Maranda: "o happy day"...

This will just never ever get old.

Maybe Piles.

This pile makes me feel glad.


This pile makes me a bit tense.

Countdown.

In less than a week I'm packing up my boa and running away to North Carolina for an adventure.

And what a lot of things I need to do before I go!

Observe:

I like the observatory best when I can imagine I'm the only person up there.



This was one of those delightfully cool days we had last week. It has since warmed up again. Damn.

Temporary.

Anyone remember these?



About two years ago I was making lots of these pieces. I sold them on and off of Etsy. I visualized beautiful roomfuls of them. I liked them then, and you know what? I think I like them again. But for a long time I couldn't stand the sight of 'em.

For the benefit of the newcomers, these are 1"-2" circles of mulberry paper with watercolor, tea, and beeswax, delicately attached to each-other with tiny safety pins. I call them temporary bouquets.

There are a number of reasons why I put aside this body of work. One reason was that I had to explain a few too many times what they were. ("um, art.") Also, I was never happy with the way they looked online. The safety pins would reflect on my scanner and cause strange things to happen. Also they are not totally flat, so the scanner thing just wasn't working out.

The main reason why they were put aside was: I GOT SICK OF THEM. All those damn little circles with their bright colors...particularly in my former apartment, which was stiflingly small. And admittedly I got lazy. I have SO many of these little dots still, (tucked away, out of sight) because back then I wasn't thinking enough about what I was doing; it was just EASY to sit and sew these doo-dads for hours and hours.

Ugh. It makes me ill.

I started making these when I came out in California not sure if I'd be staying a month or a year or forever. I was living with boys, "temporarily" and it was not pretty, so making these colorful arrangements made things better. Everything was temporary and uncertain and awful, so I tried to make it pretty at the very least, without thinking too much.

So why are they back, you may be wondering? Well. Time has passed, and I think I like to look at them again. I'd still love to see an installation with 'roomfuls' of them, but I have yet to find rooms that want them.

Also, an Etsy user contacted me and asked about them, which was very nice to hear. The two newest ones hint at the directions these may take if I continue with this work. This first one is not a "bouquet" but an "arrangement." A more logical arrangement:



And this larger arrangement is closer to what I initially wanted these to be...larger, more layered, more complex, more connections:



Dorothy-in-Paris likes them:



Anyway, these are new in my shop. More may follow. We shall see. I'd love to hear what you think.

Hi Mom!

Hey look, everybody! Its cooled off enough for me to wear a wool hat! And look how long my hair is getting! I haven't had it cut in over a year, and I'm finally past that awkward in-between phase.



Maybe it was just the Sunday Morning Loveliness and the coffee, but this pile of books with Blue Bunny struck me as rather nice looking yesterday...

I've been doing a lot of things, but blogging regularly sure as hell isn't one of them. Yesterday I spent some time catching up on my friend Abbey's blog, Aesthetic Outburst, and as always I learned new things, discovered new artists/designers and felt all around motivated to try harder.

Let's see. So on Saturday I got up awfully early and went out to Northridge to be a presenter for "smART day", a day of workshops and lectures for art educators. I did the fastest mini-bookbinding workshop ever. It was kind of cool. Here's my TA & friend Katrina stabbing some paper.



Sunday I had a good morning of farmers marketing and coffee, and then tended to the ongoing cleaning/organizing/artmaking situation. It goes like this: "I should get to work on making stuff. But boy, this place is already so disorganized...maybe I should clean first." Then I sit on my floor organizing my safety pins by size for an hour....Then I take a nap.

It's something like that. I'm exaggerating a bit, (although there have been naps this weekend, make no mistake.) Anyone else get in these weird productive/unproductive cycles?

I have made progress on a project that isn't so much art-making, but rather documentation/organization. I mean, besides sorting the safety pins.

I'm always drawing. Doodling. On all sorts of bits of paper, envelopes, margins of my calender, post-it notes, and the agendas from faculty meetings. I've been tearing out and saving the good bits for some time.

Because I need more irregular bits of paper in my life, right?

I have started pasting these drawings onto blank 3x5" index cards. Then I put them in this beauty:



My ol' grad school pal Jeremy Entwistle rescued this library card catalog from university surplus, but he could not take it with him when we graduated. I love it. In addition to storing supplies and materials, (like more irregular bits of paper) I hope someday it will be full of little drawings. What I would really love to find (and I have looked) is some discarded library cards to use as a base for drawings/collages. When I was at Murray State University they were using old catalog cards as scratch paper at the library. I wish I'd swiped a few...thousand.

If anyone knows where I could get some catalog cards, please let me know!