breakfast of champions...

i ate chocolate cake for second breakfast this morning. i felt i deserved it. nothing like rationalizing a food choice because you're having a challenging day...and it's only 9 a.m.

strong...

"revolucion" by francisco eppens

i bought this postcard in mexico city in march of 1986. i was spending a semester there immersed in a spanish language program offered through my university. i normally don't like images this raw with emotion, but something in this one spoke to me. perhaps it's the third arm rising from the back holding a machete. looks like the arm is part of a militant angel wing.

today i feel like i need to tap into whatever drew me to this image and channel it...fierce warrior, and vehement protector of turf.

w.b.w.

hey, you cool cats, let's listen to sammy and go to a "happening."

click on the image for a uber-big version where you can read the notes and get a real close-up look at the fuzz coming off of the ladies' sweater!

thanks to lesley for this wonderful "new to me" vintage knitting book!

seriously, i'm not that old...

it was 1980. i was a freshman in high school. i got a writing internship at "indianapolis magazine." my job was to gather all of the interesting events for the month of the upcoming issue and write a blurb meant to entice "hoosiers" (hey, that's what those folks from indiana are called) to attend said events. sounds easy enough, doesn't it?

what i didn't know when i took the job was that i had to talk on the phone with each event's organizer to gather the details. we all know how much i adore talking on the phone.

i showed up for many afternoons and pretended at gathering vital information. i looked at the information i had gathered and i thought about what would comprise an interesting two sentence description of the event. i deeply contemplated the concept of "who, what, where, when and how." i wrote two blurbs. i left a pile of information on my counter-top desk near the copier.

and then i stopped showing up.

i used my two month-long failed internship on my resume for the next five years.

and 27 years later i wrote a blog entry about it to clear my conscience.

give and take...

i went to the movies two times this weekend.

on saturday morning kelly and i saw "music and lyrics," the new movie with drew barrymore and hugh grant. first off i want to say that, thankfully, all of the clever things about the movie were not revealed in the previews or the 1,001 commercials i've seen for this movie. drew barrymore is expressive and adorable and, although a tad bit too young for hugh grant, was a good match for him in the movie's setting. and hugh? what can i say, but, "wow!" he has so many great lines, throwaway lines really, that made me laugh right out loud. i loved this movie and it made me feel good, which is always a pleasant bonus.

now, on sunday, the family saw "ghost rider." what can i say? nicolas cage, you can chew up some scenery, so you were the obvious choice for a character that nightly has to endure turning into a flaming motorcycle-riding leather chap-clad skeleton, but outside of that pitch perfect piece of casting, the movie left me wanting, well, an actual movie. and eva mendes must have the hardest working publicist/manager in show business because outside of her prominently displayed breasts, and MAN HANDS, she was having difficulty mastering the nuances of the ex-girlfriend of said flaming bone-dude. she was terrible...pure and simple. the plot? you ask...what with the contract with the devil and the hiding of a bigger contract with the devil and the devil's son wanting the bigger contract because of the sheer power of it all and the other water, air, earth devils causing so many distractions...not to mention a should have long been dead sam elliott character who tried to explain it all, i was not intrigued, impressed or compelled to try to figure it all out. thank goodness it was only four bucks a ticket.

so now, you, dear reader, get to try to figure out which movie was my choice and which was the boys'. i guess it's a no-brainer.

finally...

after making one scarf i decided i was ready for socks.

i got this book. i bought the recommended yarn at a now defunct local yarn store (LYS) and tried the simplest pattern in the book. i cast on no less than eleven times because i didn't yet understand how to knit in the round. but besides that, wow! that pattern was hard; a lot of knit two purl one-ing was going on and i gave up.

then i saw this post and fell in love with the yarn and dear miss alicia said she had made them using a pattern from a martha stewart magazine. but i already had the blue yarn from the cast off (pun intended) vogue socks so i made the ones from the martha stewart mag with the blue. and, never being one to take a hint, i decided to try the vogue pattern again with the new neopolitan yarn. either i was daft or that pattern is poorly written, but i ripped out the entire thing -- even after i turned the heel. cast on with the neopolitan yarn for the martha pattern, finished one sock and then took about eleventy billion years to even cast on for the second one. when i did, this happened. i thought maybe it was a sign. i thought maybe these socks were never meant to be. but i perservered and now look...

the first sock probably took two weeks to knit. the second one took less than a week. but all together it took me almost a year to knit this one measly pair of luscious socks.

and in my copious amounts of free time, i made this for my honey. please welcome "lovebot 86."

reach out...

i don't like to talk on the telephone -- you all know that.

but perhaps you didn't know that i am not so good at keeping in touch, in general. you could send me an e-mail and i will, most likely respond, but there's a good chance, i might not too. if you call me and i don't pick up the phone and you leave a message, i probably won't call you back. it's not that i don't like people, it's that i don't understand why people like me.

okay, that's not entirely true. it's that i like to think i'm humble. and with that humility comes the self-awareness that what i have to say is not all that dang important.

i've read a bit of miss manners in my time and mostly she counsels us to think that the things we have to say and the knowledge we desire to impart on the world are inconsequential compared to what we have to learn from those around us...oh yeah, and that responding to an invitation in a timely fashion is first and foremost on the scale of social decency.

********

i've been absent around here of late due to one or all of the following:

1. i have a wicked viral thing and it is all i can do to get my keester in gear every day and go to work;
2. my co-worker is going to be on maternity leave for at least another three weeks and four attorneys can sure crank out some work!
3. nothing exciting has happened lately...except a bunch of knitting and some finished sewing projects. pictures tomorrow. i know you can't wait.

'til then, please send me an e-mail and i'll probably get back to you, but please don't call me on the phone.

crabby much?

you know you're cranky when the fact that the last person in the copy room forgot to clear their column of used and pulled staples off of the staple remover makes you feel like gritting your teeth and stomping your foot.

whoa nelly...

my co-worker is out on maternity leave for the next six to eight weeks so the number of folks i assist has gone from two to four and a half (someone doesn't need much assisting...they're not 1/2 a person). so my work week has gone from a relatively laid back 40 hours to a whopping 55-60 hours. cuts way down on crafting time...not to mention, cooking, cleaning, sleeping, spending time with family and friends time.

but this weekend i did manage to make it into two of the stores where i sell my wares on consignment. i dropped off a dozen tissue holders and two junk bracelets (think cracker jack prize meets vintage sparkle meets jingle jangle bling) to recycled rose in kirkwood. and then i dropped off ten sets of my fabric cards to subterranean books in university city.

it's an odd feeling turning over your goods to semi-strangers and asking them to care for them and sell them. it's a feeling i can get used to though, as i'm not so good at self-promotion. both of these consignment opportunities came to me through friends who gave me an in and to both of them i'm mighty grateful.

it made me think about a lot of the cliches attached to success...

1) success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration....

2) it's not what you know, it's who you know...

3) you need to be in the right place at the right time...

4) the squeaky wheel gets the grease...

i've worked hard, on and off, at making a go of selling my art, and when it comes right down to it, i like the act of creating a whole helluva lot more than i do selling. i'm pretty much a hermit at heart. although to the outsider, i seem at ease with myself and can speak relatively calmly to most people i meet without sounding like a total moron, inside, i am a blubbering mess. so the interactive part of selling can get me in a real tizzy. i think there are a lot of art patrons that enjoy the interaction with the artist almost as much as they enjoy the art itself. so i don't have the chance to make a connection with those buyers. i do tend to sell more to people who know me or who are at least acquainted with me; i suppose i am missing that boat in a consignment setting, but it's a trade-off i'm willing to make for my mental health.

i ran into a fellow artist at a bead store last week and she asked me if i sold a lot of stuff from my blog. the answer was simple, "nope, never, not once." i've posted pics here and not ever had a nibble. i even made a sister blog that was just about the selling of the stuff and didn't sell one thing. i don't know why. i don't even have a guess. i suppose i could try one of the on-line artist shops for selling. it all seems like a tremendous amount of work (the pictures, the posting, the e-mails with the potential buyers, working out the payments, the packing, the shipping, the waiting to see if the item arrived safely and meets the buyers every expectation, dealing with the returns if the item is not what they expected...on and on..and on). ugh...it could give the queen an ulcer already.

i mean, it all seems entirely overwhelming and i think it would even if i didn't also have a semi-stressful full-time day job.

so i continue to create and make and give and ponder what it all means (i do that quite often, in case you haven't noticed). perhaps all it means is that i have to embrace my own limitations. maybe it means that i am meant to create in obscurity until my death when my son will unearth my trove and unleash them on the world to great acclaim. but most likely what it means is that i will keep on putting time into making treasured items one precious stitch, bead, tiny glued piece of paper at a time and share them with the people i love the most.