Junebug on a String

I have this little thing I do every year.  I think I talked about it once, maybe in a previous blog incarnation, in fact.

Every year, on my birthday, I sit down and write out what I think the next year’s going to look like.  It’s not a to-do list or strategic planning or any kind of productivity maneuver.  It’s visceral.  Visual.  I tend to paste in pictures and write for pages about what I want the next year to be like, taken from the perspective of an average day, in great detail.

There were a couple years here lately where I didn’t have a clue.  Too many things in the air, too much going on, too many roads open up ahead, and I couldn’t really commit to just one of them.  (To be fair, when I did pick one, often I’d talk myself OUT of that option, and find the other fork in the road was the better choice, so it’s not all bad.)

This year, not so much.  It’s easier.  Brighter.

And apparently, includes more skirts.

(Picture, above — flea market find skirt, $3.  Happy birthday to meeee!)

It also includes chickens, and possibly learning enfleurage with herbs I’ve grown myself.  Which is just kinda awesome, really.  (For the uninitiated:  “enfleurage” is one of the three ways you get oils out of botanicals.  Distillation, pressing, and enfleurage.  I just like the way the word enfleurage feels on my tongue.  I do want to learn all three types eventually.)

Hello, brand new year.  Welcome.

A bit ago, when I released the first of the Tiny Art Journals, I did so with the request that if you made one, I totally wanted to see it when you got it put together.  (Optional, of course.)  They’re just so much fun to design (there are three of them sitting on my hard drive right now awaiting testing, in fact), and really nice to carry with you for tiny bits of random art or writing, that I kinda wanted to see what y’all could come up with.

And two people have sent me some neato mods they’ve made to the first one, so I just had to share. :)  (A couple folks posted pics to facebook or plurk/twitter, but I didn’t ask them if it was okay to post those pictures.  If one of ‘em was you, let me know and I’ll put ‘em up on the next round of showings-off.)

Like this one, made by Catherine:

Check out the cord closure!  And the inked edges of the paper, too!

Catherine said:

I printed the pages on ivory Canson paper, probably a bit too heavy a weight because I glued them back to back so all the pages are printed, no blanks. Then I inked the edges of the pages and the cover with a dark purple ink, just enough to give it some definition and hide the white bits from my less-than-fantastic paper trimming skillz. I did pamphlet stitch from the outside with some perle cotton, and left the ends hanging decoratively from the spine, and used the same thread and a couple of little star brads with loops on ‘em to make a closure. I don’t love the closure, so may still rethink that bit, and I think I’ll do something clever for the inside covers.

Can’t wait to see what bits of clever you come up with, Catherine!

Then there was Rachel, who, much like myself, appears to have a button fetish.  (I could totally go into my button fetish at length one of these days.  It’s an obsession, I tell you.  OBSESSION.)

Buttons!  Here:  let me show you a close-up.

And as if buttons on the front weren’t cool enough, check out the SPINE:

I admit it.  I got a little swoony when I saw these pictures.  Okay…a lot swoony.  I hadn’t thought of using buttons on the spine to reinforce the cardstock, but that’s totally the effect they’d have.  Awesome AND functional.

Rachel said, about her fun:

The string used to keep it closed is a piece of Malabrigo sock yarn, btw. (in the Archangel colorway).  The buttons are from my own button collection.  I think I accidentally printed the cover a bit too big, ’cause there’s a significant size difference between this journal and when I assembled the monster journal.  Oh well, I still think it rocks!

It DOES rock, Rachel!  And hellloooo….Malabrigo?  That’s just, like, icing on the little bit of goodnesscake.

One thing about the sizing, too — make sure your printer doesn’t have an “autorotate” or “autoscale” type feature.  Sometimes, it’ll scale down your stuff so that it “fits better”, even when you already know how it’s supposed to fit, thankyouverymuch.  On the plus side, that also means that you can scale this sucker to be even tinier if you want — just set things to print at 75%, or, if you’re wanting really tiny, 50%.  I can totally imagine a 50% printed/bound TAJ being used to hold only tickets, or tiny bits of things you find on a single walk, or the definitions of your favorite words….something small and focused and, well, cute.

I should have both TAJ #3 and #4 up this week, if life can slow down just a smidge.  I’m taking Tuesday as an all-design-all-the-time day on my Internet Free Day (more on that tomorrow, of course), so (fingers crossed) they should be done and tested by then.  (I don’t put it up unless it’s been made by me, at least once.)

If you missed them, you can get TAJ#1, the one you see up there, by clicking right here….and TAJ#2, the monster edition (and who doesn’t have creative monsters in the closet!?), by clicking here.

Thanks to Catherine and Rachel for sharing the fruits of their labours with us!

I mentioned on Tuesday (?  Wednesday?  One of the two…) that I’ve started hitting the Piedmont Triad Farmer’s Market on the weekends.  And since we were just about out of the produce from last week, I hiked on the sunshine panties and went out yesterday, despite the fact that it was about a billion degrees with ninety-some-odd percent humidity outside.  (No, really.  It was that kind of HOT where you feel just vaguely like your body’s been beset by malevolent hot washcloths when you step out the door.  People were randomly bursting into flames if they stood in the sun for too long.^*1)

But once you set foot inside the vendor stalls and the smell of picked-this-morning, sun-warmed peaches hits you like a wall, and you forget the heat.  Seriously.

I also mentioned that this sucker is big.  Let me give you some perspective:

This, is ONE of the FOUR buildings that comprise the market.  It’s covered, with open sides, so that people can just back right up to an open stall to set up, and it keeps the air moving enough so it never smells like the downside of a farm.  (These people in front, by the way?  Totally looked at me like I had lobsters growing out of my ears for taking pictures.  I tried not to stare at her shorts.  Awesome color combo, no?)  This building usually has mostly plants and such, with a few exceptions (the soap lady, the place where I nabbed a gallon of strawberries for cheap…), but the other open-air building, just down the hill from this one, is almost always chock-full of local farms, selling actual pre-grown foodstuff.

(And one, permanent vendor building off to one side has some more commercial stuff, but I don’t go in there much unless I need spices.  There’s a lady that dries her own and makes blends and mixes, minus all the crazy additives, which is nice.  And there may be a separate garden center, and a restaurant called, I kid you not, the Moose Cafe.  You know how much I love Moose.  In general, not for eating.  Thought I should clarify.)

From the minute I walked in yesterday (and promptly bought about a zillion pounds of peaches with which to make strawberry-peach freezer jam today, incidentally), I was surrounded by color and people and the most amazing smells.  I’ve never been to the market on Saturday — it’s always been on Sunday mornings, when the vendors are there, but the crowds are thinner until mid-afternoon.  Saturdays, apparently, are much more marketlike, with people that run the whole range — from matrons with little folding carts doing some kind of powershopping to the guy next to me at the local cow farm (who sells hamburger and chicken breasts, and will make you think you’ve never eaten actual meat before, once you taste the difference.  I kid you not.  How the cows are raised makes a HUGE difference.) who had more piercings in his straggle-bearded face than I could count from a cursory glance.

I did an insane amount of shopping, really.  Both of my (hippielike hand-knit) market bags were full before I made it through the first building, and I decided I really need more bags.  (need. more. cotton.)  At one booth, a guy that looked so much like my grandfather that I had to double-take, literally, was holding two cantaloupes to his chest and calling them his double-Ds, and then turned all red-faced when he saw me behind him.  (Clearly, he does not know me.  The giggle, she was strong within me.)  I bought a cantaloupe.

One vendor, a young guy with amazingly tan legs, had a table full of plants.  It wasn’t until I got up close that I realized these weren’t just plants, they were all CARNIVOROUS PLANTS.  Pitcher plants and some kind of fern-looking thing, and tiny little flytraps smiling at me with fringed, pointy smiles.

I had to get one.  Meet Bill:

Bill wasn’t the biggest flytrap of the bunch, but he was the one looking like he was the hungriest.  One of his pointy smiles was closed around a fly (proving his resourcefulness) and the rest were waiting.  Mine.

The tan-legged guy looked at me a little strangely when I asked how much for Bill, and when I explained that I name EVERYTHING, he knocked a dollar off Bill’s price tag.  Told me how to care for him, and poured more water on him for the drive home.

Bill’s already caught another bug, from his perch in full-sun on the back porch.  He’s gonna do just fine.

Bill can’t eat this, but I’m making it anyway.  Freezer jam, for the uninitiated, is made pretty much like regular jam, but since you’re not cooking the fruit, it retains more of it’s original flavor (and nutrients, if you want to nitpick, though the amount of sugar in it doesn’t exactly qualify it for health food status).  Plus, it’s a heck of a lot easier for those of us who can burn boiling water.  Which I’ve done.  No.  Really.

You will need:

1 pound of peaches, pitted and chopped
1 pint of strawberries, stemmed and crushed
5 1/2 cups of sugar (toldja there was a lot)
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice  (if you keep the peels, you can do thin little curls of lemon on the top for Pretty)
1 package of Shur-Jell Fruit Pectin

Stir the sugar into the crushed fruit.  Let it stand for 10 minutes.  Stir, to make sure the sugar’s dissolving.  Let stand a little longer, if necessary.

Combine the Shur-Jell with 3/4 cup of water, and bring to a boil  (saucepan — don’t try to chintz it with the microwave.  Trust me here.).  Stir constantly.  Boil for a minute or so, and remove from heat.

Stir the pectin into the fruit/sugar mix.  Keep stirring until all the sugar is dissolved.  If it’s still grainy, it’ll stay grainy, which, while not harmful to the jam, has a weird consistency and crunchiness that you don’t normally associate with jam.  Ask me how I know.

Pour into washed containers (I just used one of those faux-tupperware throwaway plastic ones, because I don’t have jars.) and let sit for up to 24 hours, or until set.  Just for the record, it look less than fifteen minutes for the blackberry jam from last week to set.

Store in the freezer for up to a year (!!!), and move to the fridge when you’re ready to eat it.  (Or…*ahem*… you can just take spoonfuls right from the freezer, and eat them like popsicles.  I’m just sayin’.)

:)

(^*1 I may have made that part up.)

I mentioned yesterday that I’d decided to give my body a break and gave up coffee, at least for a while.  On purpose.

Oddly enough, five days in, I’ve got every bit as much energy as before, and possibly more, which I totally blame on that whole sleeping thing.  I’m actually SLEEPING now.  (Well, not RIGHT now, but you know what I mean.)  I still only konk out for about six hours at a time, and tend to get up at or before six a.m., just because that’s the way my body’s built, but I feel a TON better than I used to.  A girl could get used to this.

One of the things I didn’t mention yesterday, except in passing, is that I also cut out fake food, avoiding, in particular, high fructose corn syrup.  People have been asking me if I’m on some kind of Plan, or what I’m doing, so I thought I’d explain it here for the interested.  (Or the unwitting, who just happened upon this post expecting to see pretty pictures.  Sorry.  Call it a Blogjack for a second.)

On the way to Purl Jam this past weekend, I threw in an audiobook that I’ve had sitting here for a while now, and never did get around to “reading”.  (I do a lot of ear-reading when I drive.  Keeps me awake.)  Michael Pollan’s  In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto came on after the book I’d chosen had ended, and by the end of the first chapter, I was scared.  And pissed off.  But mostly, a little nervous.

See, the whole premise of the thing is that we’ve become a society of orthorexics, focusing so much on the components of food (various nutrients the scientists have identified) that we’re failing to realize that it’s making us sick.  Which, I know, makes the book sound like a preachy snooze of a read, about as much fun as watching paint dry.  But it’s not.  It’s well-written and manages to be fairly entertaining, even while it’s making you want to drive on over to the nearest “food” factory and light it on fire.

There’s a part that discusses, for instance, how most of what we see in supermarkets isn’t actually FOOD at all.  It’s “food products”.  It’s faux food.  It’s wannabe food.  It’s chemical lab experiments like Frankenstein’s monster masquerading as food, and boasting all kinds of GOOD FOR YOU messages on the packaging, as if by sheer label real-estate, the manufacturers can somehow WILL the slop into being actual food.  But it’s not.

And, in fact, he goes into great detail about how those labels are made to be confusing, right down to the FDA “qualified claims” nonsense, which just about ANY crappy thing can be said to be “good for you”, as long as, in very tiny print, it says that a scientist, somewhere, under very controlled conditions, was able to make, say, Twinkies more healthy than, say, bashing in one’s own head with a hammer.  It’s complete crap, and infuriating that the very agency that’s supposed to oversee this kind of thing is not only allowing it to happen, but endorsing it.  ARGH.  How hard is it to feed a family these days?!

::deep breaths being taken by the peeved blogger…one moment please::

At one point, Pollan mentions the ingredients in a loaf of bread.  Flour, water, yeast, and a pinch of salt.  That’s it.  That’s all bread’s made of, folks.  I know this because I MAKE IT.  That’s all it is.

Then Pollan reads off the ingredients of a particular brand of “smart” whole-grain white bread.

There were thirty-two ingredients.  THIRTY. TWO.  Most of which, incidentally, were unpronounceable.  And if you could, by twist of fate, pronounce them by sounding them out, you’d have no idea what they are.  Or how to identify them in a police lineup.  But they’re there, being EATEN BY YOU, in a loaf of BREAD that’s supposed to be “healthier” than other bread.

It takes thirty two chemicals to make something “healthy”?  Really?  Really?!

::facepalm::

Oh, hell no.  I’ll take my dumb four-ingredient bread over a test-tube full of faux bread anyday.

By the time I got back to Greensboro, I was done.  No convenience is worth eating a literal barrel-load of chemicals every month (no, seriously — that’s about how many chemically-enhanced foods the average person eats every few months or so.).

The next day, I hit the local Farmers Market and a local butcher.  The Market’s in height of peach season, and there were tons of vendors there.  (It’s in three HUGE buildings, two of them open-air, comprising a few ACRES of vendors on the weekends.  Seriously.  I’m blessed to be in a good area for this.)    I stopped at the store for flour and sugar (beware, even of THOSE common staples — if there isn’t just one ingredient listed, be it “flour” or “sugar”, skip it.) and it’s been five days now of OH HELL NO eating around here.

And despite my clearly inferior four-ingredient bread (::eyeroll::) and the lack of little pouches and cellophane, it’s actually been a thousand times better than before.  Fresh cantaloupe for breakfast vs. a crappy over/underdone toaster streudel or pop-tart. Green stuff for lunch, with homemade dressing and local chevre.  Balsamic-roasted salmon with roasted baby potatoes and broccoli.  Mustard-basted chicken breasts stuffed with local cream cheese and tiny slivers of ham for flavor, served with three kinds of summer squash over brown rice.

I’m clearly suffering here.  (/end sarcasm)

I won’t lie — it’s more work.  There’s cooking and dishes and having to think about more than just what take-out menu to pick from.  Wild rice takes longer to cook than the little pouches of faux-rice.  Making your own bread takes about an hour (including baking time and rising time).  It takes a little longer to go through the entire farmers market than it does to pick up a flash-frozen bag of stuff from the store.  And you run the risk of looking like a granola-crunching, birkie-wearing hippie if you’re not careful.  (Especially if you knit your own cotton market bags to take with you.  Ahem.  Not that I’ve done that.  ::shifty eyes::)

But if my own experience is any indication, I can tell you that in less than a week, I’m already feeling better.  I don’t have mid-morning sugar crashes (which was likely the caramel macchiatos, since I never really ate anything in the morning before…).  I don’t get sick every time I eat (which was happening with alarming frequency — eating literally made me nauseous sometimes).  I don’t even know what other kinds of benefits could come from it, though I can say that not spending $5 a day on coffee’s been nice, and that farmers market food is way cheaper than all the pre-processed garbage, so I’m thinking the wallet’s going to be a nice side-effect.

Pollan gave several “rules” for kicking what he calls the Western Diet, and while you should totally pick up the book if you’re interested, the couple that worked for me are:

• If your grandmother wouldn’t recognize something as food, don’t buy it.  My grandmother would have probably sneered at GoGurt or “smart” bread, for example.  And she probably would have whipped my butt with the wooden spoon if she thought I was spending five bucks a day on coffee.  Just sayin’.
• If it lists more than five ingredients, don’t eat it/use it/buy it.
• If any of those five are anything you can’t pronounce or can’t recognize, don’t eat it.

It’s easier than it sounds.

A couple folks asked for this recipe, so here ’tis.  It’s freakin’ awesome over oven-baked french toast, made with day-old home-baked (inferior, four-ingredient) bread, too.

Put everything into a pan and heat it up to boiling.  Simmer until the liquid looks thick and syrupy.  The peaches’ll soften and turn brown, but taste like heaven on a plate.

(p.s.  And there’s no high fructose corn syrup, aka Liquid Death, in it, the way there is in most syrups from the store.  Go figure.)

It’ll keep for several days in the fridge, too.  Just reheat it before using.  (It’s also unwholesomely good on pork chops, which I hesitate to mention, since according to Cassie’s mom, I’m obsessed with pork.  Will explain later.)

So it’s been a while.  Needless to say.

What you see up there, the Phoenix minikit, is the sum total of what I’ve actually finished, 10kH-wise, in the past two weeks.  There’s actually more — a megakit, full of hybrid books and art journaling stuff, but it’s been sitting, neglected, on the hard drive for the past week or so.

I do have a pretty good reason for it.  What I don’t have a good reason for is the fact that I fell out of habit of using the timers, and all the stuff I’ve sat down to “sketch out” (which is always how it starts, and usually ends with three or four good hours’ worth of work), I’ve forgotten to set the clock.

Oops.  I’m estimating six or seven hours.  I’ll claim six, just in case.  More practice is better than less.

I’ll get to the kit in a second here.

A couple weeks ago, I decided that a change was gonna need to come.  I’ve got all this stuff that doesn’t fit in with my life as it is, and honestly, I’m sick of paying for a storage unit.  (No offense to people who have one for a good reason, but for me, I feel like it’s a case of not dealing with reality.  Realities of space, of time devoted to caring for things vs. people, of excess.  I hate feeling like there’s too much.)

Since I was waiting for a replacement batch of labels to come in (got a whole pack that refused to stick once they were printed…), I figured that taking care of that backlog would make it easier to focus my attention more fully on devoted practice.  Lighten the load, so to speak.

I brought about a billion boxes back home (well, okay, not a billion, but it sure looked that way once they got into this small space), and dug in.

It’s a slow process, weeding things out.  I’m down to things that I kept for a reason — sentimental, useful, something — and it’s much slower than it was when I was sorting things out for the move.  Some stuff, I kept to scan, some stuff, I just threw out entirely.  (Including, and I know this makes the diarists among us twitch in unpleasant ways, twenty some odd years of journals.  I need a break from the past to focus on where I’m going, rather than holding on to a stack of books that were, literally, waist-high, that reminded me only of what was.)

I’m almost done with the first round.  Some days, I’ve worked on it all day long.  Some days, I’ve had other things to do for work and such, so it’s been slower.  But the twenty-some-odd boxes are down to five, and of those, I’m hoping to get it down to one.

Then we start over again with more stuff.

One of the things I did finally do is overdye some yarn that I’d been meaning to deal with for a loooong time.  It’s sock yarn, as would be expected.  Turned out kind of awesome.

Introducing Leap of Faith (green &teal), Creative Flow (blue/purples), and Passion (reds):

I need to get better pictures, but that gives a pretty good idea of what they look like.  I’ve got a couple left of everything but Passion (one left), and if you want one, email me.  I need to get ‘em out of here to free up more space.  ($20, US only, includes shipping.)

So the Phoenix thing.

I started this kit way before the L&V thing turned into Spooky Stalker Central(tm).  But it fits.

It’s a minikit — seven papers, three button elements in matching colors, a small frame, a phoenix element, the star, four bits of title art (renew, reborn, rise, and emerge), and one word art quote from Maya Angelou.  (Mini kits, by the way, are, well, mini kits.  There’s enough stuff here to work with, but not enough stuff to make it a full-on kit.  If you’re an art journaller, this means you can leave lots of space to draw and/or hand-letter things; if you’re a digiscrapper, you’ll probably want other stuff to augment the smallness.  Plus side:  it’s cheap.)

I did a little test page with a randomly-picked photo (I do wish I’d changed it.  Doing anything with my own mug on it makes me all eyerolly and squicked out.)…

I still suck at layout.  Maybe I should start doing actual journal entries with this stuff so you can see that, instead.  (My art journals tend to be a little more personal, though — I kept all of those when the Big Clear Out occurred, btw — so I’ve been reluctant to show those.  Maybe I’ll push past that in the coming weeks.)

Anyway…  :)

The minikit’s $1.50 US, and SHOULD be able to be downloaded from anywhere.  (The paypal thing is, largely, fixed.  After a few phone calls.  And being on hold forEVER.  And they know my address now.  After changing it three times.  I’m a little frustrated, does it show…?  LOL…)

Just click on the kit to be taken to the download. :)

The Phoenix Mini-Kit
$1.50USD

This week, it’s back to the 10kH in earnest.  With timer, this time.  And breaks to clear more stuff out of boxes.  Whew.  (There’s a REASON I called this thing “in which we come up for air”…..)

While I stuck to my guns and didn’t do much…okay, anything…with the scent side of things today (on purpose), I did finish up on this.  (squee!)

It’s the first in what I’m hoping to be a weekly series that coordinates with the theme of whatever it is that I’m doing for Peony Blue that week, which means that at the end of a year, you’ll end up with fifty two tiny art journals (they measure 3″x 3″, folded). How cool is that? They’re small, so they’re portable and easy to fill up over the course of a week, which isn’t so scary to the little monster on your shoulder that tells you you’ll never be done (so why start?).

The interior pages alternate — two printed pages with frames and/or text lines, then two pages of blank area for drawings or pasting stuff in. Cover wraps around the whole thing like a box and can either be tied or velcro-ed shut, OR you can use the flappy-bit as a placeholder/bookmark. (I’ve been doing that today, since I can’t seem to find my velcro dots.)

There are a bunch of ideas in the text file about how to use it, too. What kinds of things you can record, etc. And if you decide you want to do another couple of them, you can just print off another couple and do whatever you want. It’s kind of awesome. :)

It’s a pdf download with everything included, in high-quality (300 dpi) full-color, and takes a piece of cardstock and two pieces of text-weight paper.  All instructions are in an included text file (though it’s pretty easy), and the whole assembly, start to finish, will take you around ten minutes, including cutting time.

(p.s.  That little splotch on the lower left side of the cover?  That’d be dog drool.  It’s not part of the download.  You’ll have to get your own dog.  To be authentic, it needs to be a dog that has an uncanny knack for only drooling on things you’re trying to photograph.  I can lend you mine if you want.)

Tiny Art Journal #1 is live right now, delivers by email automatically, and is a whopping $3.  If you get floofy coffee, it’s cheaper than your daily joe, even, and THAT, you only get to use once.  I’d hope.  :)

Grab your tiny art journal and start your collection! :)

(EDITED TO ADD:  My paypal account isn’t accepting orders from any other than US residents/addresses.  If you send the $3 to iqzine@moderngypsy.com and tell me what it’s for, I’ll send you a link for download.   Sorry about that. :>)

Tomorrow and Tuesday, I’m finishing up the elements on the first kit (with which this coordinates, btw.), and since it didn’t *quite* follow the theme I initally thought it would (Earth Day, which morphed into OOH PRETTY PURPLE AND GREEN AND PINK.), I’m popping that up for free on Weds/Thurs or so.  If you’ve got your Tiny Art Journal printed and assembled by then, you could *totally* print some of the elements for collages and such for your pages.  Just sayin’.

AND AND AND….if you do grab one and fill it up?  Do take pictures/scans.  I totally want to see.  Might even put up your stuff here on Junebug somewhere one of these days.  Inspiration rocks, and seeing what other people do with the stuff I’m throwing out there inspires the pants offa me.  (No comments from the peanut gallery, thank you.)  :)

Off to crash before the big Monday comes storming in.  Hope your weekends were fabulous, warm, and full of relaxation.  What’d y’all do?

Total time — 2:38:21 toward my 10k.

I didn’t want to get up this morning.  Aside from being up late (and drinking way too much coffee — I’m surprised I haven’t morphed into an actual coffee bean all kafka-esque by today, actually), that whole carrot-and-stick thing was still bugging me.  Where does motivation come from when it’s decidedly not in the place you thought it was?  How do you just up and rewrite a life?

But the dogs had to go out, as dogs tend to do, and it’s not their fault that their dogmommy’s a delusional freak, and the sun was shining and the trees were still green, and the fact of the matter is that the day-to-day of it all is still right where it was yesterday morning.  So I got up.  Started the coffee stream.  Contemplated getting new innertubes for the bike tires.

I just walked it off, like a muscle cramp of any other kind.

There’s a plan greater than my own, right?

* * *

I had these scents in mind for a few weeks now.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to package the gifts, or even when they’d come up in the rotation, but sometimes I find that if I do things for other people, I don’t get so wrapped up in my own head.  Seemed like a perfect time to work on them. :)

I did H’s scent yesterday, and buoyed by the awesome way that one came out, I started in on today’s with a fair bit of enthusiasm.

Let me just say that there’s something really fun about creating something from scratch for and about someone you admire.  It’s all wrapped up in inspiration and all the gifts that person gives to you just by existing.  And these three women that I’ve been working on this past two days are bigtime sources of inspiration for me.  They’re energetic and fun — three very distinct personalities with an amazing visual aesthetic and the kindest hearts I’ve seen in a long time.  They not only inspire me on a personal level, they make me think that there’s hope for humans in general.  :)

H told me she likes vibrant, fresh smells.  Smells that are alive somehow.  So for hers, I started with a base of blondewoods and green grass, threw in some white flowers and flower stems, and finished it off with a bright zap of green apple.  It’s light, and fades just a little quickly for my tastes, but the wood anchors it and keeps it from flying away with itself.  It sparkles a bit.  Which is good.  H does, too.

R is this little tiny powerhouse of design.  She’s prone to dancing, which I totally get, because so am I.  Randomly.  In public.  Beside the point.  R’s got this wealth of experience and this eye for fabulous design, and she strikes me as the spiciest of the three — so that’s the direction I went with it.  Moroccan spices at the base, mahogany-wood to tie it together, with tahitian red cloves laid over with sugared heliotrope blossoms.  A couple hours in, I can still catch a random whiff of the cloves — it all comes across as a very spicy oriental, which I just love about it.

And then there’s J, who, apparently, has an unnatural love of the color turquoise.  So I set out to make something turquoise.  She’s a Texan, so I started with a base of bluebonnets and scattered in some dandelions sprinkled with vanilla sugars.  It almost sounds too sweet, but the dandelion holds it all together with a bright green.  I, uh, might be wearing that one now. Clearly, I like it a little.

But the cool part about all of these is that I wanted to send all three of them all three scents, but I wasn’t sure how to package them up.  Instead of just slapping labels on bottles, I thought I’d do vials of each of the three in a matchbook-style case that folds open.  And it came out SO COOL.  Seriously, y’all.  Better than I thought it would.  I’m kinda chuffed (and inordinately puffed-up proud) about them, and I’m thinking about doing a couple for ORT this way — like sample vials of all three of the Humble Gas scents with the gas station on the front and each one labelled.  It’s a labor-intensive process, but the result is freakin’ AWESOME.  Seriously.

I wasn’t sure whether the matchbook cases would fall under scent or design, for tracking, but I thought that, probably, it would be easier to just keep it with the scent, since that’s what it’s for, even if the activity was more like the other.  So I still had design to go, and wanted to keep with the printable theme, and came up with this:

It will make precisely zero sense until tomorrow.  But I’m way too tired at the moment to give it the instruction it needs, so check back tomorrow.  I’ll show you better pictures (ones NOT on the desk in front of the freakin’ blue tablet that’s blowing the color levels a bit), and tell you in grand detail what it is.  Because I’m pretty excited about it.  (It was An Idea(tm), and you know how much I love those.)

Total time tonight — 1:57:22.

Tomorrow’ll be a hooky day.  Church in the morning and fambly stuff later.  But I will be writing all this up and taking better pictures.  And maybe telling y’all about my day walking around downtown Greensboro.  It was…uh…interesting.  The freak magnet in my forehead is, in fact, fully functional.

Hope everybody’s having a great weekend. :)

Those of you who are Lime & Violet listeners know that back in the early fall, I bought Jester.  Or, at least, I bought all of Jester’s hair.

It’s the first time I bought a full fleece, completely unprocessed, straight from the sheep.  One minute, it’s a fur coat for an animal, and the next, it’s in a bag and waiting for you to take it home and do something with it.  It’s kind of neat, in a weird, Fiber Person kind of way.

I was pretty excited about Jester’s haircut.  He’s a dark brown/black/dark brown-grey -ish cormo sheep, and his hair weighed, unwashed, around four and a half pounds.  Which is quite a bit for a haircut, really.  Even washed, when all the heavy lanolin and little bits of Farm that was embedded in the hair was rinsed out, we’re talking over three pounds of fleece.  And it was, for all intents and purposes, my very first “raw” fleece.

Now, some of you aren’t fiber people, so let me explain:  Yarn doesn’t get to be a sweater before it goes through a rather lengthy process.  It doesn’t even get to be yarn until it goes through a few long steps.  The fleece needs to be washed, then carded, then pulled out into spinnable fiber (and picked over for shortbits and knots and the like), and spun into a single thread, then put together with OTHER single strands to make what you’d think of as “yarn”.  And then it still needs to be knit into some kind of Thing, since the wearing of unknit yarn tends to chafe.  (And is highly unflattering, unless you have a very particular body type.)

What this means is that when a Fiber Person buys a raw fleece, straight from the sheep, that Fiber Person is going to get a whoooole lot of very intimate time with that fleece before it’s anything resembling a shawl or sweater or socks or whatever.  You want bang for your buck, it’s the way to go, really.  (For instance, three pounds of commercial yarn will cost you more than a hundred bucks in most cases.  A sweater’ll take a month of knitting time.  Contrast that with a fleece, which was forty bucks, and has *already* been three months of daily fiber fun, and the stuff’s not even all carded yet.  It’s like the cheapest Fiber Entertainment EVER.)

Anyway, I’ve digressed into exposition.  My point was, initially, that carding a full fleece worth’s of fiber is a loooong process.  A very long process.  You’re essentially taking little bits of clumpy fluff and brushing it until it’s little bits of fluffy fluff.

I’m doing a little bit on Jester every day.  Usually just a couple of cards’ worth, in the morning, while I wait for the coffee to brew.  And aside from the benefit that I can suddenly feel my bicep muscles from all the daily exercise, I’m to the point where I can see the light at the end of the carding tunnel — there’s maybe two or three weeks’ worth of fleece left to card daily, and then it’s all about the spinning.  (Which is going to be every bit as slow, and every bit as daily, I think.  Three + pounds of fiber in skinny little single plies is going to be a fairly long process, too.)

Because I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I’m finding myself wanting to speed up.  Just to GET IT DONE.  To check this thing off the list and move on to the next phase of processing.

What happens, though, as a result, is that I overload the carders, putting just a little too much fur on one or the other, and it doesn’t card as easily.  It fills up the tines of the cards (which, by the way, look a whole lot like big, flat dog brushes, for the uninitiated), and they just slide right past each other, not affecting the loaded fibers at all.  I end up having to peel the clumpy fiber off one of the cards, and doing half of what I loaded, in order to make any effect on the Jesterhair at all.

This morning, I found that to be fairly illustrative of a whole lot of things in life.  Especially in my own.

Without relaxing, and doing things in a patient, focused manner, things just start to slide past each other ineffectively.  You FEEL like you’re doing something, but the stuff you’re doing is getting such diluted attention that it’s not REALLY getting done.  It ends up taking much more effort while you peel back some of the Stuff, focus on the amount you SHOULD have been focusing on to begin with, and then carding up the rest you had to remove.  It may actually be making more work than it would have been if you’d just been patient to begin with.

I’m neck-deep in two huge projects right now.  Most of those black-pen items over my desk are related to one of two projects.  They’re getting checked off, slowly but surely.  I’m not sure if they’ll be done by tonight, but a whole lot of progress has been made, “t”s have been crossed and “i”s have been dotted, and the year’s being tied up in a neat little bow.

The thing is — much like carding up Jester — the lists are giving me one tiny bit of fluff to work with at a time.  The singular focus is preventing me from loading too much on the carding paddles, even though the end is in sight and I really WANT to do EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW PLEASE KTHXBAI.

In a way, I’m forcing myself to move at Nature’s pace.  One thing at a time, with all the singular attention it takes to force a flower to bloom, or for a sweater to emerge from a sheep.

It’s all about letting things unfold.

Yesterday, J sent me a link to this chart of the past decade in icons.

I can. not. beLIEVE that it’s been ten years since some of this stuff.  This whole past decade has gone by like a blur.  Some of it feels like it just happened yesterday, despite the fact that sometimes it feels like things are moving at a snail’s pace.  I was twenty-eight ten years ago.  I remember feeling like thirty was fast approaching, and then I’d have to grow up and get serious, because who could be thirty and still be bumbling around trying to find a place in life?

Ahem.  Apparently, the same can be said for forty.  Good heavens.

Ten years ago, I was in southern California, drawing pictures of palm trees, writing books and gearing up to teach classes, and I had a *plan*.  A five-year plan.  A five-year plan that I threw out the window to move to Seattle on a dime (which, really, was the best thing I ever did), and which facilitated a brand-new five-year plan.

I didn’t count on five years going all wonkified and landing me in the midwest again with a broken knee and a broken heart, but life’s weird like that.  Everything for a reason, and apparently, that reason was to drop Lime in my lap and tie us together forever.  (She’s the best friend I’ve ever had, and for good reason.)

If anyone had told me, ten years ago, that today I’d be sitting in North Carolina, on a purple bed, putting together packages of hand-crafted perfume to go to people all over the world, and talking mostly-weekly to a huge audience about knitting…?  I’d have giggled and thrown a glu-stick at them.  I’m an artist and a writer, stupid, I’d have said.  I don’t even LIKE perfume.  And I don’t know how to knit.

Ah, the sweet life’s path.  How you twist and turn.

*  *  *

Speaking of time — I sat down last night and got to the section of my planning where I do the actual scheduling of stuff.  All the lists are made for each of the projects in the pike, and now it’s a matter of deciding when that pike needs to be opened.

I figure I can sleep around January 3rd or so.  Until then, even breathing is on a strict time schedule.  We’re talking fifteen-minute increments here, and I’m still choked with Teh Busy until at LEAST the 3rd, and after a brief respite to catch my breath, it’s on to the next huge thing from the 4th to the 15th, then ANOTHER bit of crazy from the 15th to the 30th.

Then things start to even out.  To be fair, this Crazee is from the move this Fall, and all the subsequent downtime and cocooning.  That’s the big problem with having a lot of ideas, and a lot of good ideas, going all at once — any little ding in the schedule and it throws everything off into a whirlwind, and if it’s a big ding…well…you don’t get to sleep until the third of January.

Thing is…despite the busy, and all the crazee that comes with it, I really do love my life.  The crazee makes me focus a lot more clearly on the little moments inbetween the activity, where the Good Stuff happens.  The emails from people who love what they get.  The phone calls and texts from friends.  The quiet moments where one of the dogs comes and lays his/her head in my lap and just looks cute as the dickens.  You get a chance, when things are nuts, to really test the Important Stuff(tm) in your life — to see who stands by you, to find out what’s important, to see where you have a chance to grow and change for the better.

It’s during the times of deliberation that you get to stretch your mind.  It’s during the times of action, though, where you get to test your mettle.

For those keeping track of such things, you’ve probably noticed a whole lot of quotes from Thoreau ’round these parts.  And Emerson, though they’re fewer at the moment.