It's Only Words

I like to clip the words I like out of my magazines before I toss them in the recycle bin. I have a little drawer full - weird but true! I reach in and give them a stir and get a little storm in my brain. It's only words and words are all I have.... Where does YOUR inspiration come from?

The Title Wave

Our county library has a used book store called The Title Wave. This Saturday they had a BAG sale - fill a brown paper grocery bag with books for $10. Sure got Alayna and I up and out early on a Saturday morning! We got books for reading, books for picture looking, books for gardening, books for building things, books for collecting and books for making art. You can never have too many books - right? Well maybe... We each spent $20 and came away with over 80 books between us.
This was my big SCORE for the day. A two volume set called Le Filet Ancien from 1912 and 1913. They are from Paris and what little text they have is in French. They appear to be sample books of French needle lace. They are oversized measuring 12" X 16" and each has about 45 pages of lace patterns. Don't you have to wonder how these ever landed in the Multnomah County Library in Portland Oregon??

The sale itself was a chaotic feeding-frenzy of book buying. Grocery sacks exploding their contents in loud thunks as the store personnel shouted "another one down". People scrambling accross the floor to gather the spilled contents before they were stepped on or snatched up and deposited in another shoppers sack. Squatting on the floor to check out the bottom shelves and dodging books falling from the upper shelves where people were shopping above you. It was every man for himself!

Three hours and a couple trips to the car. I think this may be the closest I ever came to literally shopping until I dropped. Those bags of books are HEAVY. On my very last effort to hoist myself and bag off the floor, Alayna told me to just grab onto her. She looked as exhausted as I felt. I told her "Oh sure, I'll just pull you down with me and then both of us will be stuck here on the floor and we'll have to crawl to the car!".

Yes, it was like a Title Wave!

All Kinds of Artists

Are ya watching the Olympics? I'm sitting here thinking about how there are all kinds of artists. I'm thinking about Shaun White. Mostly Olympic sports are very structured. You have to do this THING and you have to do it this WAY and you have to try and do it faster or longer or more perfectly than the other person. Don't get me wrong - I LOVE to watch figure skating and I so admire the grace and the athletic ability. And then along comes somebody like Shaun White. And he just innovates and tears it up and you can hear the shear bliss in his voice that he did THIS THING that he does. And don't you think that's an artist? An athlete with an artist's heart. That is what I just watched.

Packaging Proto-type

Lots of time practicing my soldering so took time out tonight to work on a proto-type for the packaging. There are a lot of others making soldered pendants so thinking about how to set mine apart from the crowd - beyond the handmade collage. It seems to me it might be nice to have a little handmade folder to store it in so it doesn't get scratched in the jewelry box.
My little folder is sewn from a combination of paper and fabric and ties with a ribbon. The paper is brown kraft paper crumpled until it has a leather-like look. It is sewn to a piece of batik I had in my stash. I have made a few design changes based on the proto-type but that's why we proto-type - no?

Art Room Time Warp

Whoa!! Where did THAT week go? I was busy all week getting a few things made and listed in my Etsy store, enjoying all camaraderie from the 'heart sessions' and getting my Haiti package ready to send off to Rebecca for Haiti By Hand. Then I looked up from my desk and a week had flown by!

Getting my package ready - sounds simple, right? Not! Rebecca encouraged donating things from our personal stash since the folks who follow her style tend to be serial accumulators. Okay, I better speak for myself. Needless to say, once I started going through my stash, looking for things on her list, one thing led to another. Kind of like an art room time warp. I sorted my beads (did I mention I don't bead), dismantled some old jewelry, untangled my embroidery floss (did I mention I don't embroider), reorganized the drawer full of seam binding and bias tape and on and on.... Even found a yo-yo project I started about 20 years ago - LOL!

The picture above is one of the three Inspiration Kits I listed this week. More of those to come but first I'm trying to finish a few collage necklaces to list. I am anxious to test-drive some ideas I have for the packaging. Good grief my attention span is short!

Another "Heart Session"

Be true.

Very fun looking at the heart-work of so many different artists. So many, many talented people out there and as many ideas as there are artists!
This is the little "pretty" I have been working on. My soldering still isn't quite as thick and smooth as I have in mind but the lighter weight look is starting to grown on me so maybe this is my style. Be true. That pretty much sums things up!

Time now to buckle down and get busy making more Inspiration Kits for my little Etsy store. It looks so empty right now....

Be true!

Millinery flowers

No... I didn't get the heart "pretty" finished and posted for the next Heart Sessions post. No... I didn't get any new Inspiration Kits finished to fill my little Etsy store back up after selling every single one yesterday - but I'm working on some really neat ones so more will be coming soon. YES... I did take time out this morning to go to, you guessed it, The Volunteers of America store. It must be some kind of OCD thing.
I got a poke sack with 9 jars of embossing powder, a brand new bottle of Tacky glue, two bottles of glitter glue, a hand full of bells, two rolls of crepe paper streamers and on and on. I got one of those satin "mother" pillow covers from Kansas City. Plus I got another poke sack that included, among other things, the pink and lavender ribbon roses and the big, gorgeous handmade yellow, lavender and white roses shown above. I tossed them right into my little millinery suitcase with the other flowers and it's just a like a bouquet in a box. Ahhh. $7.96. Wouldn't you go, too?

Heart Sessions

To the world you might be just one person
but to one person you might just be the world.

The sweet Rebecca Sower put out a call to fill the world with hearts and how could I not join in on that?? I'm working on a special little heart 'pretty' but I couldn't wait to play so I'm posting this in the meantime. I made it a while back when I got a strange notion to embelish all my old wooden hangers. Does that ever happen to you?

Treasure Hunt Score

I have been so busy practicing my soldering that I almost forgot to show off what I scored on my Sunday visit to the Volunteers of America. I suspect it went through a prior reincarnation before I got my hands on it. The drawers and the portion of the front where the little key holes are look like they came from an old card catalog from a library. How cool is that?
They are now enclosed in some pretty junkie paneling(use what you have - oh, yeah!) and smelled like a barn. I scrubbed it up and oiled it a bit and put a stick of incense in each drawer to drive out the cooties before I actually use it. What will I put inside, you ask? Well I don't know. But I knew I had to have it. $4.99. Wouldn't you?