End of week 5: Too Busy &Too Awesome!

(Edited to add: Scroll down for a giveaway!)

Wow, I accidentally skipped last week's blogging, but it was because I was too busy MAKING STUFF! Hahahah! What a wonderful feeling. :)

For starters, allow me to celebrate that I've had a piece ACCEPTED TO A MAGAZINE! Yeah, wooooooohooooooooo!  I sent a query into Green Craft over a month ago, and thought I'd never hear from them again. "Oh surely," I thought, "I'm nowhere near as advanced as some of those REAL artists."  But, surprise surprise, I got a letter back from the Editor, saying, "It looks great! I love it! The deadline is March 15th, but we need to see where it will fit in." 

I'm pretty sure my feet didn't touch the floor for the rest of the week!  However, the bad news was that the journal I'd queried with had been half-destroyed by...well...life, so I had to make a new one.

Not bad. :)  The reason why it was accepted is because its made entirely from cereal boxes, paper bags, junk mail, and covered w/ vintage book scraps that I found on an antique store floor.  "Oh, we're just going to throw that away," said the manager.  "You can have it."

I made a few bookmarks from the same material, only used a cracker box for the base.

Also, this past week, I realized that I could sell some of the recycled die-cuts on Etsy, so I started building my stash.

Then, my hand hurt so bad that I said, "Dangit, I'm getting a Sizzix!" I found this one for 15 bux on Craigslist. Score. :)

Dies are going in this month's budget. :)

I then realized that some people were just selling vintage ephemera on Etsy.  I was like, "You're kidding.  You mean people actually buy that stuff in packs?  Why not rummage around an antique mall?"  I'd taken for granted how blessed I was to be surrounded by junk stores, and forgotten that not everyone has that.  Heck, not everyone gets a spine-tingling thrill from it the way I do, haha!  I've got TONS of that stuff....

...and can't wait to start wrapping it up in pretty lace and selling it.  My new goal is to have my Etsy shop, HappyScrappyStuff, open by March 15th.  :)  

Today, while I took all the studio pictures, the five-year-old had a "wood sale" on the kids' side of the studio

Everything was sorted by size, color, and function.  She tried to tell me why I should buy them all--I loved it!  But she hates the flash, so I couldn't get a decent pic down there, with her wiggling around.  Then we went "camping," and stayed in "Jesus' Forest," and she caught a whale with her fishing pole.  I only caught a minnow, though.   Sigh. [Big Contented Smile.]  She's so herself.  She's the strongest personality I've ever even heard of.

The two-year-old got ahold of my beads, and threw them.  Lots of them.  Everywhere.  I didn't take a picture of that.  I felt too silly for actually keeping that box at her eye level. :) To make up for it, here's a pic of her  finishing an ice cream sandwich.

I can't believe it, but most of the time, I really can work with the two-year-old beside me.  She's an introvert.  She wants to play quietly. Her favorite thing in the world is cutting paper and watching colors mix together. ("Yeah, honey, mine too!")  We have a routine now--every day Mommy takes her to the studio, gives her some safety scissors and some paint, and we *both* make stuff. 



I never thought the day would come when my kids would say, "Can we please go down to the basement and cut paper/glue things/paint/sew...with you?"  That day is not only here, it keeps coming back for more.

Last Saturday, my five-year-old said, "Mommy, can we sew with you in the basement?"  The two-year-old joined in with clapping and cheers, and then my Dear Husband even said, "I'll come down too."

My five year old made her "very own blanket," (a denim scrap with a real chain-stitch down the middle, which she promptly wrapped her Zhu-Zhu Pet in), my two-year-old "made hearts" by cutting up paper scraps into triangles,  and my husband developed his own font, tentatively titled "Wall-E."  (The movie has been burned into our consciousness recently.  We can't help it.)  I worked on this quilt...

...made from their jammies and old jeans.  They were excited. :)

I didn't take a picture of that time, because honestly, I felt like it was the World's Best Family Time Ever, and didn't want to say, "Hang on a sec while I get my camera, so I can update my blog." I just felt (rightly or wrongly) that it would have been an Epic Mother Fail.  But as I looked around the room, I felt like those moments were the first part of a serious Dream Come True for me---my family making stuff together, and enjoying it.  We're not addicted to the TV (overly much), we're not sitting around consuming junk food (all the time) we're able to enjoy things together.  How did we get so blessed?

I want to spread the blessing around a bit---leave a comment on this blog, and you'll be entered into a drawing for one of those bookmarks. :) Just a little thank you for joining me on my journey. :) 

Raymond Carver said it best....

This is just the best way to describe how I feel right now. Enjoy, then buy his books. :)

"Poems"
by Raymond Carver

"They've come every day this month.
Once I said I wrote them because
I didn't have time for anything
else.  Meaning, of course, better
things--things other than mere
poems and verses.  Now I'm writing
them because I want to.
More than anything because
this is February
when normally not much of anything
happens.  But this month
the larches have blossomed
and the sun has come out
every day.  It's true my lungs
have heated up like ovens.
And so what if some people
are waiting for the other shoe
to drop, where I'm concerned.
Well, here it is then. Go ahead.
Put it on. I hope it fits
like a shoe.
Close enough, yes, but supple
so the foot has room to breathe
a little.  Stand up.  Walk
around.  Feel it?  It will go
where you're going, and be there
with you at the end of your trip.
But for now, stay barefoot.  Go
outside for a while, and play."

Week 4: Giblets.

 This is my 5-year-old's original painting.  She said she made it just for me. I could kiss it, or eat it with honey!  I just absolutely love this!

Now, about giblets. :)

Giblets is the affectionate name my husband gave for the piles...and piles...and piles of little pieces of toys that both of our girls seem to love. The Cootie Bugs game, Monopoly, chess and checker board sets, Barbie parts, card games....all of these things seem to get piled in the middle of our playroom! They make a huge mess. Then we have to go through, sort them out a piece at a time, find which game that every little piece of cardboard goes to, and we don't feel like we've really accomplished any housework when we're done sorting through it. 

A lot of my art projects seem to follow this pattern too.
 
I'll have fifty-five different ideas in any given day.  Sometimes I'll start pieces of a project, then abandon it for whatever reason--I need another tool, the project's not working the way I want it, a kid loses a fingernail (!!!) or I just get sidetracked.  Eventually, I look around, and it feels like half of my studio is covered with half-finished items.

Any time I finish a writing project, my brain simply aches for the physical and visual action of crafting.  So, after finishing a short screenplay last week, I was revved up and ready to finish a lot of the little things, the "giblets" that had accumulated in my brain and work space. 

Of course, I felt like I hadn't accomplished *anything* artistic this past week until I looked through my photos and had a physical record of everything I'd done. Blogging to the rescue! :)

The first project was to make this incredibly fun "schedule" for the kids. I've wanted to do this for a year, literally, and just "never got around to it." I literally found the sun picture in a moving box from our last house!Now it's finally done. I got the idea from the inimitable FlyLady, who suggested making a visual routines list for kids that were too young to read.  The girls both loved it, and started following it immediately.  :)  With no pressure from me, of course.  And I never had to remind them of anything ever again. :p

The tags were upcycled cereal boxes, and I used some old beads that weren't annealed--so they busted in my hands when I tried to make jewelry with them. >:-[

I made these with the girls.  We took clothespins apart, covered them with gesso, slapped on the acrylic paint of our choosing, and then stamped them with Staz-On ink.  I got the idea from Shona Cole, but thought, "Aw, what will we do with those? And who would ever want to buy them?" Cause no idea is good unless someone would want to buy it, right?  Well, these little babies made me smile, and that was enough for me.  I started using them everywhere:

...and they make me smile every day now. :)

Another project I worked on this week was an art journal, here:

...and here...

...and then I bound the pages together....

 ....only to realize that I'd measured something wrong at 4am, and the pages didn't fit to the covers properly!

The bound pages stuck out at the top of the cover, and were half-an-inch away from the bottom. :(  And, um, I'd used wire to bind it with, so it wasn't like I could just chop all the excess off.  I'd spent all that time cutting out tabs and holes and binding everything, and now I'd have to start all over again.  :(

I put a new tool on my wish-list: a wire binding machine!

Also this week, I learned to make great guacamole, thanks to my new favorite website: www.chipotlefan.com.  Yeah, it was yummy. We had that for lunch a couple of times.  With chips. And nothing else. :) I'm not ashamed.

My oldest made a new creation:

And celebrated it:

Yes, that really is her throwing pieces of Styrofoam everywhere. She thinks I'm the cool mom, until I make her help me clean it up. ;) Styrofoam is not fun to clean up.

I did some writing.  I spent one morning outlining my musical play.  Yeah, it's the one I've been working on for a bajillion years, have ten songs for, and have even written spin-offs of it for various church skits, but never finished.  I almost hate it now, but I want to finish it, just so I never have to think of it again.  I think I may need to write a SFD just to get it out of my system. (google "SFD writing" if you don't know what that means, haha)  At the very least, I was able to figure out a couple of reasons *why* I always get stuck, and hopefully I can spend a week on it without puking. :)

One morning, I felt so blah/sleepy/useless and prayed, "Lord, what do You want me to do today?" I strongly felt like he said, "Praise Me," and I did.  I pulled out my guitar and praised Him.  I even wrote part of a song.  That's when my two-year-old walked in the room with a stunned expression on her face, and I realized that she may have no memory of me playing.  For Shame. 

I took some pictures, and experimented with the different settings on my camera.  I'll post those later, because the kids have been patient enough, and I need to get back to the real world.

Finally, I had a blessed moment when my two-year-old knocked some Raymond Carver poetry books off the bottom shelf.  In a whirlwind moment of ADD, I just *had* to sit and read forty pages of it (I'm a fast reader--it took me about 10 minutes). Carver's language soaked right through my skin again, reminding me of all that God had delivered me from.  I wrote a couple of poems in his minimalistic style, and I'll post one for you here.

I have to be patient. 
I will not be my mother.

I will not scream when 
A little girl sings 
about songs that never end
at the top of her lungs
when I have a headache. 

I will take an asprin
and remind her
that she'll be on Broadway someday.

Week 3: One ten-page screenplay, two kids, sick for nine days.

"All That You Think About" , a 10-minute screenplay about how men deal with their thought lives, and how women respond to them.  Click on the linky to read-y, and let me know what you think in the comments below. :)

My goal for next year is to put together a team for the 168project.org competition, where a 10-minute movie is written and produced in a week, based on a Bible verse and a theme of their choosing.  I'm practing writing the 10-minute format.  (Of course, next year I'll have a nanny set up for the week, and  make sure she'll have a flu shot. :) )

To help me practice, I picked a random "verse of the day" from http://www.biblegateway.com/.  Then, I picked a theme that naturally came from that verse.  The verse was Philippians 4:8: ⁸ Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." The theme that I gleaned from that verse was "purity." 

The rest came to me in a bit of a flash---and this is a story about guys and their eyes.  :)

During the times when both of the kids were napping (!!!) I was able to pound out  the beats for this screenplay, then finally got a morning to myself to write it all down.  I have to remember that I'm an outliner.  I do my best work when I build the skeleton for the story first, then know where I'm going with the dialogue and the action, fill in some fun details, and make it sucker-punch the reader/viewer with a twist on the very last page.  Even though the kids, and not the art, were my priority during this week, I was able to do a little creating by working the way I work best.


My kiddos have been so sick. :( Between the snow and the flu, we've been house-bound for two weeks.  The only exception was a day when I had to use a hammer to break up the foot of ice that had encased my tires, so I could take them to the doctor.

When my oldest gets sick, we think, "Ok, this is her time to rest, to calm down, to stop climbing the walls, and she'll be fine in a few days."  She fights that sickness like it's one of her favorite bad guys, and she's back to bouncing around in no time. 

When my youngest gets sick, it's like the whole world comes to an end.  Her fever goes higher, her energy goes lower, and her little body just doesn't want to put up much of a fight. It breaks everyone's hearts.  She was coughing, sputtering, feverish, inconsolable....yeah, it was rough on her. 

Right now, the youngest is sleeping well, has no fever, and has stopped coughing.  We're hoping that the battle is over, but we're staying vigilant, and praying.  Next year, we're getting the flu vaccine.


I have to put in a blurb for Michelle Ward, both here and here.  I have NOT yet used her coaching service, but just her newsletter ( titled, "8 Ways to Get Through Your Job Without Shooting Yourself in the Face" )  and other blog posts gave me the permission I needed to enjoy working in multiple fields at the same time.  I've always felt like "You will be a complete failure if you don't pick one of these fields and STICK WITH IT! You WIMP"!  That's the whole reason why I started this blog: to help me pick one of these fields and....well...grow up.   

Michelle says I don't have to.  Really? REALLY?  AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! (I'm running through the fields, happy, so happy!)  She says that it's perfectly reasonable to carve out a career for yourself that puts all of your talents to work.  She profiles clients who are both chefs and (I kid you not) pet portrait painters. Or nurses and ballet dancers.  Or salespeople and members of the blue man group.  Yeah, I made that last one up. 

So, it's okay to make journals one week, write a screenplay the next, and write spoof comedy songs the next? Seriously? Seriously! I'm doing it. I'm seriously doing it.  I'm loving it. 

And I'm no longer looking at any of these projects with a note of regret: "Yes, I love making art journals, but I'll be wasting my talent for music if I focus on this."  No, I'll get to the music.   I'm just making a mess with acrylics right now.  My guitar needs to stay safely in her case until I clean up the mess.  Paint would be a problem for my screenwriting software. I can do all of this.  I can grow.

Thanks Michelle.  I'm buying time with you, as soon as we pay off the first credit card.  You're worth it. :)

Ok, until I figure out how to post the short screenplay here, just email me at d o t t y j y o u n g at y a h o o dot c o m, and ask to read it.  I'll send it to you in PDF format. :) 

And leave me comments to let me know you were here! Over 250 independent views so far---thanks for joining me on this journey. :)