Catching up

I haven't felt much like blogging lately, but I have done some journaling. My main news is that I finally bought a new camera. I'm really enjoying it. I'm looking forward to hopefully taking some photos of my grandgirls tomorrow.

In other news, the roof is finally done on the new part of the house. Johnny asked what I thought about moving the kitchen to that part. I'm thinking about it, but it will be hard to change kitchens. It's such an integral part of the house and I've had the same one for nearly thirty years.

Crushes

Crusade Number 12 over at GPP Streat Team is Crush. I wasn't sure what to think of that until I realized that Michelle was talking about what I consider fazes or obsessions. I've been through several, starting with dollhouse miniatures in my teens. I bought every magazine or book I could find on the subject. I corresponded with people across the world (before Internet) trading my handmade miniatures for what others made. I spent endless hours with them. And then I was done, so done that I could only find one photo on my flickr stream.

This photo actually shows several of my next crushes. About the time that I finally got online, I developed a big crush on crazyquilting. So big that my alias on several sites is still Crazyquilter.

I got into web pages and mailing lists at that time and spent endless hours with both with a crazyquilt theme. The little doll in the middle of the wreath was my next crush, or rather taking pictures of her wherever I went and sharing them online. Dolls have been an on and off crush all my life.

Altered books came next and I spent a couple of years learning how to do things with paper, paint, scissors and glue. Then came my current crush/obsession of visual journals. I've nearly filled seven composition books. I love looking at other people's journals, books about them, and of course working in my own. I have a thing for recording. Everything paper and some things that aren't find their way into my journal. The phone sketch below on my lastest journal page was done in my car on a light bill that is postdated May 16, 2005. It's been floating around my workspace ever since then waiting to find a spot on a journal page. I go weeks sometimes without journaling, but it always draws me back.

My crush always seems to have lots to do with creativity. Other crushes along the way included making doll clothes, knitting and taking pictures through my kitchen window. I can't seem to go very long without making something.

Collaborative Effort

Drat, I knew collaboration had two l's. I even tried to look it up in my art room dictionary, but that page had been torn out to use in a project. Oh well, I can't spell. It's really no secret to anyone who knows me.

I had a wonderful time with my grandgirls and son and daughter-in-law this weekend. Right before they went home I wanted to show them the photo I took a few weeks ago of the turkeys and deer together in our garden. I had one printed out in my journal. Madelyn, who is four now, wanted to draw on a page in my journal that I had prepped for a vacation page this spring and still haven't done yet. I suggested the next empty page and she was happy to draw there. It was a lot of fun working with her drawings on the page. I'm looking forward to doing this lots in the future.

The fruit stickers are from Umberto in Italy. I still have several more to put in my journal. I love getting these in the mail. When Maddie finished the drawing on the right of the page, I asked her if it was Larry the Cucumber. She is in a Veggie Tales phase right now. Her birthday party in August had that theme and she has an adorable green t-shirt with Larry's face on it, so it was a pretty safe guess. She told me, "Yes, he's jumping."

I'm looking forward to the long week-end. The second week of school went well. I got a new marker board and new rain-gutter bookshelves for my free choice reading books. The room looks great

I know better than to go upstairs at 9:30 PM, thinking I'll work in my journal for half an hour. I wound up spending three hours, but I had fun. I guess it was worth it. The doll's skirt on this page is loose at the side because there is journaling underneath it. This is the first time I've tried something like this in a journal. I discovered that if you are going to use glitter glue, it needs to be the last thing to go on the page and you difinitely don't want to work on the next page while it is still wet.

Today I took some books I was wanting rid of to our local second-hand bookstore. They took nearly everything I had and I wound up with these fun books and the stencil for only $3.10. I'm not sure if the science book is Chinese or Japanese, but it has some great diagrams. I'm looking forward to using it in collages. The open book is A Guide to Making Decorated Papers by Anne Chambers. I hope it will motivate me to try some of her papers. The block print ones look especially enticing.

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

**********************************************************************************

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.

Yet more tomatoes

I went to a teacher inservice today on altered books. It was fun. I got to see several books made by highschoolers in response to literature. One was supposed to look as if it had been used by a WWII soldier in the field as a journal. The boy took it home and used it for target practice. It was a really effective book. I got to share some of my books too and worked on a new book for geography. I'm not too thrilled with the book I started. I'm hoping tomorrow I can just work on one of my unfinished altered books instead.

When I got home I had to can the tomatoes I picked yesterday. I wound another 22 quarts canned with onions and sweet banana peppers . I finished at 11:00 PM. I'm bushed, but need to unwind before I go to sleep. Too tired to journal I'm afraid.

My Grandma is Gone...

It's a haunting refrain that echoes

Over and over in my head,

Or pops up to announce itself afresh

When least expected.

After one of life's small pleasures, I think,
I should write Grandma -- she would enjoy this.
Then I remember...
My grandma is gone.

Leafing through a magazine

I spot a faded photo in a frame.
And there it is again...
My grandma is gone.

The ceramic ducks that graced her kitchen counter

since memory began
Now find their home on mine.
They murmur every day...
My grandma is gone.

When I look into the mirror I see her shape, her legs.
My grandma is gone -- yet some of her remains.
I send a card to cheer, to thank.
There she is again.

The last two months of misery and pain, she begged,
"Pray for it to end." -- so I prayed.
And when it came there was sorrow,
But more relief.

And now, weeks later, the ache and emptiness reign.
The tears stream down my face.
I weep. Too soon, too soon.

My grandma is gone.

I felt really close to my grandma tonight when I put her ducks up on the window sill from where they usually sit on the counter underneath it to photograph them. I knew I had to dig out this poem that almost wrote itself one morning in 1996, a few weeks after my grandma died.

I still miss her. She was my rock. Since my mom worked, she babysat me from the time I was 18 months old until I was seven. When we moved to California from Ohio a couple of years later, I always spent summers with her and Grandpa.

Her presence always fills my mind on her birthday, July 13, especially when it falls on a Friday like it did this year. She was born on a Friday 13, 1906 and always said it was her lucky day.

Why journal?

Dawn Sokol asked the question on her blog a few days ago, "Why journal?" I just ran across the post tonight and it sent looking for a spread I did in one of my journals on the same subject. I didn't find the spread, but it did inspire another one.
It reads, in part...because I have a lousy memory and would forget too many things I want to remember without it...because it gives me a creative rush...it's a way to satisfu my need for color and pattern... I love sharing my journals with family and online...it's a place for all those bits and pices that I've always kept, but never had any place to put them...intorspection...a record of the snippets of daily life... it calms me down after a stressful day...things don't get lost in my journal...it's a place for addresses, recipes, birthdays... I like to...it's an excuse to buy cool pens, rubber stamps and other stuff...I don't seem to be able not to for long...it's a place to practice ideas and skills...my doodles have a home...it makes me feel good when I'm done... probably a more important question, at least for me... Why not?

I could have added that it's a reason to stay up all hours of the night and be tired the next day. That's happened more times than I care to think about and here I am again. My picture turned out lousy after searching for ten minutes for the camera. Sorry. I'll probably try to take it outside again tomorrow for flickr. I was afraid that I had left the camera at church this morning. VBS is over and I'm pleased with the way it turned out and glad it doesn't happen again til next year. It is definitely worth it, but those little ones take so much energy.

I really need to get a new camera and a light set up. I even have a camera picked out and the money to buy it. I just need to get it done.

I wanted to mention a bit about how I did this page. One of my favorite ways to start a page is to find something in a magazine that speaks to me and go from there. I like matching the colors and the mood on my page. Tonight it was the arm and bracelets of a model in a Free People catalog. The page was laying on my art room floor. I must get that place cleaned!

Canning time again

No journal pages today. After VBS I helped figure out how big to make the windows in our new dining room and exactly where to put them. After helping mark the boards, I headed to the garden to pick tomatoes. It didn't take me very long to determine that I would be canning tonight.



As I type the jars are clicking to let me know they are sealed. I would up with 20 1/2 quarts. I stopped to snap a few pictures as I was working them.



I thought I'd share. One more day of VBS tomorrow. I'm enjoying it, but it will be nice for it to be over too. I have to figure out how to make the angel ornaments and cut the parts before I leave tomorrow.

VBS Week

My mornings this week have been spent at Vacation Bible School. My niece is going with me and we are having a good time together. It doesn't leave a lot of time or energy for much else though. I'm used to older kids. The little ones require so much energy! That's me on the journal page back when I had lots of energy.

I did manage to finish up one journal page yesterday and then went on to do another simple one. On Monday we went to McDonald's after VBS. On the counter was this huge fake $100 bill with the president's portrait cut out. My niece told me that I needed it for my book. The girl behind the counter told me I could have it, so here it is.

Most of my journal pages get photographed here on the back deck. Our cat Harry is usually tons of help.

Today was a tomato kind of day

I had a request in a comment on the last post to give more information on how I made the "Jenga" stamps. I got the whole Jenga set for a quarter, so I've been using these great little blocks for stamps ever since. Any wooden or plastic block would work. The striped stamps used strips of leftover rubber from full sheets of unmounted rubber stamps that I bought. I just cut them to fit and stuck them to the block with double-sided tape. Another style of homemade stamps I've made use fun foam. The checked one you can see in the photo (last post) was made with fun foam. I did these the same way as the scrap rubber ones. You can also use the fun foam shapes.



Now on to the tomatoes. I knew I was going to have to pick them today and that before I could do that the branches that were hanging down over the tops of the cages and blocking the rows would have to be tied up. I got an old skirt that I've been trying to convince myself needed to go in the trash and tore it up in strips to do the job. We have our normal fifty or so plants, so it took me a while. When I was done my hands were a horrendous shade of deep green. I cleaned up and took a nap.



After dinner, I started washing jars and tomatoes. By the time I got ready to can it was after nine o'clock. I didn't finish until 11:00. Wound up with eight quarts. We usually can around a hundred quarts each summer. We'll see how the tomatoes hold up.

Blog surfing

I spent an enjoyable evening surfing some new blogs Tuesday. I saw Belinda's blog for the first time. What a treat! She takes part in Michelle Ward's GPP Street Team Crusades which I had somehow managed to miss also. What fun! Now I just need to find the time to follow all the links on the Crusade blog. They are up to Crusade (kind of a challenge) number ten, but you can join in on the current one and have your blog linked by doing one of the past ones. How cool is that! They all look like fun. Crusade No. 8 - Cheap Tricks is one I can for sure contribute to. On of my favorites is to cut an eraser with a serated knife and stamp with the resulting edge. You can see that to the left of the row of postage stamps above in red and black.



Another new favorite is to use a hospital wrist tag as a stencil. I like the row of tiny dots like you can see above the lady's portrait.



Another favorite is to make new stamps from the scraps from UM stamp pages. The tone-on-tone stripes at the top and bottom of the page above were done with a stamp made from a Jenga block and some strips. I used a different one for the writing part of yesterday's page.



The current crusade No. 10 is mail art. Too bad I was in too big a hurry last week when I sent some off to take a picture. That's what happens when you procrastinate getting things sent. I did enjoy the recipient's telling me that her mailman hand delivered it with a big smile on his face because he didn't want to bend it.

More wall building is in tomorrow's plans. I'm hoping that we will have some of them vertical by the week-end.

The Wall

I spent yesterday helping to frame the first wall in our new bedroom. It wasn't nearly as bad as I'd thought it might be and when it was finished I had a sense of accomplishment as well as sore shoulders and a bit of a sunburn. You'd think that I'd realize at this stage in my life that my fair skin burns even when the sun is hiding behind a cloud. I wasn't a tremendous amount of help I'm sure, but I did measure and mark boards and helped carry a few. It doesn't look like much in the photo, but this new wall will have two large windows facing Bay Creek. I'm starting to get excited about the prospect.

The bug is a photocopy of a dobsonfly. It spent the night in my bathroom last night. I thought I recognized it from my oldest son's 4-H bug collection. It was on the floor dead this morning, so I thought, "Cool, I'll scan it for my journal." I was checking online to make sure it really is a dobsonfly and discovered that the females can use those pinchers to deliver a painful bite. Who knew?

After I finished yesterdays post, I went to Big Huge Labs and made my first mosaic there. It won't be my last. I see now why people make so many of them. Fun, fun.

Beth found the link for me for the face generator. I'm looking forward to playing with that again.

I got up today looking forward to taking photos for the 07_07_07 Flickr group. 7,777 people from all over the world are supposed to take and post seven photos each. Being the over-achiever that I am, I wound up taking 148 photos. I narrowed it down to 28 photos to actually upload to a Flickr set. I still haven't picked which seven will get posted to the group. I took photos of our house, Bay Creek, our cows, our yard, etc... I didn't leave home so they were all taken close to home.

One of the photos I post will definately be this journal entry. I like the idea of promoting journaling to people who maybe haven't seen visual journaling yet.

I've been wanting to try a self-portrait stencil since I read a post from Mary Ann a couple of days ago. She's been doing portrait stencils and they look great. For a first stencil, I think it turned out pretty good. Unfortunately, it slipped when I was putting it on the journal page. The practice tries look a lot better. I'll be trying it in the journal again. I want to make one of a photo I have of my grandma with marcelle waves. I'll be making more I'm sure. I hope I learn to keep them still while I'm spraying the paint.

The self-portrait at the top-left of the journal page is one that I made online quite some time ago. You uploaded a photo and the web site gave you portraits as if they were painted by different artists. The only one I liked well enough to save was this one in the style of Modigliani. I'd like to try again with a different photo if I can find the site again.