The Queen of Saturday

Once school starts, I become the Queen of Saturday. I don't want to do anything except enjoy myself and relax. The first week back is always hard and this was no exception. I'm always stressed about getting the classes off on the right foot and that keeps me from sleeping right which makes it hard to function the next day, and makes it even more difficult to get the classes off on the right foot. I feel pretty good about how the week went all-in-all.

I finally broke down and ordered the 1000 Journals book. It is my new bathroom reading. I'm enjoying it a lot. The book feels nice in your hand too. Lots of inspiration here.

I've Been Contemplating

Do I need more storage, or less stuff?

Sometimes I think more storage would be great and other times that I just need to get rid of a bunch of stuff that I don't need. I did get rid of some this summer and I really haven't bought much.

I was sitting here earlier and suddenly felt the need to go upstairs and work in my journal. Didn't matter that the kitchen was a mess. I got to it after the page was done. The sketch I did a few days ago during an inservice. It was my granddaughter's fourth birthday, so I added the cake and phrase stamp that was sitting out because I had used it for her card. That's why lots of stuff makes it to my pages. It was sitting there with-in my reach as I did them. The strawberries and cherries above the drawing came from the tops of jelly jars. The jelly was great and I like the jars too. I'm starting to get a little collection of them. I've been wanting to add green tea tags all summer. Johnny has been drinking quite a bit of it iced while he works on the house. It takes eight bags for each gallon.

I carved the seven while working on this page. That makes one, two and seven. I also drew the nine/six on the eraser. I figured I'd carve it next since it was a twofer.

Last day of summer vacation

Yesterday was the last day of summer vacation. I went to church in the morning, and then came home and mostly vegged. About 5:30 my husband looked out the window toward the garden and called me to come and see. The flock of turkeys that we have watched in our field for the last two months was in our garden. The babies are nearly as big as the two moms. As we were watching the turkeys eat the grass and bugs, the doe and fawns that have been around for the past few weeks ambled into view. It was a blast watching the fawns interact with the turkeys. Of course, I grabbed the camera and tried to get some photos. I managed to get a couple of decent ones. Later, before I went to bed at the new and improved earlier time, I printed them out and journaled.

When we went out to wash the car we had to shoo the deer away. There were another doe and fawn that we didn't see from the window.

I'm not sure if anyone is interested in reading about the process of my journal pages, but I thought it might be fun to record one.

I woke up early this morning and was told to quit moving around, so I thought I would do something in one of my books. I really had no ideas, so I grabbed one of my journaling books, Altered Books, Collaborative Journals, and Other Adventures in Bookmaking by Holly Harrison and opened it at random, thinking that I would try to incorporate at least one thing from what I found on the page into my journal or one of my altered books. This is the page I wound up with. I grabbed my journal and headed upstairs.

The page on the left appealed to me, but not for a journal page. I've been working in a red, white and black altered book for quite a while now. I usually use found text in this one. First I looked for some words that I could work with and circled them with a grey colored pencil because we have a pencil-stealing gremlin in this house and no matter how many I buy there is never one when I need it. There must be one at school too, because neither I, nor any of my seventh-graders ever has one. But I digress. After finding the words, I spread some red fluid acrylic paint with a sponge on the edges of the spread. Then I painted in antique white around the words with a brush and then dry brushed the rest of the spread in antique white. At this point I sat the book aside to dry, intending to sketch a woman on the right page.

I picked up my journal and thinking I might turn an interesting piece of a red magazine photo into something similar to the heart on the right photo of Harrison's book, I got to work. The left page of my spread was a piece of an old German book that I sewed into the compo book when I reconstructed it. The pages are really fragile and I had forgotten to strengthen them when I did the first side, so I grabbed some masking tape and went all around the edges of the page. For good measure I added some to the right page too.

Since I was doing a red heart and I had some read paint on my pallet still, I spread it on the right page and worked some into the masking tape on the left side. It looked pretty flat, so I dry brushed some antique white on both pages. The texture was starting to happen

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I started this post two days ago and had my computer freeze up. Luckily Blogger now does lots of mini saves. Unfortunately, I've totally lost my train of thought and have no idea how I planned on finishing the post. Rather than start over, I thought I'd just post this.

Today is my last totally unencumbered day before school starts back next week. I've been upstairs making mail art all morning and now I need to clean the house a bit. The mail art is a lot of fun, I'll probably pop back up and work on it some more too.

The Discard Pile

I cleaned out the kitchen cabinets yesterday. Snatched this out of the discard pile this morning. This will probably find its way into my journal somehow. Moral of the story...when you de-clutter, get rid of the give away stuff quickly.

It's back to school for me next week. I have slept like a baby all summer and suddenly last night I didn't get to sleep until after 4 AM. I don't want to start that!

I've had a busy couple of weeks to sum it up, I had a cool teacher's inservice on altered books Mon and Tue of week before last. It lasted two days and we played in books the whole time. Most of the other attendees were new to altered books, but most of them were art teachers so the pages were cool. One man was an agri teacher. The presenter wondered what he was doing there and tried her best to include him and help him make a book that reflected his area. He said the nicest thing when we had show and tell at the end. He said it was the most pleasant workshop he'd been to. Usually people complain and gripe at inservice and want to be anywhere else, but he said we all smiled the whole time and were happy to be there. I had a cold and got a migraine the second day and I still enjoyed myself.

Wed I canned tomatoes and also the following Sun. I baby sat my sweet granddaughters Thur, Fri, Mon and Tue. The little one had a hard time sleeping and we had some quality time around midnight all three nights. She was so content just to sit on the couch next to me while everyone else slept. Wed I came down with walking pneumonia. That's not an experience I care to repeat. Fortunately the Z-pack took care of it quickly. This last Sat was my nearly four-year-old sweetie's Veggie Tale birthday party in the park.

I went out last night to pick tomatoes. I got side-tracked by my marigolds and zinnias they are putting on an awesome display. We don't often get the amount of rain we've had this summer and they are showing out. It tickles me to think that all this beauty came from $2 or $3 worth of seeds. Several of the flowers had dried while I was so busy, so I picked them and sprinkled the seeds around the edge of the yard. We have had them volunteer in the past and I'm hoping if I scatter seeds they'll do it again. Thankfully I didn't have enough tomatoes to can. There were plenty to eat and that suits me just fine. I've canned 84 quarts this summer and I don't mind if I don't have to do any more. We will enjoy them this winter I'm sure.