back yard

So CraftChi had this awesome tutorial for making your own photoshop frame brushes and such, which is something I’ve ALWAYS wanted to know how to do, but thought was one of those Big Technical Heavy Things(tm).  You know, the kind that require things like software and knowledge of ancient acronyms like AJAX and COBOL.

Not so! says she.  WOOT!

I was headed out today to start in on getting in my Farmer’s Market list item checked off the list, but apparently, Mother Nature thinks that “Saturday” is synonymous with “Rain Like Crazy”.  Which is fine with me — I have some other things to do that don’t involve sitting in the rain.  Like, say, getting a new camera cord dealie at Target, and picking up lots of old shoes at Goodwill so I can make a shoe garden, based on Sassafrass Hill’s awesome tutorial.  No, seriously — go look at the link.  I’ll wait.

*insert hold music here…doodeedoot, doot doo dee doo doo…..*

Is that not the coolest garden idea EVER!?  I have the perfect little shaded corner of my yard for it.  My yard looks like a junkyard ANYWAY, so having a bunch of plants in old beat up shoes will fit right in.  Look natural even.  I’m not sure if that’s a positive or not.  Ahem.

Unrelated:  I love the smell of grapefruit.  I have no idea why.  I’m not a big fan of grapefruit, the *fruit*.  But the citrusy grapefruity smell?  I’m all over it.  Go figure.

Just found out that there’s an Heirloom Plant Sale going on in the next town over, right now.  Maybe I’ll go there, too, since the Farmer’s Market’s out the window for the time being.

I can’t wait to show you pictures — there’s a robin’s nest just outside my office window, and the fat mother robin just came back to sit on the nest for a while.  I think she knows I’m here (can’t miss the overpowering smell of grapefruit coming from the open window, most likely), but apparently, I’m nonthreatening.  I’m going to be able to see baby robin heads in a few weeks, right from this very chair!

I love Spring.  I missed it.

More later, with photos and photoshopped frames!  Squee!  (Anybody have any interest in a set of knitting frames for scrapbooks and/or blogs?  Or maybe just hand-drawn elements one?  I’m thinking I could put a couple of these in a .zipfile for y’all if there’s interest in ‘em.  Let me know!)

Y’all are going to totally laugh at me.

I keep meaning to update this sucker, but I have misplaced my camera cord and can’t figure out how to get the important stuff OFF it so I can show YOU all.  And as such, I keep putting off updating, because an entry without pictures is no entry at all.

Ahem.

Things I have pictures of:  several shortish hikes for letterboxes, for those that wanted to see.  My handspun knit comfort shawl of doomy-doom, and the pieces of Nottingham, not quite yet seamed, but I’m okay with that.   Some gratuitous dog photos.  Pictures of the beaded jewelry that all of a sudden my brain seems to want to make.  A photo of the Insane Perfume Oil Collection that has sprouted up in recent months.  Pics of the back yard (the real one, instead of this figurative one) and the little bits of garden-planting I’ve been doing to try and make it not-so-junkyardish.

There’s a lot to cover, see.  That month off?  Well, it wasn’t really a month, and I didn’t really take it *off*, but a whole lot went on.  We almost bought a house.  I relaxed and did a lot of creative wandering.  We fixed most of my car, which means I’ll be independently mobile again soon.

Just a metric TON of stuff.  Seriously.

I’m working on the camera-cord thing today.  I’ll be back with some pictures once I find it. :)  (To be fair, I rearranged my whole office to make room for J’s computer in here, and you KNOW how things disappear when you clean/organize?  Yeah, it’s like that.)

Soooon.  Very sooooooon.

I’ve been looking for a good way to segue back into keeping a blog over here.  After the long, flu-filled absence and subsequent recharging, all I’ve really wanted to do is hide from the world for a while.  Get some things done.  Check some stuff off my list, or at least make a dent in it all.

And most of that stuff has been soooo behind the scenes and boring to the outside world that there was no point in taking pictures.  I mean, really — how many pictures of a sweater in progress can you see before you start wishing the blogger to get hit by a bus, just so they’d have something interesting to talk about?

Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway…

The past few nights, I’ve been up late, due to a weird bout with insomnia.  And all three nights, I’ve gotten to a point where I couldn’t stay in the chair and knit quietly on the socks I’m working on — I had to MAKE SOMETHING, and I had to make something RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW.

And who am I to say “no” when the call’s that strong, right?

This is the third day.  (above)  It’s technically a collage, due to the King County Metro transfer stub I found in a pocket and glued down, but all the rest of it is drawn/painted by me.  It’s a repurposed piece of wood I got from a local dollar store about two and a half years ago, intending to paint over the existing “art” on it, and I’m just NOW getting around to actually doing that.  (I love that it’s already got picture hanger stuff on the back and the sides were pre-painted…it’s literally ready to hang when it’s dry.)

I have some pictures from my month off, and I’ll probably edit those tomorrow if the weather doesn’t improve around here.  (It’s raining like mad, and they’re saying that parts of my state could get *snow* tonight.  SNOW, people!  It was EIGHTY DEGREES here today.  Seriously.  Mother Nature = Needs an Intervention for her Obvious Crack Addiction.)

I missed blogging.  I missed y’all.

We’ll talk again soon.

I’m finally on what seems to be the Other Side of the Hump when it comes to the illness thing.

I was going to try to catch y’all up on the stuff I’ve been doing while recovering, but honestly? Mostly delerious with a side of Weird. And mucous. I made more of that than I did anything else. Ahem.

This morning, I woke up to rainy skies, thwarting my plan for grocery-getting and a bit of Outside time, and the humidity is clearing out the last of the Sick Junk in my lungs, which means I’ve actually got a bit of energy. (Go figure — AIR IS GOOD FOR YOU. Who knew?)

On the plus side of all this nonsense: I’ve been reading a lot, knitting a lot, and watching a lot of movies. So I’m plugging away at that part of the list, when I wasn’t in a fever-induced swoon. I’m half-way through a sweater, too. (Nottingham, by Jacquelyn Landry, for the interested.) And I’ve been art journaling, since that’s about the only thing that doesn’t make me leave the chair. And working on the embroidered towel set for the kitchen. That kind of thing. Things that let me sit very, very still, to avoid making the cillia angry.

You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry. More of that mucous we mentioned earlier. Eeeew.

Downside: Hospital bill was $18, 034.43. Eighteen THOUSAND dollars. Which means some of my list is hosed. Like, anything that requires cash ever, unless someone will take a kidney from an old lady (me) as payment for, oh, say, a hotel room. Because OMG who do they think they’re kidding!? The average American family doesn’t have eighteen THOUSAND DOLLARS just sitting around in case of a bum appendix. Ugh.

So I’m going to be selling some art stuff. Soonish. I need to get some other stuff organized first, but the Hospital Bill Sale will be coming soon. Stay tuned.

Y’know, this was going to be a short entry, but apparently, all this oxygen made me yappy.

Pictures forthcoming. Promise. It’s been, like, a MONTH since I had pictures. (To be fair, I was unconscious for most of that time, and it’s *really* hard to take pictures when your eyes are closed. Seriously.)

What have y’all been doing?

.

(edited to add: p.s.  I quit smoking.  Seriously.  Woot!) 

Still sick.

Still not king.

Not even remotely the prettiest.

The tamiflu doesn’t seem to be helping.  Doc says this particular strain lasts ten to fourteen days *minimum*.  Doc should have kept that bit of wisdom to herself, because now I kind of want to get hit by a bus to put me out of my misery.

More updates when I’m no longer a festering ball of snot.

Remember the bull-moose roommate the hospital put in with me post-op?

Whatever she had was contagious.

I’ve been spiking temperatures around 102 for the last four days, prompting a call to the hospital’s infectious diseases department (which, by the way, the hospital denied, saying she wasn’t infectious.  Um. I have what she had.  Isn’t that the definition of infectious?), and almost another trip to the ER when I coughed so hard I bruised around the incision sites.

I’ve been sleeping pretty much 20 hours a day, if not more.  Going back to bed now, in fact.  I’m exhausted from coughing and trying to heal.

I thought you went to the hospital to get *better*, not get infected with a bunch of disease….

So I sort of fell down on my posting at least once a week thing this past week, but I have a Very Good Excuse.

I haven’t felt so hot for around the last month or so.  And really, if I’m honest, I haven’t felt all that hot since last May, but it kind of came and went at random, so I was thinking it was just a side-effect of getting older and that I could live with the fatigue and weirdness after eating.  (I’d either get really, really tired, or my stomach would hurt for *hours* after an actual meal.  I blamed it, honestly, on allergies.  I’m allergic to so many things that I figured there was one I just hadn’t figured out yet.)

Last Sunday, I had what I thought was an upset stomach.  I took it kind of easy and felt okay on Monday…until about 3 o’clock.

Then my side started to hurt.  Kind of like a stitch in my side, but lower.  Like usual, I sort of blamed it on general gallbladder weirdness residual from the Ohio Event of 2007 (what I blamed a lot of stomach ickiness on, really), and went about my life.

At 10 p.m., our DSL line went out.  No internet.  Great.

I called Quest, and sat on the line with some girl who really had no clue why it wasn’t working.  She reset the modem (killing my wireless connection, I might add), and did all this crazy stuff, and finally, at 11:30, said she’d have someone come out and look at it.  By this time, the stitch in my side had started to burn.  I attributed it to stress and went to bed.

The pain woke me up at 1:30.  Then at 3:30.  Then at 4.  Then at 4:17.  Each time, it was a little worse than before, and had spread across my whole abdomen by that point.  And I had to stop fooling myself that it was just stress — this was something Not So Good.

I still didn’t have internet access (of course), so looking on webMD was out.  I texted my friend Angie and asked what side the appendix is on, since the worst of the pain was on the right side, down low.  She confirmed that it was on the right, and informed me that if I didn’t wake up J and have him take me to the ER RIGHT THAT VERY SECOND, she was going to drive over here and kick my ass to the point I’d forget the appendix.

If there’s one thing I know about Angie, it’s that she’d do it.  Then she’d take me to the ER.  But first, the asskicking.  And I was already in enough pain that I felt faint.

We got to the hospital in record time, and the ER staff got us in right away once they determined it might be my appendix.  The doctor came, took blood (phlebotomist was freakin’ hot, by the way), and dosed me with two shots of Demerol.

I don’t remember a whole lot about the next 20 minutes.  I remember J calling my mom and just about everyone we know.  I remember the unBELIEVably hot surgeon (no, seriously.  We’re talking Dr. McDreamy, here.  Carin works in a hospital populated with Very Hot Medical Professionals.  Wowza.) coming in, poking my side, and telling the nurses to prep me for immediate surgery.  They CAT scanned me to make sure it was the appendix.  They told me about the risks and had my husband sign some kind of form since I was clearly impaired.  And they wheeled me into the ER, put something in my IV that was cold inside my arm, and I woke up an hour later sans some vestigal organs.

Apparently, I have a Mutant Appendix.  One that was infected and about to perforate, which sounds a whole lot like a sheet of postage stamps to me, but I get it.  It was highly enlarged, showed signs of being enlarged long-term, and the colon parts of me were wrapped around it in such a way that it was doing weird things to both the colon and the intestines.  (Which, by the way, is exactly why I felt like tired crap after eating.)  The entire surgery took 10 minutes, and that’s only because of the complications.  Apparently, Dr. Hovey (McDreamy) is THE guy to see for laproscopic ANYTHING, and he could win speed trials and accuracy contests.  Talk about a relief.

My room was filled with visitors I wanted to see and one roommate who coughed incessantly and snored like a bull-moose in rut.  Despite the demerol shots and the hydrocodone pills, I got a lot of mostly-error-free knitting done.  My stomach hurts all over, but it feels like a superficial pain, not like the appendix/colon/intestine pain I had before, and I told the recovery room nurses, when I came out from being under anesthesia, that I felt better in that moment than I had for the past month.  And I wasn’t lying, either.

I’m tired, groggy, drugged-up on the LorTab and hurty all over.  Not exactly the best condition for artmaking.  But I’ll be back as soon as the hurtygroggytired subsides a little more.

Just wanted to let you know that I haven’t been abducted by aliens or republicans, and that I’m still here, just a little slower and a few ounces of appendix lighter.

Hope y’all are faring better.  :)  Send me some links to fun sites to see — I’m in the mood for some inspiration. :)

I’m waiting for Carin to get here so we can dye things pretty colors (after doing about six pounds earlier today already), so I dove back into Collage Unleashed AGAIN.  Three in one day!

My sewing machine’s being all funky, though.  I’m clueless about the whole tension thing, but I’m pretty sure that’s what the problem is.  The back side is all thready and loose, and pops through to the front.  When I mess with the tension, though, it gets all funky and weird and the thread snaps, so I’m thinking it may be time to actually read the manual or something.  Meh.  (The next two are sewing things, so I do need to get it fixed, or be happy with not doing any fabric stuff in the book.  Not that I’m above doing that, but I’d like to dip a toe into the fabric world, and I figure with this, at least, I won’t question it too much if it comes up looking like crap — it’ll just be par for the course. :>)

So without ado, the washed photocopy collage (a really, really bad picture, but artificial light was my only choice and it just wasn’t coming out.  It looks better than this grainy thing.):

I do kind of like a collaged background of photocopies, but next time, I think I’d use a titanium buff wash, mixed thick so that it de-contrasts a bit.  All the contrasty bits give me a headache.  (Oh, and it’s coincidental that it’s all lime and violet — those were the random two colors I picked out of the basket o’ paint.  Seriously.)

And then, the only thing I’ve sewn other than curtains in the past six months…a fabric flower brooch that isn’t a brooch at all — it’s made to be mounted on the front of a journal, which will make it heavier than all get-out, but I like it anyway.

For some reason, that photo came out just fine.  Go figure.

That’s dyed paper towel, scrunched up over some heavy interfacing, stitched down randomly.  Embellished with  glass marbles, freeform crochet flower, buttons and a fabric yo-yo.

I think that’s my favorite of the things I’ve made from this book.  I’d like to make some smaller ones, but not until the machine’s working right — the back of this is a giant mess.

Three posts in a day.  Wow.  This won’t happen all the time, I promise.  It’s just that I’m really re-energized on this list again, now that I want to go to Portland in October.  (And yes, Michelle, seeing you and nabbing those letterboxes is on the list of Must-Dos. :>)

Eight gesso backgrounds.  Two washes with acrylic glaze, color added in with oil pastels, since I don’t have the other tools Traci talks about.  I like them, though, so I don’t really care if they’re not quite to specs. :)

I *believe* these are then cut up to use as book covers and the like, so it should be kinda interesting to see how they look in chunks.  Adminnie just cut me another stack of papers for today’s exercise, which is something about washed photocopies (actually, the next is about textured papers, but I don’t have any and have decided not to cry about it. :>).  Sounds like fun to me. :)

Squeee for getting started on the list again — only 12 more exercises to go before I’m done and can move on to the next item on the list.   Which is good, since I think I *really* want to change my reward for 50 items completed to “go to Art & Soul in Portland in October”.  Juliana Coles will be there, teaching both her extreme journaling methods AND doing a project class called “Circus Circus” and, really, how perfect for me is THAT?

One Sideshow Wife, reporting for duty. :)  (Plus, then I could tick off the list items for both Seattle and Portland letterboxing, and probably stay in a Yurt AND the Madrona Inn on the coast before heading back to the flatlands.  It’d be like List Check-Off Central.)

Must get busy.  Dyeing roving today with Minnie, and yarn tonight with Carin, so I’ll be ticking a bunch of line items off on THAT list item too.

Caffeine, apparently, makes me chatty.  Ahem.

I don’t have any pretty pictures (yet) today.  I dove back into Collage Unleashed last night, since I can now *find* my worktable under all the crap that used to live in my studio.  More on that in a bit.  But the exercise I’m on has you do this textured gesso-with-words thing, and I didn’t have rosin paper.

Apparently, “rosin paper” is this giant red roll of stuff you get at the hardware store.  They use it for roofing, instead of tar paper.  I know this because I had to look it up — I’d never heard of such a thing before, and needless to say, it wasn’t residing in my studio.  Which is kind of surprising, since I apparently had EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE PLANET.

I ended up using some paper of unknown origin that was residing in my paper roll basket.  (I have a rolling basket — metal mesh, on wheels — that’s full of rolled up papers.  Decorative ones, watercolor sheets, bizarre large pieces of vellum.  All kinds of crazy stuff I’ve collected over the years with the good intentions of using it someday.

I figured today was as good of a someday as any, so I lopped a large roll into 9 x 11 sheets, and got to work.

The exercise is largely multi-step.  Gesoo, glaze, paint, letter, do something to the edges, gold leaf, etc., etc..  (I don’t have any leafing pens, so I’m skipping that step.) So I’m through the first few steps and getting ready to do the oil pastels on top of the top of the other five bazillion layers.  And while it’s still MUCH more chaotic than I’m used to, and more complicated than I generally like in my own work, I’m finding that I like this a little more.  Especially knowing that it’ll be hacked up as decorative paper, rather than being an end unto itself.

There’s also the fact that there’s less chaos in my studio, in general.  I got the curtains done, though I think I want to add tab-tops to them and hang them on some kind of rod at some point.  (J found me a big stick — I’m thinking about making the curtain rod a limb instead of a metal rod.  It’s more tactile and natural, and I like that idea.)  I think I have a picture…lemme look here….

Aha!  From when I had one done:

(Ignore the clutter.  That’s all gone now, too.)

But it’s looking much more “grown up” in there (as opposed to the sheet that was tacked to the wall over the window before), and now with the major, MAJOR declutteration, there’s so much less chaos that I think I’m a little more accepting of the chaotic nature of the exercises in this book.  (Clutter affects everything, see.)  Not that I’m planning on changing my style any time soon, but anything that helps me be more clear and likely to get into the whole Flow state is a good thing.

After last night’s purge, I’ve managed to get rid of almost three *thousand* things in my studio.

Three.  Thousand.

From paper to bits of ephemera to tiny pieces of fabric on up to giant yards and yards cuts of fabric to tools I’m never going to get around to using…I’ve been purging out all the stuff in there that isn’t serving me and my purposes.

Not surprisingly, after handling all my Good Stuff, I’m feeling more creative in general now, too.  Yay for positive side-effects!

Y’know, I was thinking about it all last night, while slopping paint onto some of the gessoed paper, and it occurs to me that the time in my life when I felt the most creative and productive was when I first moved to Seattle and got settled in. Much of that came from the company I was keeping, for sure, but a big part of it was the simplicity of it.  I’d moved on the fly, taking with me only what I could carry.  (Long story, but suffice it to say that I had to go, and right then.)  I had very, very little by way of posessions.  Like, one notebook, a couple pens, and a glu-stick.  Not even the cheapie watercolors.  Two art books that I read front to back twice over.  (Biographies of Dan Eldon, actually, not even art technique books.)

Still, with that very limited focus, I was often like a WOMAN ON FIRE with the writing and the journaling and the drawing.

Now that I’ve had time and distance, and have some longer perspective on the time, I’m thinking that it’s not having the right materials that makes you creatively productive.  It’s the lack thereof that makes you work with what you have instead.  Creativity can’t help but happen when you’re having to come up with solutions, instead of just grabbing something from a store or the shelves.

Even when I had a little more money, and could buy what I wanted, the times i did the most journaling was when I was Out — on my bike with a backpack full of just the journal, pens, watercolors and glu-sticks.  (And masking tape, because apparently, there are just as many uses for that as there are for duct tape, but it’s not as sticky. :>)

There is a lesson in here for me, people.  One that I keep getting reminded of, from time to time, when I sit very quietly and listen to the voice of wisdom in my head.  I have this realization, in varying forms, over and over again.  And then I get all crazy busy and desirous of time to create, and stock up on so many art supplies and books that I’d never get through it all in a year (or ten), and wonder why I don’t do anything at all.

Well, duh.

I’m hoping this time, even though I didn’t have to slash-and-burn everything in my posession, I’ll learn my lessons well, and avoid the Restocking Of Creative Stiflement(tm).

We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll finish these papers up here in a bit, and if the weather cooperates, get pictures of them today.  Wish me luck, I’m going in.