A Mixed Bag Post - Soul Journal Potpourri, Porch Flowers and some beautiful things...

So I really wanted to post yesterday but life had other sweet plans for me ... more later in the beautiful things portion...

I did a photo shoot on the back porch again - check out this gorgeous hibiscus ! I love the orange ! The blossom is about the size of my hand ! :

And this beauty is a cosmos I grew from seeds. The plants are about 3 feet high and finally flowering. Cosmos remind me of my dad. He always planted them at our cottage up north. I love their delicate strength.

The artist in me is still working at low speed. I have a few projects I really need to get done ! My deadline is next Thursday, just before David and I head to Montreal for Andrea and James' wedding, Baby Cupcake's christening and then our week at the cottage. I want to have it all done but seem to still have a hard time focusing on those have-to's !

Finding time for the Soul Journaling though... Here are page 3 and 4 of the Collage Potpourri. Some of the things Sarah (at Caspiana) suggested we try on these pages were painting with a plastic fork, adding numbers in a variety of ways, doing a monoprint with a paint blob, adding significant words and doing some sewing on the page. Sewing isn't really my thing but I added some stitching in red embroidery floss to page 3 and I sewed on a tassel I made from metallc embroidery floss on page 4.

Here is a "sweet spot" shot of page 3. I love all the numbers popping through and I love how the fork painting at the bottom looks like a little red fence. I think this sweet spot should be called "Don't fence me in !"

"Don't fence me in!"

Here is the sweet spot on page 4. I think you can see it pretty well in this shot but what I love best about this page is the depth of the colors in the background. That came from the various color washes and dry brushing but also the glorious metallic color from the copper Lumiere Acrylic paint ! This sweet spot is called "Love : Long May She Reign".

"Love - Long May She Reign"

As you can tell, I am really into that creative process that this Soul Journal project has inspired. I think I will bring a few minimal art supplies with me to the cottage and continue the pot pourri thing up there ! A whole week just to play ! No have-to's ! Yippee !

To end off, here are my three beautiful things for the end of this week :

#1 My wonderful friend Sonia took me for my first every pedicure yesterday ! I know ,43 and a pedicure virgin !!! But I am a virgin no more, let me tell ya ! The woman who did my foot massage was incredible ! I almost fell asleep ! And my icky summer "Hobbit" feet are so very pretty now ! Ready for the high heeled sandals for the wedding next week ! A thousand thank you's Sonia, for that wonderful sweet treat ! You rock, girlfriend !!!

#2 My incredibly talented friend Lois has been working so hard on my beautiful dress for the wedding next week. It is turning out so well and I am excited that I will feel pretty and special in my dress. A thousand thank-you's to you too, Lo ! You are amazingly generous and I so, so appreciate it !

#3 Girlfriends, girlfriends, girlfriends !!! Girlfriends are a beautiful thing everyday ! I am so very, very grateful for them on the good days and on the bad. I also know that I am a good girlfriend back, when one of the glorious women I know needs me. Thank God for girlfriends and all the joy, support, laughter, tears and love they bring ! Now that's a beautiful thing, baby !

Happy August, have a great weekend and may your world be full of beauty (and girlfriends !) today !

Morning Glories

So I came outside on the deck this morning to take some shots of the Soul Journal Process I am following and had to stop and stare at these beautiful Morning Glories. The photo makes them look electric blue but really they are the deepest, richest purple. Such a treat to see the seeds you planted in late April be full-bloom plants in the July sunshine.

Chica looks suitably impressed, doesn't she ?

Anyhoo, I am still following the Soul Journal fun that Sarah has been prompting us to do over at Caspiana. One thing about this great, free-form play is that it is EXTREMELY MESSY !

Check out my worktable. Yikes !!!!! :

The fun I am having following along is well worth the mess and the eventual clean-up ! The prompts Sarah is providing right now is what she calls "Collage Potpourri". It is a whole bunch of suggestions for adding layers into your journal pages. Her main instruction is that we do as many of the suggestions as possible yet never in the same order on any given page.

One fun lesson was "Magazine stencils" which making stencils and/or masks from figures of people cut out of magazines. They give a cool ghostly impression on the page when you use a make-up sponge to dab paint around the shapes. I also loved the effect of leaving watered down acrylic paint pooling and dripping on the page and letting it dry for a couple of hours.

Here are page 1 & 2 of my 6 pages of Collage Potpourri. I also included a couple of "sweet spots" shots I found on the page.

Pages 1 & 2

Sweet spot on page 1 - wine label ephermera, yellow adjective scribbles, drippy white paint

Sweet spot page 2 - pooling orange paint, magazine stencil, bought stencil of #2

I am really loving the process. It is sometimes hard to keep the critic or control freak in me away as I play but giving myself over to the process is really good for me right now ! It feels like each session I sit down to is a mini-vacation ! I highly recommend it for helping our soul !

Cheers !

What I Am Doing on My Summer Vacation - It Ain't All Pretty !

Does this happen to you ? When you are having a hard time on the inside, your home reflects it ? You know...you feel blue, so those huge dust bunnies in the corner seem comforting rather than annoying ? You run the dishwasher only because you have no forks left in the drawer ? The piles of clutter around the edges of the counters and tables are like the stupid bad thoughts that are cluttering up your brain ?

This is what has been happening around my house this summer. I have also noticed it on my blog - it has been feeling messy and uncared for like the rest of my world ! The good news is that I reached the bottom of my blues pit last week and I can feel myself heading slowly back upwards ! I am far from flying high but I surely do see that light and feel it warming me back into living ...

The bottom was pretty yucky to say the least !!! I hate that place ! I haven't been that low in a long, long time and was really hoping I never would be... but anyways.... You know how the only good thing about a headache is the relief you get when it finally goes away ? That is the same kind of relief I am feeling now. I am even well enough to start think about what lessons I learned from my voyage to the DARK PLACE, and what were the silver linings in the whole thing.
Here are a few of the the many lessons I learned :

Lesson 1 - You are so very loved. ( nice one, eh ?)

Lesson 2 - It is ok to grieve and in fact, it is necessary to feel that pain of loss before you can go back to working on being whole. Letting yourself feel it all takes courage but is the right way to do it ! (otherwise, it will get you eventually !!!! Beware !)

Lesson 3 - ABBA and Girlfriends (along with Hubbies from Heaven) can save lives ! (Go see Mamma Mia asap ! )

And the biggest SILVER LINING I have found so far is that I quit smoking.....
I mean I QUIT SMOKING !!!!
I know, I know, many of you will be so grossed out that I was still smoking..... I know, I know, I was really B A D !!! Whatever !!!!

Today is DAY 6 of my non-smoking life. The first three days were the easiest. My motivation ? Fear of dying ! I honestly felt that if I smoked for one more day, I was going to die. I have felt that before and somehow ignored it, believe it or not! But this time, it just clicked. That is what my ex-smoker friends told me would happen. When you are ready, it will just click. Didn't believe them then but I guess I do now. I told my doctor I quit and she was as excited as can-be ! She even clapped her hands like a little girl. She also said I should yell it from the roof tops - both to be proud of myself and to reinforce my commitment to the change. So I yelled it out , already..... I think Friday was the hardest day so far - I was alone a lot, and I was feeling better emotionally, and the cravings were intense but I made it through with lots of Smart Water, a couple of lollipops and a few phone calls to the Hubby when I was feeling weak. YAY ! KIMBO !!!!

And now back to our regularily scheduled programming :

So needless to say, there hasn't been a whole lot of creation going on the the Queen of Arts studio for the last little while. I did start following the art journal prompts from Sarah at Caspiana (see previous post) which has been about all I could handle. I liked having some one else guide me for a while... I have gotten as far as Day 12 where Sarah encouraged us to create our "house" and our "neighorhood" in a two-page spread in our journals. I actually love, love love, how mine turned out ! My house is by the sea, with like-minded and much loved neighbors living close by. My House is bright, beautiful, colorful and full of whimsy - just like me....the real me... the me I am re-discovering again now that I am back from the DARK PLACE..... welcome home, Kimbo, welcome home.....

"My house is a very very very fine house..."

Weekend Finds

So there have been a lot of ups and downs in this Queen's life these days. The downs were the extremely sad news about a friend of the Hubby's who was killed in a motorcycle accident on Friday. He was 40 years old and the father to triplet 11 year olds. I also have a friend who is bravely battling cancer who I spent some time with last week. This, along with the re-surfacing of my own issues with panic attacks and the deep down blues, has made life challenging, to say the least... It just feels like the world is a scary, sad place sometimes....

The upside has been the wonderful tender love and care that I have been getting from some dear dear friends and love ones. That is what it must be all about, I think, holding on tight to what is good and celebrating it whenever possible. So in the midst of the crappy stuff, I lift my half-filled cup to my pals who make life beautiful and worthwhile !

While on the look out for good things this weekend, I made some fun finds. My friend Sonia and I hit a flea market in Hollis, NH on Sunday. We didn't buy much but here is the crazy piece that had to come home with me :

This cobalt blue glass hand was mine as soon as I saw it ! The red $5.00 sticker is still on it. Of course I had to play with the seller and ask "You gonna give me a hand ?" when buying it. Good for a little laugh anyway...When I told the Hubby about my day's activities, I said "You will never guess what I bought at the flea market today !" He didn't guess... he wasn't as excited about the blue hand as I was but he was fine when I said it was going in the studio....

Another find was out there in Blogland. I discovered the wonderful blog of Sarah Whitmire at Caspiana. She has started a project called Soul Journaling and gives guided art journaling prompts everyday. I love the activities she has has us do in our journals. They are directed yet open ended at the same time. With the scatterbrained feelings I am having right now (Hubby call it "Etch-a-Sketch Brain"!), it has felt so good to have someone else set the tasks and just dive into the process. It took me all weekend to catch up as I think Sarah is now on Page 8 of the journal but we are completely welcome to start anywhere and to take our time. This is the page I like the best so far :

Sarah prompted us to create a page with our Soul Armor, what we would need to nourish and protect our artist's soul and what we would like to surround ourselves with more of in our creative process. She also provided links to copyright free images of medieval armor to use in our pages if we wanted to. I like how this page turned out. The first word that came to me was "Self-Love" - that piece of armor is covering my heart and I think it is the one piece that needs the most reinforcing right now...

I will share some bits and pieces from this Soul Journaling journey but also feel kind of protective about it, like it should be just for me for the most part... part of getting myself to a better place....

To end off for today's post, here are my Monday's Three Beautiful Things (it was hard to find these today but here goes...) :

- my blue cobalt hand sitting on the bay window in the studio

- grilled mushrooms, onions and zucchini on the BBQ was yummy at supper

- gave the Hubby a nice back rub after work - it was nice to be there for him for a change

Hope your day is filled with beautiful things !