A Few of My Favorite Things

I went shopping Saturday afternoon in Chandler, and ended up spending a lot more money than I expected. So much more that I had to put my purchase on a credit card. It was a business expense and it was a great opportunity, but I usually don't buy things unless I can pay cash. I made an exception, and I drove home with the back of my truck loaded with my goodies.

On the way home, I was in one of those zones where the sky is bluer than normal, and the air smells sweeter, and the light seems brighter. And then I pulled up behind this Mini Cooper on Warner and Dobson, and lightening stuck my heart. Life is good. It was exactly what I was thinking as I pulled up to stop.

That was Saturday.

I've had a really rough day. I feel like my heart has been through the blender along with the spinach, celery and other ingredients in my morning green drink. It aches and I can't seem to stop crying. I'm only telling you this because I want to talk about how I'm dealing with it.

Apparently, I haven't done a great job today in resolving my feelings, because once my heart was broken, everything I have touched, everything I have tried to do, has somehow gone wrong. The worst of these collateral damages came through a project I volunteered to help. I offered to write a press release for an upcoming event and send it out the media in Phoenix. I always have an editor for my things because I'm rather anal about everything being perfect. So my favorite editor volunteered her time today to review the press release. I sent it out to 40 locations, and at the end of the day, I found more than one error in it. I was embarrassed for myself. I felt horrible for the project because I didn't want to do something that reflected poorly on the event. I was just a little angry with my editor. I also felt any sense of control slip like sand through my clenched fists because this happened in spite of my efforts to turn out perfect work.

I've been looking forward to going to sleep all day, knowing it would put an end to my day and give me the hope of a fresh start tomorrow. Only it is tomorrow, and sleep evades me. So I realized I had this opportunity tonight to really dig in, not to my problem, but to work with myself to both acknowledge exactly how I feel and also refocus on what I want in my life (post-broken heart). My life has taught me that the way I react to a challenge doesn't change the present moment reality, but it does change what happens next. This is about changing what happens next for me.

I decided to work with my strengths. I have crow eyes. I don't mean that my eyes have those wonderfully named wrinkles, crows feet. (Not yet, anyway.) I mean that my eyes go to the sparkly and bright colored things in the environment. My home is filled with them. I have lots of pictures of them. So I decided to do a little digital art project to cheer myself up, to indulge my crow eye, and see if I can't turn this heart thing around before morning, even if I don't sleep.

One of the songs that cheers my heart eternally is Diamond Road by Sheryl Crow. The second verse is the one that gets me every time:

Little bird, what's troubling you?
You know what you have to do.
What is yours you'll never lose
And what's ahead may shine.
Underneath the promise of blue skies
With broken wings, you'll learn to fly.
Pull yourself out of the tide
And begin the dream again.

So without further explanation, here's my digital art gallery.


I see this starfish box sitting on the glass mosaic tile box every morning in my bathroom. It reminds me of my drive up the Pacific coast about ten years ago, nearly three glorious weeks of beaches, redwoods, and mountains. I camped every night except for the three I spent in Seattle. I spent one afternoon on a small sliver of beach in northern California flying my kite and finding starfish and anemones along the water's edge. It was a magical afternoon.


The word "dream" captures the essence of what I do to visualize the things I want and focus on the things most wonderful in my reality. It is inspired in part by the emphasis on dreamtime in the shamanic traditions. But it also is inspired by the dream work I did so diligently when I spent my time with Liz in Yellow Springs. It was a time of deep personal growth and understanding about myself and life. I treasure my memories of time spent with her.

I see this little dreams with wings image every day many times. I try to always see it and not look past it because I've grown used to it. It reminds me to give my heart wings.


I found this little embroidered bag in a shop off the plaza in Santa Fe. When I saw it in the store, my heart stopped. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen in a long while. When I bought it, I had no idea how I was going to use it, but I knew I wanted to use it every day.

I returned to the plaza, kicked off my shoes and wiggled my toes in the grass. I pulled out my camera to capture the joy of the hour. I suddenly realized that I had purchased a camera bag. Since then, I carry it everywhere with me.

Project: Small Ideas Book

On Friday, I took another wonderful class from Carol Wingert at Scrapbooks, Etc. Her project is called Little Things and involved using aluminum tape, embossing, and lots of Glimmer Mist with masks. It was a fun class, as always.

I finished creating the book today in the studio. I am going to give this book as a Christmas present for a young woman in my life. I'm going to call it Small Ideas and fill it with inspirational quotes that I believe she will appreciate. My goal today was to finish assembling the major embellishments of the book and have it ready for quotes. After I insert the quotes, I'm going to use glass glitter and a few other embellishments to gussie it up even more. I'll post pictures when it reaches that stage.

For now, here is the book almost as Carol imagined it, awaiting my quote insertions:


The book is based on a cascading accordion book. Because Carol loves things with depth and texture, the pages include things like ribbons and jeweled brads, things that force the pages open. You can see the depth from this shot.


The bird was fun to make. We started with a die cut bird and glued on a sheet of cut cardstock that looks almost like a doily. Next, we applied a strip of aluminum tape over the cut cardstock and gently embossed the metal into the cardstock design. The results are amazing. It looks like a serious piece of embossed metal. It sits on a library pocked adorned with scrap of the cut cardstock.


Inside the first spread, the right page is an envelope holding a custom made insert with a ribbon pull. I added the bracket to the left page to emphasize the butterfly in the paper.


The right page has cardstock vines in blue and brown, with the brown placed underneath to look like a shadow. We bent the blue vine a bit, and applied the butterfly brad.


The center design comes from using a mask on the open book spread and applying a couple different shades of brown Glimmer Mist. The tree and bird are die cuts from cardstock.


Here is another page done with masks and Glimmer Mist. The reflection hides the image on the right page. It's a glorious effect, though.


The right page includes another piece of aluminum tape. This time, we embossed the tape using some of the Ten Seconds metal embossing plates and the Revolution die cutting machine. It sits on top of a brown lunch page, a chipboard die cut, that is tied together with a piece of vintage seam binding. Carol had this in her stash and included it for the class kit. She is very generous and gives us so much in each kit beyond the basics of the project, often items from her personal stash.


Inside the back cover. From this angle, you can't see the accordion stacked up on the left side. On the right, we have constructed a sort of Victorian posy starting with a metal rimmed tag embellished with paper and fabric flowers, metal leaves, and ribbon.

I'm going to give two of these Small Ideas books for Christmas. I purchased the blank cascading accordion blank to start the second one. I am sure I have enough paper in my stash to make the second one using a different color scheme, perhaps in orange and red. Next, the fun of selecting the quotes and deciding how to insert the writing into the books. I plan to hand write many of them, but may also use some vellum or heat transfer for others. Can't wait to get them both to that stage.

My Blink Photos

Many people are posting pictures of their homes based on the idea in Blink (by Malcolm Gladwell) that you can learn a great deal about people by spending a few minutes in their home. You get to see the real person this way, not the image they present. Catherine encouraged me to participate in this, and here it is.

For full disclosure, I did straighten up my desk, my studio had been a total wreck so I did unearth the worktable (mostly), I straightened up the kitchen counter (things are in the sink now), and I picked up a few things in the bedroom. But mostly, this is how I live and not staged. I didn't dust or vacuum or move things around. My financial filing is still on the family room floor. I didn't take some shots that would have shown you the backlog of shredding or the guest bath which needs picking up. I did start using a housekeeper every other week about a month ago, and that really helps me to keep things tidy. End of disclosure.

What can you learn about me from this? I must say, when I looked at this pictures, I saw some trends that jumped out, things I didn't realize were so obvious in my house. Yikes.




























I'm posting these and a few more pictures on my Flickr account in a few days, along with some narrative. I'll point out some of the details there that I think reveal tons about me.