Mermaids and Mamas!

I’ve finally had a chance to go through all the Mermaids and Mamas pictures! We had such a fabulous time and have fabulous pictures to show for it! I’ve uploaded them all to a private Flickr group for now until I get the Mamas permission to share more. For now, here are a few to give you a little peek into our weekend: my Livvie enjoying a little hula hoop action, the perfectly wonderful mermaid wand Wyanne made, and part of our group...the last of the gang that stayed until the bitter end and helped me clean up!

I was so pleased with how everything came together! The girls were the perfect hostesses, showing everyone around as they checked in and helping them get settled in, and DH was the perfect helper, taking care of all the meals for us. We started out with our love letter envelopes (a project I brought from my big kid retreats) and then created our journals. From there it was on to some painting! We created painted initials, magic mermaid wands and painted rocks, all embellished with a variety of embellishments, everything from buttons to stickers to little wooden letters to paper and silk flowers. Lots of glue gun action! We also created pendants and bracelets, hair clips, a treasure box to keep them all in, and fairies to watch over all us. Mixed in between the projects we had hula hoop contests and bubble blowing parades, some parachute fun, and a dress up dance party Saturday night with a few challenging games of musical chairs. Some of those girls are fierce competitors!

All in all, it was simply wonderful. The Mamas gave me great feedback and the Mermaids (and the Mamas!) all had a ball. Girls enjoying being girls…both the big girls and the little girls. We played, we talked, we bonded, and we played some more (we didn’t sleep very much). It was magical. And it hope is was the first of many more to come!

p.s. Don't forget I'm up as a guest curator on CrescenDoh all this week! I share different links every day and tell my Art Saves story.

p.s.s. I currently have a very happy kitty sitting in my lap purring. I don't think I shared with you here that our sweet little Tink has been off on an adventure for the past two and a half weeks. I had almost given up hope. Then just as I was getting ready to come upstairs and write this post, something told me to peek out the front door and there she was! She's pretty skinny and very meowy, but otherwise appears to be in good health! I know the girls will be so excited when they wake up in the morning and she's here. Welcome home, Tinkster!

Mermaids and Mamas and More

I can’t believe it’s been a week since I’ve posted! We’ve been on Spring Break this past week week, so the girls and I have been staying busy. We spent Monday being totally lazy, lounging around in our pj’s all day…we needed that after Easter Day down at the lake! Tuesday, we spent the day up in Fernandina browsing the galleries and shops and going to the beach, and then Wednesday we went to the Zoo with friends. Thursday and Friday, the girls had Daddy time since I had to travel over to Tallahassee for some legislative meetings.

This weekend, I've gotten back to work! Yesterday I created new pillow covers for my back porch swing and had a genius moment I'll share with you later this week. I still need to photograph them! I’ve also been working on my Picture Spring assignments, so I’ll share more of those with you soon. I’ve started getting caught up on jewelry photography as well as some custom orders, so all in all, we’ve been hopping around here. I'll share some new jewelry with you later this week too.

Lastly, I’ve been working on my latest retreat project, and that's what I wanted to share with you today. Carmen and I set an April 1 make or break date for Art and Dreams Bound. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the amount of registrations we needed to make the retreat a go for this time around, but we aren’t giving up! Carmen is a very talented artist and, having experienced one of her online classes, I know she's an excellent instructor. I fully believe we had a great offering; I guess the timing just wasn't right, and we probably need to invest a little more into advertising. Lessons learned! We’ll try again another time!

Since I already had the retreat center reserved, I decided to implement my Plan B. I mentioned a while back that I’ve been taking an online course with McCabe Russell called Mermaid Warriors. It’s been a great course, and we've had some awesome discussions centered around working with young girls and all that comes with that...confidence issues, self-esteem issues, mean girls at school, etc. I’m adding some great ideas to my skill set and quickly seeing how I can take what I’ve already been doing for years—experiential education retreat planning and facilitation—and working in art. To that end, Mermaids and Mamas Artful Adventure is ready to roll! I’m very excited about this project and I hope it will be the first of many more to come. Please hop on over and read more about it here. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you have four-to-nine-year-old girls in your lives, just the first age group I'll be working with, I hope you’ll consider joining us!

An Artful Journey: Day 5, The Journey Home

I’m a few days behind in posting about my last day of my Artful Journey trip. It’s been a busy week! Monday was a great wrap up to a great weekend. Leah and I lingered over breakfast not wanting to leave and shared one last hug before we left. I had some time to kill before I had to be at the airport, so she suggested I go into Santa Cruz.

What a nice little end of trip bonus that was! The boardwalk was utterly charming in a Kelly explosion of color kind of way. Leah must have known I’d love it. And I guess it’s true. If I was THAT close, I had to at least dip my toes in the Pacific Ocean (cold….February cold…).

The boardwalk wasn’t officially open but I managed to sweet talk my way in to take some pictures. I absolutely fell in love with the swing and took several dozen pictures of it. The detail on it was just extraordinary.

I loved how all the rides and the old fashioned ticket booths and the signage there meshed into one big happy color scheme. I’d love to bring the family back here to see this. My girls would absolutely D-I-E for it, as they love to say. :-)

I gathered a handful of shells and some sea glass I found and put them in my coat pocket. I had forgotten about them when I went through airport security, but luckily they let me keep them. Seaweed and all! I have them all in a little glass jar now here at home.

I have to say God must have been watching out for me on my flight home. On the San Jose to Vegas leg, the flight was overbooked and the crew was looking for volunteers to step off. One of the volunteers just happened to be in a choice seat on the first row and stood up just before I got there. Score! Leg room! That flight was late taking off, so I barely made my connecting flight (and I mean barely as in I was the second to last person to board the plane on this very full flight.) Yet, there again…three rows in was an aisle seat, next to a four-year-old little girl and her mom. A motherhood bonus! I’m quite certain most everyone else walked by that seat because they didn’t want to sit next to a young child for four hours on a plane. Fine with me! I have twin six-year-olds! The little girl’s name was Ava, and coincidently enough, her mother’s name was Kelly. Early into the flight, Kelly and Ava traded seats so Kelly and I were sitting next to each other, and we talked the entire flight home. Ava was a complete angel, as was Kelly. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with her, and to top off a wonderful trip, she even gave me a ride home so I didn’t have to call a cab! How sweet was that!?! We’ve exchanged cards so I hope we’ll get together with our girls soon.

Now that I’ve been home for a little over a week, I’ve had a little more time to reflect back on this whole experience, and I’ve really enjoyed reliving every moment as I’ve shared it all here with you. This experience truly did change my life. That may sound a bit corny or cliché, but that’s the only way to explain it. When I got home, I immediately told DH that I will be going back, and I’d love for him and the girls to come too. I’ve been wanting to make some changes in my life for a while now, and this experience really crystallized that for me. I have a clearer focus on what’s most important, and I’m working on ways to more integrally combine my two biggest loves…my family and my creativity. Life’s too short to spend it doing something that doesn’t totally fill your soul to the brim, right?

An Artful Journey: Day 4, When Magic Happened

Day 4 was the day it all came together. I finished all the collage and stamp work on the tissue and molding paste pages the night before, and then on Sunday decided I’d make some smaller pages with lightly painted duck cloth to go in between. DJ put beautiful fabric and lace mixed in with her book, but since I went in a completely different, kinda funky, direction, I thought the duck cloth would be more fitting for mine. We brought the duck cloth to make our covers with, so I had a little to spare (and then borrowed a little more from Leah!).


While my duck cloth pages were drying, I got to work at the sewing machine. Thank you to the four wonderful ladies who brought their sewing machines to share! Funny how this happened, really. I hadn’t really thought much about adding stitching to my pages, but once I put down the first row of stitches, I was hooked, and nearly every page ended up with some sort of stitching embellishment on it, including my name badge! I learned how to sew in high school and have always played around with various sewing projects, from pillows to funky purses, even a few cute skirts (yet I could never master zippers), but I’ve never sewn on paper before! What fun!

I had fun with the eyelash yarn, sewing around it to tack it down in various places. And I sewed on playing cards that I found at the reNEWables table (Cindy’s fab idea of how to recycle your un-needed stash for others), as well as a fortune-telling card Davi gave me, some tags I made, postcards I pulled from my vintage postcard stash, and all sorts of other goodies. And that little bit of awesomeness on the side of this page was from a great collage pack DJ and Cindy put together.

After dinner, we had show and tell. Each class brought their work to the big assembly hall and had several tables on which to display their work. Here’s Davi with her Chunky Funky Coffee Table book she made in Kelly Rae and Mati Rose’s class.

And here’s one of Ann’s pages from her book, same class.

And here are some of the awesome papers made in Albie’s class. I REALLY want to take one of Albie’s classes sometime too. See those colors? Kelly colors, aren’t they?! Albie also incorporated bookmaking into her class, turning those luscious papers in book covers.

Before the show and tell broke, each of the instructors addressed the full group and talked about her class. It was so wonderful. There were tears, there were giggles, there were belly laughs, and there were tons of hugs and shared inspiration as we all reveled in what we had accomplished through the help of these wonderful teachers.

Following the show and tell, Leah and I and few others went back to the classroom for one last jam session on our books. Robin-Marie had just recently purchased this fun new camera which took mini Polariods. Pretty neat huh? You can see that the tables behind me had already been vacated, but I was determined to finish and told DJ as much.

After a while, it was down to just Leah and me. When DJ popped in to check on us, she saw that I was getting close to done and went up to her room to get her camera. When she came back down, the three of us finished my book together. It truly was a magical moment, and I have tears in my eyes as I write this. I have never felt so much support and so much caring around me being able to accomplish something. Truly, I had no idea that I could do something like this, and DJ helped me see that I was capable of so much more than I ever realized I was. It was after 11pm by this point and from the quietness around us, I’m pretty sure the three of us were the only ones left in any of the classrooms. It had been a very long, very exhausting, but amazingly inspirational four days.


And that’s when DJ said we had to dance on the tables! So dance we did! At 11:30pm Sunday night, Leah and I climbed up on the tables and danced with my finished book while DJ laughed and took pictures. It’s a moment I’ll never forget, and I am forever grateful to Leah and DJ for sharing it with me.

You’d think that was it for the night, right? Oh no, sweet friend. After DJ headed to bed and Leah and I packed everything up, we started walking back to our cottage. It was near midnight by then, and it was cold and misty with fog coming in. We were quietly talking about our adventure when Leah stopped and grabbed my shoulder. Then she pointed, and there I saw them: nearly 10 deer watching us from just yards away in the mist. They looked like deer angels, really, all shrouded in mist and fog. They just stood quietly; we just stood quietly, neither wanting to move and break the moment. Finally, one of them turned and started walking away, so as they moved on, so did we, quietly awestruck. Awestruck from everything we had just experienced…the art making, the friendship making, the memory making, all wrapped in one final, magical night. This day truly changed my life, though I didn’t realize how much until I got home and really started processing everything that I’d experienced. Just like magic.

An Artful Journey: Day 3, With a Little Luck

After a dreary day Friday, we got a little sunshine on Saturday. I shared lots of flower pictures with you on Day 1, but each day I was more amazed at the landscape around the center. Those mountains are just magical. Even in sunny Florida, my flowers had all died, but look at this little beauty. They seem to have really temperate weather here in this area. Seems like the perfect climate!
Day 3 was a turning point for me. Thankfully, this little four leaf clover appeared in my hand because I really needed it! In the morning, DJ demonstrated her photo painting technique. She made it look so easy, but I still had that nagging fear that I was not going to be able to do it. I’m just not comfortable with a paint brush for some reason. I prefer to move paint around with my fingers! I started working on one and then another and just wasn’t happy with either one. I talked with DJ about it, and she encouraged me and just suggested that I work on the rest of my pages in the meantime and she’d help me with my painting first thing Sunday morning. The painting was to be the cover of our book.
After lunch that four leaf clover popped up, and I had a light bulb moment. No, I wasn’t really comfortable with a paint brush, but I loved my water soluble crayons and pencils! I thought about that and went in a totally different direction. Away went the detail paint brushes and out came the crayons! I was so glad I brought them! The focus was this page is actually a photograph that I altered. It’s a Boca Grande sunset that I took my water soluble crayons to! I added a little bit of molding paste around it (love that stuff!) to blend it in and scribbled in it some for kicks. From that point, I really took off and everything started coming together, so much so that I didn’t want to stop! I was a woman on a mission! Thankfully, so was Leah, and the two of us stayed up working on our books until 12:30am! I think we were punch drunk by the end of the night, but we had such a great time together. I finished all the collage and stamp work on my tissue paper pages and my molding paste pages Saturday night.
This page has several bits of significance worked in. The background is one of my molding paste collage pages, and I just really didn’t care for it. Leah took a look at it and give me a couple ideas that we then worked through together. The red strip was her idea and it really lit up the page. The fabric here is also meaningful. One the new friends I made there is Ann. After dinner on Saturday, Ann, Davi, Dorothy and I walked around to each other’s classes and shared our work. It was so fun to see what everyone else was doing! Ann gave me that scrap of fabric and asked me to include it in my book. Leah and I had the same light bulb go off at the same moment to sew it in and make pockets. I still need to do something with those tags in the pockets, and I’m planning to do something in honor of Ann and Leah on them.
This page is also special. The “Life Unscripted” tag on the bottom is from Davielle Huffman, my apron swap pal. She signed it on the back. As I mentioned yesterday, I also have some rickrack in my book from Davi and a cool card as well. I just adore her. We hooked up prior to the retreat on Facebook and really clicked. She is so sweet and I really wanted to include a couple pieces of her in my book! The paper collage strips were done with some of Albie’s papers I bought at vendor night.
And last for today, here’s another of my molding paste pages. I just love the colors on this one. I use aqua and brown combos in my jewelry designs a lot as well and love them together. This page is definitely perfect for some journaling!

Stay tuned for tomorrow! Day 4 is dancing on the tables day!

An Artful Journey: Day 2, Artful Abundance!

Day 2 of the trip was Day 1 of the class. DJ is such an incredible teacher and shared so many different techniques. She’s middle left here in the yellow vest. I learned so much, it truly was overwhelming at times! We started out painting tissue paper with a mixture of acrylic paint and watered down matte medium. It was here I learned that matte medium and gel medium (in all its various forms) are not the same thing! There are so many ‘mediums’ that it was hard to keep up at times!

Above is a picture of some of my painted tissue papers. DJ showed us how to cut up smaller pieces of tissue paper, strips of telephone book pages (which she brought from her home in Oregon) and even pieces of string and other small items and then sandwich them between two sheets of tissue paper. It was pretty cool.

Here’s another shot of them. Sorry the light was less than ideal here, but I think you can see the string sandwiched in there. I tried to make the shape of a flower out of the string.

Here’s a shot of some of my classmates' papers drying. It was so interesting that many of our papers started out bright and colorful, but most of them ended up much more muted (um, except mine…muted is apparently not in my vocabulary).

Once the painted tissue papers were completely dry, we glued them to plain muslin with more matte medium. You can see the tissue paper here on this finished page of my book. I included little cut up pieces of DJ’s phone book on this page. :-) I did five tissue muslin pages in total.The fun green rick rack on this page came from my wonderful friend, Davi. Davi made my apron! I will share some pictures of that with you soon! It's totally fantabulous!

Next we took more muslin and covered it in molding paste. I’ve never even heard of molding paste, but it was fun to play with! It has a thick, creamy consistency and dried white on the fabric, and you could manipulate it for some good texture on the fabric. Then we painted color washes over the dried molding paste muslin pages. This picture is a finished molding paste page in my book. See that cute little tab? There are three of them in my book, and they are one of my favorite things! DJ brought us the feathers from her friend’s bird, and I backed my feathers with sheet music to carry through the music theme of my book. I did four molding paste muslin pages, and I think I’ll do some journaling on them.

Friday afternoon between class and dinner, I was back in my cottage when I looked out the window and, boom!, there were three deer right there! I took this shot from the window. I immediately called the girls to tell them about it and quickly remembered the time change. It was only 2:30 at home, so I rambled on excitedly on the answering machine until it ran out!

I went outside to try to catch a closer shot, but this gal was the only one who stood her ground for me for at least a few minutes before walking off down the trail. After that, I saw dozens more deer over the rest of the weekend.

Friday was also the day a nasty cold hit me full force. I ran into Los Gatos after dinner to find a CVS for some cold meds, and then stumbled across the most wonderful family owned toy store and loaded up on goodies for the girls before I headed back to the center for vendor night. I had told myself I was going to be a good girl at vendor night, but alas, that simply wasn’t possible. There was so much good stuff! I bought some beautiful ribbon and a few collage pages from a local shop, some gorgeous handmade papers from Albie Smith, some prints from DJ, and a CD full of gorgeous bird images from Lesley Riley. Albie and Lesley were also teaching at the retreat. I used the ribbon, some of Albie’s papers and two of DJ’s prints in my finished book. The page above is an example! This is one of DJ’s painted photograph pieces. She took the photo in Hawaii and then painted into it. We learned that technique on Day 3.
Friday was also the day the bonding started happening. To me, this was just as enjoyable as learning new art techniques. My cottage mates were Gwynne, Donna, Denise, Leah and Beth. Beth traveled all the way from England! After her weekend full of inspiration, she went home and started her blog. I had the honor being her first follower! Gwynne, Donna, Denise and Leah are all from California, and Leah ended up becoming my best bud at the retreat; I love you, Leah! She was in DJ’s class as well, so we had a LOT of time together (just wait until I tell you about Saturday and Sunday). Gwynne was in Nina’s class, Donna was in Lesley’s class, Denise was in Albie’s class, and Beth was in Kelly Rae and Mati Rose’s class, so between our little cottage, we represented the entire retreat! Everyone was so wonderful. We all made jokes about our spaceship tube shower. There’s really no other way to describe it. It was like a Star Trek tele-porter tube or something, but with nice hot water! I also finally got to meet Roben-Marie and Chrissy in person. They are fabulous! Roben-Marie is such an inspiration, and I just fell in love with Chrissy and her infectious spirit. Roben-Marie was in my class, but I didn't get to spend near enough time with Chrissy. Hopefully, we'll meet again! Day 3 tomorrow!

An Artful Journey: Day 1, The Adventure Begins

I’ve been trying to figure out how to share this whole experience with you. It was just all such a mind-boggingly, life-changingly awesome five days! :-) (and that from a college English professor…) So I’ll share each day with you as it happened, with lots and lots of pictures.

One week ago today, DH and the girls drove me to the airport at 6:15am. Jacksonville to Las Vegas to San Jose. Can you see me in the reflection in the glass in this picture? Just above the front third of the Southwest plane in the distance? Yeah, that’s me. The long flight to Vegas (5 hours, 20 minutes) was made much more bearable with my seatmates. To my right was Ed, a very friendly plastics salesman heading to a conference in Las Vegas. His company makes the plastic cards that 90% of all credit cards are made from! To my left was Michael, an engineer/rocket scientist on his way back from NASA after installing the rocket boosters that recently launched Pluto Five. No joke! I was sitting next to a genuine rocket scientist! Ed and I were totally enthralled. Mike told us how the rocket boosters work and how, since the Pluto payload was such a small one, those five boosters shot that thing up into space faster than any shuttle launch ever seen. “Where is it now?” I asked? “Heck, I don’t know! Somewhere between here and Pluto. There’s a whole other group of engineers and scientists who determine when to launch so the payload will reach its proper destination,” he replied. “And when will it reach its destination?” “Oh, in approximately eight years.” Eight years!? Can you imagine the science it takes to determine when to launch something that will not arrive at its destination until eight years later? Now, here’s the kicker. In his free time, Michael is an actor in Wild West reenactments. Didn’t see that one coming, did ya? He’s the president of his troupe, Sierra Six Guns and Sidekicks. So after he enthralled Ed and me with his tales of space exploration, he continued to enthrall us with his tales of Virgil, Wyatt, and all the other Earp brothers. He plays Virgil. He’s excellent at falling during gunfights. And I think a little peeved that his actor friend who plays Wyatt never has to fall because, you know, Wyatt was never shot so he never fell. Who knew? DH would have loved it.

So, here you go. Now I can say I’ve finally been to Vegas! Since I barely had time to make my connecting flight, I managed to avoid actually playing the slot machines, but I did have to pull out my camera to take a picture of some of them.

Once I arrived in San Jose, I picked up my rental car and headed towards Los Gatos and the retreat center…and promptly got lost. Got out of San Jose just fine; that was the easy part. From there, I had printed out MapQuest directions but neglected to read the warning on the retreat center website that said not to follow the MapQuest directions. I ended up on a continually narrowing winding road on a neighboring mountain. When I realized I must be lost, I called DH (thank God for that time difference at this point) and he pulled up the website, found the better map and stayed on the phone with me until I found the right place…on the mountain next door. (Yes, Katie, if I had an iPhone I could have pulled up the correct map myself, just like you did when we were trying to find that cupcake place that night in NYC. And yes, Jim, I'm sure I could have pulled it up on my Blackberry…if I only knew how to use it.)

Once I actually made it to the center, called Presentation Center, this is what greeted me. Beautiful, huh?

And then once I checked in, I received this. Isn’t that awesome? Every attendee received one. More than 100 of us. Talk about a lot of work! Our welcome, agenda for the weekend, and all relevant instructions were attached at the back with the ribbon. Just the start of the amazing job and special little touches that Cindy (retreat coordinator) pulled off. Just lovely.

Here’s a shot of the inside of the welcome bundle.

After I checked in, I had some time to wander the property. Here’s an example of some of the cottages.

I will admit my cottage itself, St. Martha’s, was not that photo worthy, but the surroundings sure were. These daffodils were right outside my cottage door.

…as was this little marked grave of Our Friend Muffy. I’ll have a story sparked by Muffy for you next week.

These pretty little red flowers covered a nearby tree. No clue what kind of tree. It was a California tree. I don’t think we have this particular California tree in Florida. :-)

This daisy was part of a cluster just around the corner from my cottage. Can you picture me laying on the ground shooting up to catch this angle?

This is St. Francis, the watchful saint of the retreat center. I imagine he was quite the handsome fellow in his day. Am I allowed to say that about a saint?

And lastly, to close out the first day’s entry, I’ll share a couple more sneak peeks of my finished book. Back cover….

And two inside pages… Of course I can’t show you the entire book until Sunday night…the night I finished and DJ, Leah, and I danced on the tables (oh wait, it’s still Thursday…we’re not dancing on tables yet, forget I said that….)