Dispatch From LA

cat figurines & new underpants

blustery & cool here in LA.  i headed out of my house early this morning and made my way to school on rainy streets.

caught these small street scenes as the city was waking up.  sipping my coffee.  driving.  window down a couple of inches to let in some drizzle air.

my bossy camera with a mind of its own.  pointed it up and this is what it wanted me to see.  crooked morning.  pale light.  i love this drive.  looking at the other people in their cars.  wondering where they're all going.  the people waiting at the bus stops.  extra 3-day weekend smiles.  hiya!

made the return trip 8 hours later.  all the way back to here.  home.

started building little collages in my little book.

just an excuse to use my little labels.  little little little.

these dancing robots remind me of tina fey & steve carell in date night.  the robot dance scene in the strip joint.

i think this 4x6 is going to be my quickie cut-um-up-and-stick-um-down book.  a good method of rounding up the stray bits of paper spread across my desk.

my sister and i just had our first squealing facetime ipad yack it up.  i think we showed each other everything.  from new underpants to cat figurines to actual cats.

getting shaggy

yard work anyone?  my front yard is getting shaggy!

i attached my tunnel vision goggles to my head bright and early and got crackin' on building my label empire.  the path was fraught with distractions.

emails!  phone calls!  cats! 

doesn't mama moss look spiffy and up for anything in her new mother's day shirt?  2 birthdays and 1 mother's day within the same week.  it was a trifecta of celebration in kansas this weekend.  wish i could've been there.  i imagine sometimes living in the same town as my sisters.  wish they'd hurry up and move here.  then they could mow my lawn!  and make me dinner!  i am the youngest child!  i have needs that must be met!

alas and alack i stayed at moss cottage under the big shady umbrella out back and put tape in my old ledger. 

don't feel too sorry for me though.  it was fun!

i marveled at how the old pages were held together with 90 year old tape.  tiny tears patched up.  i did the same thing.

with brighter tape.

i hope someone patches me up with bright tape when i get old.

also, because it seemed quite necessary and important, and also because i was curious, i painted on some of the pages.  they held up just fine.

this is going to be my Fast Fool Around book.  as in do whatever i want and try stuff out.  today i tried out some watercolor brush pens on a few of the pages {not seen here}.  a few splishy splashies and i was done.  super fast.  versus my Slow Fool Around book.  which is my regular visual journal.  FFA & SFA.

it's sunday!  i have 2 hours left to fool around on my ipad, make a fruit smoothie, and watch t.v.  OH BOY!

p.s.  this post has over 10 exclamation marks in it!  sorry!

happy birthday sister!!!!

i am sitting here sipping spicy christmas coffee.  mmmmm

getting ready to sit down at the art table and put the finishing touches on  my little project.  handpainted labels if you hadn't already guessed.  

it's gonna be a late night here at moss cottage.  music's on.  night sounds are drifting in the open windows.  paint & ink are flying.

i've been in the deep end of the photoshop pool ever since i got CS5.  these little frames are called:  real simple shaped masks by jen allyson.  i got them a little while ago, but hadn't used them.  don't know if they're still available or not, but they're super easy to use.  i added the thin grey outline.

happy friday.  i can't say it enough.  it never gets old.

xo

p.s.  today is my sister's birthday!!!!  monday is my other sister's birthday.  may babies.

sunday evening

a grand day.  made grander when my neighbor hollered over from her yard to see if i wanted her to go pick us up a stack of carne asada tacos from the truck down the street.  huh?  hello.  do bears poo in the woods?  OF COURSE i want that.  yes!  make that hells yes!

while she was out hunting and gathering i cleaned up the outdoor studio and got everything spiffied up and brought inside.

apparently i am obsessed with forks & spoons.  you eat with them.  so figuring out why is not really not too big of a mental leap.   art, furry animals, sunshine, a nice carne asada taco with a double corn tortilla stuffed with meat, onion, cilantro, lemon juice, dash of salt.  these are the things the cat lady up at moss cottage digs.

now it's evening and i'm getting ready to take ipad to the couch and watch more videos from lynda.com.  i highly recommend if you have any techy nerdy genes and enjoy gobs of information about how your new CS5 (or other software) works.  i'm learning so many things i don't know if i can fit them all in my nutcracker.

i am a self- taught photoshopper for many moons.  there are major gaps in my learning core.  but now i'm patching them all up thanks to lynda.com.  they aren't paying me a red cent to say that, but i appreciate good business with good customer service.  when i find a place that treats me right i like to crow about it.  when i find a place that stinks, i slash tires .

~

i am always grateful for the nice people who pop in on this blog to say hi from time to time...like ellen from growing gills.  she sent me the coolest email about william stafford.  i posted his poem yesterday.  anyway...she gave me permission to share:

Life moves in mysterious ways!

When I was in high school in Honolulu, I had an English teacher who opened up the world of poetry to me. Miss Durbin was her name. She was rather formidable, but poetry ran in her veins and she planted the seed of poetry love in my little brain.

 Now, comes the amazing part. I left home in 1960 (yes, I am that old) to go to school in Portland, Oregon...Lewis and Clark College to be exact. One of my professors in Humanities was none other than William Stafford. Oh, how I loved that gentle, gentle man.

Oh, Mary Ann, what a gift. I can still see him. He wore blue chambray work shirts, unassuming ties, and baggy pants. Soft spoken, calm and reassuring, that was William Stafford. I think that I have all of his books of poetry and some of Kim Stafford, his son.

If we are at all fortunate in life, we have tucked away in our hearts and memories a small number of precious jewels. The jewel that is Dr. Stafford shines brightly for me. 

It is actually sunshiny today here where gills grow by leaps and bounds with the relentless mizzle that is spring in my patch of Oregon. I am picturing you outside of Moss Cottage, surrounded by all the beautiful flowers and the cat posse.

Oh, the joy of it all. 

 

p.s.  kim baxley your passwords were sent and returned.  twice.  i have a carrier pigeon if that would be better for you...?  just let me know.

the white sky

The White Sky by William Stafford

Many things in the world have
already happened. You can
go back and tell about them.
They are part of what we
own as we speed along
through the white sky.

But many things in the world
haven't yet happened. You help
them by thinking and writing and acting.
Where they begin, you greet them
or stop them. You come along
and sustain the new things.

Once, in the white sky there was
a beginning, and I happened to notice
and almost glimpsed what to do.
But now I have come far
to here, and it is away back there.
Some days, I think about it.

sometimes i like to swallow poems whole.  but that one i kept going back to nibble at it.  i've featured poems of william stafford here before.  they're all good.  edible even.

like the epis blooming out back.

even the ones that are wilted are still luscious.

this week i got some ultra inexpensive acrylic craft paints from the martha stewart satin line.  lots of pretty colors!  they have a matte finish when dry which is kind of a nice change.  the periwinkle purple color is one of my usual liquitex brand paints. 

 i started this visual journal below in january 2011.  i just have a few pages left.  it's been left alone to fend for itself for months at a time while i was off galavanting with other lovers.  like my travel journals or sketchbook or inspiration journal.  i also have a stack of wood panels out in the garage i've been wanting to dig into, but that means i would have to drop everything else for awhile.  NO CAN DO.

i saw this quote today and it spoke to me.  screamed at me actually.  i took notice and wanted to share.

my kettle wants to boil

 

sunday...will be over for me in 4 hours.  i crammed a lot into the last 48 hours and i'm feeling good about it.

lots of work on a special project.

which.  if truth be told, may delight you much less than it delights me.

we'll just have to see about that!

i stayed outside from morning until about 20 minutes ago.  while i waited for special project things to dry i sloshed paint around in the visual journal.

at times i feel like i don't have enough time to work uninterrupted for long stretches of time.  i need long periods of intense creativity to get big ideas out of the head and into the world.  day jobs, no matter how fulfilling, prevent full throttle art making.  the creative kettle is hot, but it can't reach the boiling point when you're nursing a day job.

i find this frustrating.  but i make do.  we all do.

 sometimes though i take long delicious mental journeys to a world called early retirement.

 and imagine a life that revolves around full-time art making.

i wonder dear reader, what sort of mental journeys you go on?  what other sort of lives are being imagined inside the cocoon of your heart?

~

yes i am!

i finally found the app that instagramers use to make the little mosaics.

!!!

and it has a corner rounder.  huh?  NO WAY!  yes way.  it's true.

picframe.  you might want it.

i tried a few others but didn't like...

 i thought this video was d e l i c i o u s.

 lisa bengtsson 

 

tomorrow is sunday and i am going outside first thing and staying out all day.  yes i am! 

if you pop over for an impromtu visit you better knock on the back gate.  cause that's where i'll be!

you might be put to work clearing brush up on the hill in back.  you don't care do you?

somehow i made it all the way to here.

home sweet home.

watermelon jellybeans with a sherbet chaser

you know how when you were a kid and your ma made meatloaf with bread or crackers to stretch it out?  well this post is kind of like a meatloaf.  it started the other day with the close-ups of these pages.  and now i'm stretching that right out into today.

i'm clever like that.  post stretching.  i'm a post stretcher.  

as i mentioned in the previous post, pam started the page on right above and i finished it.  that was fun and i want to do it again.

these are the very last pages in this visual journal.  i decided they would all be buttered with creamy layers of pink, orange, pink, pink, and some yellow.  i wanted to take advantage of all the leftover paint in the lasagna pan.

see those chalky grey circles up above?  they make me ecstatic.  when i was painting them i think i was thinking of donuts.  raspberry filled yeasty donuts with a thick layer of lavender icing on top.  or.

maybe i just thought of that a second ago.

i sort of wish everything didn't remind me of food.

in my next life i'm going to come back as a naturally thin vegan person who does not think of orange marmalade bisquits while she smears orange paint on her pages.

the thought of watermelon jelly beans with an orange sherbert chaser will never cross my mind.

ever. not even once.

guess what?  i found a super cool corner-rounding action and it's FREE.  FREE!!!

you want it?  okay.

go HERE to the coffeeshop and get it.  

isn't it nice to have such insanely helpful people floating around in the blogosphere?  not me.  i mean the corner rounding action maker.

playing checkers & knitting sweaters

this morning i reported for duty at yesterday's journal center for a playdate with myself.  i like my new outdoor studio a lot.  a larger than normal troop of birds kept me company.  hummingbirds, red-headed finches, sparrows, crows, and hawks.  everyone was doing fly-bys.  chortling, twittering, cackling, beeping.  a duck might've flown over and quacked.  i can't be sure.

i was smack dab in the center of my pink & orange happy place.

here are a few snippets.

pam started the background of the one below and i finished it today.

i haven't sat for long stretches in my big visual journal in quite awhile.

gwen (a blog reader) sent me an email about the big red farmhouse she and her posse of art girlfriends used to gather at up in the pacific northwest.  doesn't that sound nice?  they still meet 3-4 times a year.

i'm pretty sure if kim jong-un,  bashar al-assad,  mahmoud ahmadinejad, barak obama, gathered at a big red farmhouse and played checkers or knit sweaters, crocheted rocks, or drew portraits of each other our world would be way less tense.  i'm gonna suggest it.    

i found the stars poem!

tomorrow!

she brought lasagne!

cute pam showed up with her paint in a giant lasagne pan.  i thought she brought snacks.  but no!  it was fun lollipop colored paints.  muffin tins with big creamy smooshes of lovely & amazing color.  i didn't know whether to grab a spoon or a paint brush.

sigh.  shiver. smile.

i was dumbstruck.

and terribly excited.

how good it is to partake in art communion with a friend!  i don't do it often enough.  of course if we could keep our traps shut for longer than 30 seconds at a time we might've gotten a lot more pages done.  yack yack yack.    yadda yadda blah blah.  i enjoyed every minute.  it was dark when she climbed back into her chariot and headed home.

i didn't take NEARLY enough photos.   too busy laughing and painting kooky portraits of each other.  DO NOT underestimate the amount of rip roaring fun you can have (without smoking any dope) doing this.

a day of enchantment.

through & through.

i can't wait to get back into my big visual journal tomorrow and move more of that creamy bright paint around the pages.

torn between 2 lovers

okay.  back to sketchbook subject no. 10.  yeah, him.  

after trying to draw him from the teeny tiny cabinet card...i scanned and then drew while looking at the screen.  much easier!

i decided to do this in my visual journal.  i've been neglecting it since i began my love affair with my sketchbook.

torn between 2 lovers.  feeling like a fool.  loving both of you is breaking all the rules....

you can sing along if you want!

of course my cabinet card man looks nothing like his photo.  but isn't that silly after all?  trying to get your portrait to LOOK like who you are drawing.

HELLO.  that's what cameras are for.

my life is made richer by all my crazy magical thinking and faulty logic. 

whaddayagonnado?

the moral of this story:  when the voices talk...you better listen up!

it is not november

Sent from my iPad

brave new world

painted over existing visual journal page using SKETCHBOOK XPRESS app. the only part left of the original is the bit of yellow rose wallpaper. sort of feel like I have discovered another world. utterly infatuated. mmmmmm. you can't tell can you?
keep sharing things with me I am v.v. curious. the links are leading me to new places...

Sent from my iPad

larry the handyman

huh?  oh nothing.  just playing in my visual journal.  which, as you may have noticed has practically no writing lately.  i keep a written journal so my visual journal is more like a big book of collage.  i do happen to love text and words as design elements, but lately i don't have any of those either.  oh well.  whatever blows your skirt up.  i mean my skirt.  except i don't wear skirts.  but you get the idea.

wyatt earp doesn't care what i do inside my visual journal as long as it doesn't make noise and disturb his beauty rest.

turns out the green planter that smashed to the ground didn't actually smash.   how a big ceramic pot can fall several feet down onto a flagstone paver and not get so much as a crack is a mystery that shall remain unsolved.  and uninvestigated.  a cold case.

so, that's all to say... i only had to replace one pot.  

 handyman larry came over and fixed the roof.  he also decided my new pot should be tied to the pergola since more wind is in the forecast.  good idea!  

this is officially the first photo (accidental) i took with my new wifi ipad, which arrived from china today!  here i am wearing stunned befuddled cray cray face.  i used my new instagram app to apply a filter.  then i spent about 25 minutes trying to figure out how to make my instagram account private.  i just like the filters, not all the social media jazz.  i also got penultimate, luminance, kindle, photo toaster jr., flipboard, ibooks, and kobo.

ipad school is over for the night.  well except for when i read about the short history of tractors in ukranian on my kindle app later.

if there are any can't-live-without ipad apps i know you'll let me know.  i want to get the one that you hold up to the night sky and it tells you which constellation is above you.

a jumble of pages

i like seeing all of my recent pages together.  they're like a map, showing me where i've been and which direction i'm headed next.  my very own paint splattered GPS that says, "you are here."  and then...

"reconfiguring."  i love getting found.  and then lost again!

that bottom right page doesn't exist anymore.  i covered it up.  wish i hadn't.  but that's the fun of working things out in a book format.  a big container to hold your past impulses. 

sara berry made this book in full tilt boogie

  here's what's going on sale and staying on sale from december 1st - december 31st

FULL TILT BOOGIE

STENCILRY

clickity clack for more info!

things happened

stacks of vintage photos sitting around.  and 2 perfectly good rolls of pink & orange washi tape.  things happened.

when i work in my visual journal i hate to waste paint so i usually swipe it on a blank page.  sometimes i don't change it much, other times it becomes something else entirely.

before

after

mostly it's not so much how the page comes out as how i feel while i'm doing it.  i bet you know what i mean.  isn't the ACT of creating a wonder?  it always feels to me like my brain starts running on a different frequency.  bzzzzzzzzz

i've been riveted to my inbox reading your comments and emails about the ipad.  thanks for all the links!  i was pretty much sold when i went HERE.  isn't that cool?  isn't that fun?  don't you wanna do it?  me too! 

maybe you also want to know how to make rounded corners on your photos that you post to your blog...or not.  if so, here's one way how in photoshop cs:

1.  use the rounded rectangle tool to create the shape (radius 120 px)

2.  from the layers palatte/window make the opacity 0% then select shape 1

3.  click on PATHS in the layers window

4. click on arrow on the right and scroll to MAKE SELECTION

5.  now click back on LAYERS and select the background 

6.  SELECT -> inverse

7.  EDIT -> clear

8.  FLATTEN -> voila!

sensible & senseless

we're getting reacquainted, visual journal no. 12 and i.  bonding.  making playdates and keeping them. 

do you have an ipad 2?  have you blogged with it?  traveled with it?  please share.  since i have a laptop i've resisted the urge to plunk down the cash for an ipad, but it's getting harder to resist.  my sensible half doesn't think it's justified.  my senseless half is in a trance.

my inner child is having a party with the pink washi tape.  she can't help it.  no really.  she can't.

i saw this really neato video on one of your blogs a couple of weeks ago, but the old cogs in my memory wheel seem to be stuck and i can't remember where!  

anyway i'd never heard of a murmuration before.  incredible.

 

sci-fi tween page turner

i've been dabbling in my handmade "smash" slash inspiration book which i haven't touched since summer (!)

and also taping down some arrangements that please me in my visual journal.  there's a BIG 4-day weekend in a turkey costume looming ahead for the u.s.a. and i am taking my leisure studies seriously.

thank you for those awesome book recommendations!  some i've read, some i've heard of, and plenty were brand-new-to-me books.  i needed a quick fix so i started {and finished} DIVERGENT.  it's a sci-fi tween page-turner.  sort of the girl with the dragon tatoo meets harry potter in a futuristic mad max-esque thunder dome. um.  sort of.

 now i'm starting emily, alone.  i like what the washington post wrote about it, "addresses the undiscovered country of being a senior."   plus the huffington post said, "a book of quiet yet stunning beauty".  i'll have 2 please.  thank you.

i also downloaded plenty of your recommendations {samples} onto my kindle to try on for size.  will report back with my findings!

oh hi!

i'm swatting ideas back and forth inside my head about the kind of travel journal i want to make for san cristobal.  i'm thinking something different.  something painted ahead of time with big blank spaces left to write.  something that's sturdy of course.  in case i get chased by bandits on the highway between tuxtla gutierrez and san cristobal.  you know...and it gets crushed.  while i'm kneeling on the backseat trying to shoot out the bad guys tires.  from the shot-out back windshield of the cab.  

enough of my made-for-tv movie plot, i have bigger fish to fry with you.  for instance this line from  STATE OF WONDER that made me go ha ha ha for quite a long time earlier this evening.

if you don't have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.

playdates

I miss you Ojai.  I really really do.  On Saturday night the moon rose over the eastern ridge and shone down on the cabin and creek.  It was breezy.  The leaves were glittering with silver light and the water was like mercury.  I stood and gazed for a very long time just outside the porch.  Soaking up the very last of my magical woodsy experience.  

Then I came inside, consulted my school calendar and booked my return trip in February.  I'm so happy to have found someplace this special within a couple hours drive of LA.  My kind hosts were nice enough to let me stay as long as I wanted on Sunday, but alas, I had to get home.  

Zip me out a private email if you want the details of the little cabin in the big woods.  I'm happy to share!

p.s.  the suspension bridge in the last post is only for emergencies (flooding)  so I couldn't walk across it, but it looks very sturdy!

Making playdates with myself in my visual journal.  Feels good.

Avoidance Tactics

I was thinking Paris would be cold and grey the entire time.  The trees still bare.  But my sister sent me HERE and I got excited by those blossoms.

I expect it will be grey & damp, but since we don't get enough cool here in LA I won't mind a gentle nip of winter.

"du" below should be "des"  thank you French speaking readers!

Oy muchachos I have a million things to do! Suitcases don't pack themselves.  A playmate (not from the playboy mansion from orange county!) is coming to visit with her Rome travel journals and camera tomorrow.  We're going on a stairway walk and for a drive through the gleaming metropolis. Full tilt boogie. Till the very last day of my 45 day vacation.  Yes siree.

Where I Get Out My Sewn Paper Crack Pipe And Take A Big Hit

So I went HERE and saw one of my favorite crafty gangster's sewn valentines and then I found HIM and basically I got all excited and decided I needed some to do some of this:

and then I did this:

and this:

which led to this:

and in between all that I went to my visual journal and did this:

and this:

Vacation induced narcotic bliss.  It's good.  You want some.  You want some NOW.

Oh and if you plunk down 330 pennies you could check out THIS.     Because  there's some pretty cool stuff inside including boats made out of milk cartons that you could make with the little punks in your life.  Plus lots of blog layout ideas.  Online magazines are so full of those.

Where I Am Reminded Of Many Things

Let's face it, I'm not known for my sartorial splendor, but I so enjoyed recently watching Scott Schumann taking photos on the mean streets of NYC.  If you like looking at the world through the eye of your camera you might dig that video as much as I did.  Which reminds me of a blog I added some time ago to my roll, Advanced Style.  Which, I neglected to mention, but which is very worth your time.   And that reminds me of another photographer I stumbled across this week somewhere which led me to John Maloof's blog:   Vivian Maier -  the CBS video segment there is fascinating.

Whew.  And all of that reminds me that Wyatt and I are getting ready to tuck in early with a book.   A book I'm reading thanks to Jeanne (!) from snowy Kansas.  C'est la Vie by Suzy Gershman.  That I got for exactly 1 cent on Amazon used.  It isn't good in the same way Dracula is good of course.  Which is to say, I don't want to sleep with a glow in the dark crucifix by my bed or sleep with a garlic necklace on...but I'm certainly enjoying it!  

Happy Friday.

just remembered.  and nothing reminded me!  forgot to show you THIS.  click on WATCH THE FILM to peek into this super cool studio!

p.s.  that reminded me of THIS...

Hello