Ongoing Projects

This little ghost faerie ATC is for Lou. It's a signature card. I am just finishing up some work in her calendar journal. Lou's is the last one of 11 journals I have worked on and I am pleased to be able to wrap up my work on this project. I am eagerly awaiting the return home of my own journal. It was the littlist of the bunch, measuring just 4 x 6 inches and the feedback on it was so positive that I can't wait to have it back and revel in all the artsy goodness!! It's been gone a whole year, that I can't even imagine what's in it. Even though there were photos posted as it was worked on, I actually didn't look at them unless asked to, so whatever was created for me is going to be a surprise!

Speaking of surprises, I just posted pics of my wrapped gift for the Be My Valentine exchange. There will be more pics uploaded as the ladies wrap and send out their gifts. I can't wait for February 1st!!

January Thus Far

So I have been working hard on my gifts for the Be My Valentine exchange. (The photo here is a hint!) I have 10 out of 15 completed and should be able to mail them off by next weekend, once I figure out how I want to wrap them. I am looking forward to seeing what everyone made. Like my friend Penn often says, we have so much fun making gifts to give that we forget that we are going to also be receiving some back!

In other news, I am incredibly excited about an upcoming book I have recently been invite to contribute to. I love doing work for publication-it's what inspires me the most. Art is for sharing and I love thinking up a project and then working through it to the finished piece, knowing it's going to inspire other artists. I know my heart really lies in the process of design more than anything. Speaking of design, Paper Artsy has published two more of my designs as project sheets for their retailers. I am very pleased. It looks like it's going to be a busy winter, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

I am also starting to get my supplies gathered for Artfest. It's a couple months away, but the time goes by so quickly and before I know it, it will be time to go! I can't wait to visit and reconnect with old friends, meet some new ones and fill up my creative well. I have classes with LK Ludwig and Kristen Steiner who are new to me and the lovely Nina Bagley whom I have had the pleasure of taking a class with before. It's so important to spend time with people who "get" the whole mixed media art thing. It's wonderful to walk into a room and be greeted by a whole host of people who are like-minded. I always feel like throwing my arms wide and shouting "MY PEOPLE!!!" *grin*

Meanwhile, back in reality, we are still dealing with snow and ice. Since the last storm hit, we have had a cold snap so it's barely melted during the day and then refreezes overnight. I can tell you I am already tired of scraping my windshield and having to force my car door open every morning! Once I have driven my son to school, I scramble back to my warm house, throw on an extra sweater and a pair of slippers and get to work. Winter always makes me want to burrow down and hibernate. It's a time when my creativity is at its peak.

Thoughts on Stanley Park

These are pictures taken at Stanley Park on various visits I made to the park. This park is a large green space (forest) in dowtown Vancouver. I have visited this park often througout my life. This park was a source of wonderment for me as a child when I came here on vacation. I thought it truely was magical. I had never seen such big trees and I loved driving around the park and being enveloped in green. I have happy memories of swimming in the pool on the west side of the park, that is now gone. It was filled with seawater, something a prairie girl had little exposure to.

Once I got married and had my son, our family continued to enjoy the park. We have had picnics there, walked the seawall, gone on photo shoots, visited the aquarium and zoo, ridden the Xmas train and beachcombed at low tide. The park continues to be a source of happy memories for our family. It's a place we go to to get out when the weather is good, to get some exercise and to have some family time. It's woven itsself into our lives.

I am not sure if anyone living outside of BC knows, but we have been hit with a series of 14 wind/rain/snow storms in the last 6 weeks. The winds have been up to 100 km. We have had torrential rains that have created alot of flooding. We have had the rare occurance of snow, which on the coast is extremely wet and heavy. All of this has meant huge damage to the park. Trees have either been felled by wind, snapped in half as if they were twigs or later damaged by the weight of the snow on the branches. The rains have created errosion on the cliffs above the seawall, resulting in mud slides that have shut down sections of the wall.

Stanley Park has taken alot of abuse from mother nature. The park has lost trees that are at least 200 years old. It absolutely breaks my heart to see the damage. I believe the trees in the top two photos are likely gone. Prospect Point, the area in the park where those photos were taken was hit especially hard. There is a Flickr site that has some photos of damage from one of the storms in December. You can see them here.

I guess the reason why I am writing this is because this is the place I go to feed my soul and to get inspiration. This park has been the place where I have taken some of my best photos, which I am so glad I have now that Stanley Park has been changed forever. It will never be quite the same again, even though work is already underway to restore and repair the damage. I know that the park will always be beautiful, it's just different now.

"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her."
-William Wordsworth

1 Inch Wonders

My first little pieces of art for the new year. If you are interested in having them for your very own, you can check them out in the Tattered Edge Mercantile.

Blogger was down for maintenace for the better part of the day. It's just gotten back up and running and now we are having another wind storm here. The trees are whipping back and forth like crazy! This will make storm #14 if I remember correctly. Last Friday, our power went out for the second time in the last couple of weeks at 9:30 p.m. and stayed that way until 5 a.m. the next morning. It was a very cold night. Last time it went out, on December 23rd, it was off for 16 hours and I had to turf most of what was in my fridge. We have had the power flicker here twice already in the last hour. I hope it doesn't go out again-I have had about enough of that! I am running to the kitchen now to cook dinner, just in case!

Book Junkie

So I have been cooped up at home alot lately and was getting a little stir crazy. I had to go for a test this morning so I took a detour over to my library, even though it was snowing. (That should tell you how desperate I am-we rarely get snow on the west coast and when we do, the roads are mayhem!)

Anyway, my library has a bunch of discard shelves in the hall where they sell off their unwanted books for 10c or so, depending on what it is. I decided to have a look, since I often find little gems-really old dictionaries and such.

On one shelf, there were 6 little books, all with pretty embossed burgundy leather spines. Upon closer inspection, I discovered they were actually set of readers, in mint condition. They are copyrighted 1881 and have these wonderful old-timey illustrations. Book one is pretty thick with lots of pictures. Book two is a tad thicker, still a fair number of pictures. Book three, thicker still and less pictures. By the time you get to book six, it's very thick, no pictures. (Which I found rather amusing!) The sign taped beneath them indicated the set was $10. How on earth could I walk away and leave them there? I didn't! They are now happily ensconced on my shelf!

I also picked up "Biology Made Simple" from 1956 that has funny diagrams in it and a French lesson book from 1966 with all kinds of cartoon type pictures in it. Both books were 10c each! Finding all that made the detour worthwhile!

Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

I am still breathing! I have just been lying low because I am not feeling too crisp.

Seems like January is going to be a whirl wind of preparation. Yesterday I was invited to teach a 5 part series on ATCs to kids which will likely begin mid-February. I am excited about this because it's always fun to expose kids to mixed media art. I remember when I was in elementry school. It was a small school-there was only one teacher for each class and back then, classes were split (two or three grades in one room) because there weren't enough kids to make a full grade class. Anyway, the grade 6 teacher was Mr. Hanna. Mr. Hanna was the teacher whom everyone couldn't wait to have because Mr. Hanna's passion was art! He would do all these very cool art projects and everyone was just dying to get to grade 6 so they could do them. I remember making clay masks, painting and firing them. I loved working with clay. My Gram still has that mask hanging on her bedroom wall!

I get alot of satisfaction from going into schools and sharing my love of art with the kids. They are enthusiastic learners and while I can show them what to do initially, they always surprise and delight me with their own take on the project. It's that give and take that happens, that is so exciting.

Just prior to Xmas, I taught my altered mirrors class to two classes of grade 6/7 students. At the end of the class, I asked the kids if anyone thought before they started that they couldn't do it because they didn't think they were an artist. Lots of hands went up. One girl said she didn't think she could do it at first, but once she started, she realized what she was doing was good! A couple of boys chimed in and agreed with her. That's a golden moment right there! It's a good lesson for all of us as artists, wherever we are in our learning and creating: never underestimate yourself! There is courage in even starting something and once you start, you never know what you will learn along the way.

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
~Goethe

Ringing in the New!

Happy New Year Everyone! Hope you had a safe and joyful celebration last night. I had a quiet night at home with my guys, which suits me just fine.

January 1st brings with it the opportunity to start new projects and to that end, I wanted to announce the launching of the Be My Valentine Blog. If you were following the 12 Days of Xmas Blog, you know that that swap drew to a close last week. What will you do for eyecandy now? Well, you can visit the Valentine's blog! We had so much fun doing the last gift exchange, that I decided to host one more before taking a hiatus from these kinds of projects. (One of my goals this year is to cut back significantly in order to persue some of my other artistic yearnings.)

To that end, I accepted an invitation to join Art Pub Studios which is a network of artists supporting one another to reach their personal goals. It will be helpful to have a sounding board and to be able to receive constructive feedback. I am also looking forward to supporting the other members. So much of the processing and work we do as artists takes place alone in our studios and it can be quite an insular experience. It will be nice to feel like a part of a team-together everyone accomplishes more. *Note: The website for Art Pub Studios is a work in progress.

So that's where I am at on this first day of the new year-thinking about the unlimited potential that lies ahead in the 364 1/4 days left of 2007. Onward ho!