Thing-a-day.com

I wrote about being gentle with myself under adversity a while ago, so I have been doing anything that I thought they would be uplifting emotionally. I was wrong though.

Indulgence has a hint of regret, or guilty to it when you use it, doesn’t it?

I did enjoy going to a ballet, orchestra, fancy dinners, but part of me was saying, ‘is this really what you are supposed to do?’

I tried not to listen to the voice, thinking, why not? I am not going into debt or anything. What is wrong with being indulgent as I am feeling like crap?

Because of the sense of guilt, I must say I didn’t completely embrace joy of what I love to do, which led me on a binge of all those things I did. I wasn’t fully satisfied with them, so I had to do more, more and more, which made me feel more insecure, worried and crappy.

The voice is mine, but this is what my mother always said to me when I was growing up.

‘You should save your money. Keep your room clean. Don’t be like that,’ and so on and on, and on.

In a way, my mother did a great job to ingrain what she thought I should be doing.

I am a grown-up woman now and I want to live my life. Not hers.

This is quite liberating. I can stand on my feet. Now, I wait for the time to make actions to pursue my dreams, which I neglected for too long.

Today I did a billion things, but most importantly, I finished the silhouette notecards for my daughter’s thank you notes! I printed them with a gocco. I think they came out quite smashing. The blue is very brilliant in the real world (I took this photo in the dark).

I also started my next project - a personalized shrinky dink bracelet for a dear friend.

My theme for this week is childhood. Shrinky Dinks were very popular when I was a tot, although I never really got into them because you didn’t draw your own pictures and I did not have much use for the little plastic figures. But I have seen the light. I was inspired by a project in Super Crafty. This book taught me how to make my own shrinky dink beads, but instead of using their images, I decided to use my own.

I have a friend who makes me and my family the coolest knit jewelry, toys, bibs, and dishcloths. (check out her stuff at reine.etsy.com). So I wanted to make her something.

She loves typography so I made shrinky dink “beads” with beautiful lettering. I printed out the images onto shrink plastic (the images came from Fancy Alphabets, then I colored in the pictures with colored pencils and cut 2 inch circles. I punched the holes and then baked! I then coated the front with clear nailpolish to preserve the color. Here are the “beads” as they lay out drying:

I hope to assemble the bracelet tomorrow.

A few doodles and sketches and class assignments in progress over the last few days.

One is the “bad” childhood memory, the start of my career as an outlaw bandita.  I musta been 3 or 4 and saw my brother with candy in the store. So I reached up and grabbed some gum off the shelf. I apparently didn’t know about the whole ‘buying’ concept, which turned out to be a problem when my mom discovered the gum in my fat little fist about to go into my contented face. I think I had to go in and hand it back. It wasn’t so bad, really, but I remember the whole thing came as quite a surprise to me, and an unpleasant one. Mostly, I chose this topic because I wanted to google pictures of Piggly Wiggly stores. Wish I’d had time to do their logo and lettering justice.

Other sketches are a kaiser roll (see day 4) and idea generation sketches for a book review illustration assignment…the book is about horse races, and involves lots of gambling, addiction, cheating, superstition (apparently nuns in parking lots are bad omens) and racetrack weirdos

.

here you got the secret view into the calendar of girl. she’s 15 now, and she’s going to live her live in full. someday, she will be a lawyer, doc or journalist or something and noone will care what she did back then. for today, I captured her life for a week.