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!

Last Sunday, and the Future.

Hello!

I had a weird, wonderful Sunday last weekend, and I want to tell the world all about it.

It started at 3:00AM. I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. I tried til about 4, and then got up and started my day...

Around dawn I left my home and headed to the Hollywood Farmers Market, on Ivar & Selma Avenues, right between Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards for my non-California friends. That's part of why I like this farmers market I think: its in such a touristy, awful place, but at 7 AM its quiet and lovely, and I can walk-on-the-walk-of-fame with my colorful radishes and appreciate how Los Angeles indeed has its moments....













I also stopped by the new Los Feliz Farmers Market, which happens behind the Dresden. And I had a decadent breakfast at Figaro. It was early enough that the hipsters weren't cluttering up my neighborhood yet, so the place was nice and quiet. I sat outside and enjoyed life, and read, and wrote things down.



The rest of the day was spent drawing and binding books, so that ain't bad either.


So as to 'the future'...well, I was going to write about some of my forthcoming Michelle-things, but I've got a busy day before me, and I better get away from this damn computer....but in brief:

My students are starting the "Cal State Northridge Printmaking Society."

My students are having a show!

I'm teaching another bookbinding workshop at Surface Gallery in Bakersfield in November.

I'm applying to be a vendor at a couple of upcoming handmade sale/marketplace events.

I'm making books. Lots of books.

I'm making a halloween costume this year! That's really all I want to work on this weekend. sigh.

So all these happenings are well-and-good, but what I'm really obsessing about is my adventure to PENLAND (yep, going back for more, folks) in late October/early November. It's just about one month away.

It looks like this.

Some of the good things I've been up to:

Last weekend I had the opportunity to speak about my work at a meeting of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. A table full of my work looks like this:


My brother was in town this week. Our adventures included an afternoon at the best place ever, LA's Farmer's Market on Fairfax, which looks like this:


and this:


Yesterday I had an wonderful, intense day of bookbinding with Charlene Matthews at her amazing Bindery. What I made looks like this:


Nice, huh? I made a treasury on Etsy today. It looks somethin' like this:


Meanwhile, outside it looked like this: