused and see a journal from start to finish iver the course of a few weeks. I am more about refining the process to find my style, I think. Doesn’t that sound better than I have craft ADD?

Last week, I started Mary Ann Moss’ Remains of the Day class. It’s a different process and I am having a hard time in my brain separating the two as different. I think ultimately, I will be combing the two as my own. I am not sure what preconceived notions I had about the ROD class, and I am  in no way saying I am at all dissatisfied as there is plenty of new information an d technique I am soaking up. I just feel like I am missing some connection. So while I wait for my ROD a-ha moment to happen, I am going to just keep plowing forward in my own little process until something clicks into place.

These pages are the front, inside cover, two random spreads, and the back. When it is colsed the journal is about seven inches square. The largest spread is 5.5X13. some of the pages feel too plain, some too busy. I think part of refining the process will come in actually working in the journal and finding the balance. That is part of personalizing it and I get that.

Ultimately, I would like to offer these journals for sale in the ARTreach gallery/store. I think it would be a good low-end item for that. My goal is to make them mostly recycled materials and I am going to get a few going over the weekend in an effort to refine the procedd to a point where I feel it is something worth selling. I know by the time I am done with this journal, it will be much cherished, but today it is in the meh column.

I am soon on my way to the grocery store to stock up for a weekend of eating crap. I haven’t had a total crap binge in quite a while, and the last time, I noticed I would have a few bites of something and then move on, so even though I am thinking binge and saying binge, it really won’t be a binge. Yay for me…

The list so far? Cheddarwurst, Velveeta mac and cheese, Pepsi, chips, sushi, ice cream(maybe), and I am thinking of maybe having a nice juicy burger for dinner unless something else catches my eye. I think I might actually walk the aisles and see what else sparks my nostalgic indulgence radar.

Adios muchacha…

Yesterday was the beginning of WWKIP Week and the knitting readers I meet up with monthly decided to combine our monthly meet-up with some public knitting at the mall. We met at the fireplace area at Memorial City Mall and had 4 new to us knitters join us.

I decided to bring Lady E along to knit on because she is so showy with all her Noro-licious color changes. I am about 5 or 6 balls into this and the stole is about 5 feet long with at least another foot or so to go. I am totally enamoured with this bit of knitting just as I am every time I start one of these. This is my fourth one if I am not mistaken.

Not sure if I have already mentioned it, but Elizabeth and I joined a Frida Kahlo art journal Round Robin. There are 11 women participating, and by the end, we will all have a Frida Kahlo art journal with a page contributed by each member. the deadline for mailing them is tomorrow and mine is finally ready to go out the door. I decided that rather than a traditional journal format, I will use materials salvaged from the trash. The panels for my pages are the sides of six-packs. The theme for my journal is Dia de los Muertos. I used loose binder rings to hold the pages together and it will live on a shrine that is another work in progress, hanging from cup hooks, I think. I say I think, because my first plan was to collage a tin or box to hold it, but I think I want something more available. Of course I might also change my mind again a time or two since it will be about a year before I get it back again.

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…

We were supposed to be in small town central TX this past weekend, but then the weekend prior, the washing machine changed our plans. We decided to be real grown ups and change the plans rather than tax our budget for the foreseeable future but both taking the planned getaway *and* fixing the washer.

Grown ups or not, we found ourselves able to still take off Friday and enjoyed a lovely long weekend in the most decadent of slothful ways. Art was made, restaurants were visited, plants were purchased. It was all rather refreshing and divine.

Some of these are finished, and some not so finished. I usually orient these scans to the proper direction and I just realized I negected to do so this time. I was distracted by reading a recap of Lost while scanning.

In addition to making a new journal to send out to someone, I also made a set of 5 Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) that I am sending out to a swap, and also 5 postcards going to a similar swap with the same group. You send in 5 cards and get back 5 cards from various members of the group. This is new to me and I am both excited about the possibilities and equally trying to have no expectations. My challenge today. I will scan the cards for sharing here once they are finished.

I decided to make the back cover of the recycled journal a second front cover, so the resulting book will meet in the middle and flip sort of. This is the tyvek padded mailer that has the cow on the other front cover. On this front cover: The elephant scene and the desert sunset are both wine labels, there is a note on the top that came from a skein of yarn graciously sent to me from Mountain Colors as replacement for one that was squirrel-napped. If you don’t already know about the squirrel-napping, that is a story for another day. The clown is cut out from a sheet of gift wrap we bought at Kate’s Papers in NYC, and the bird carrying the Draw and Paste Here note is from a book called Ideas that was given to us by the wonderful Lisa of Hasting’s Nebraska. I wish the book had ISBN info so I could link it here, but it doesn’t. Suffice it to say it is a collage dream waiting to happen.

On to the new Journal. I am calling this the Ring Journal as it is held together with loose binder rings. One of the inspirations behind all my recent journaling is seeing how much I can incorporate recycled materials and found objects. Most of the ring journal pages are the sides of various six packs. Yes, we drink a little beer, so these are always available. In this particular grouping there are also sides from a Velveeta box, Tampax box, and Kotex panty liner box. Yes, we always seem to have these boxes readily available.

Elizabeth and I are involved with a group of women doing an journal swap themed on Frida Kahlo. I am thinking of using the Ring Journal for that.

I did start a few of the pages this weekend and since the binder rings come in a multi-pak, I will just start them as their own journaling assortment. I will still do some pen work over the tops of these. I am not sure yet what I will do on the other side, maybe just give them a wash of paint and leave them as a blank surface for journaling.

The live happier page is all magazine pages from various ads. There is something inherrently pleasing in transforming annoying advertising.

Max with fish uses a piece of chinese lettered gift-wrap (upside down, I know) with fish found in my collection of found papers, some are from  some old bookplates I had, some from newspaper ads, the one with the coffee cup is from a brochure for Pike’ s Place Market from our trip to Seattle. I have scraps of paper accumulated from everywhere, and I am sure Elizabeth is finally glad to see some of them being used.

Florio has small versions of a lot of my dad’s pictures of himself. I like the contrast of the black and white with the Florio image which was

cut from another sheet of giftwrap from Kate’s Papers in NYC. Across from that is various family members from my dad’s photos. The ones on top are my Aunt Joan with Bruse Springsteen’s aunt who lived next door in Freehold (again in the 50s), or so the story goes. My Uncle Arthur is sitting on my dad’s lap, My Aunt Dorothy is sitting with my cousin Cheryl, and the bottom grouping is Aunt Joan’s 8th grade graduation. The other paper is from a sheet of giftwrap and looks a little like a game board to me.

Finally, there are various pictures of Max, my grandfather with the bookplate fish and chopsticks directions. Important info to keep from the chinese take-out…

As usual (lately), all the thumbnails will take you to a larger image if you click.