For my BFF

This is a cigar box purse I'm making for my bestest friend. Is it silly that I'm 30 and I find this very amusing? Perhaps, but I don't care. This is the front:Side:Side:
SideBottom:
I want to add some words to the phone booth side and the one where she's sitting on the bench. Maybe add a little more silliness. I just wanted to post the progress because I'm pretty excited about it!

Angel

I already posted an angel with this quote, the journal page led to the painting and here she is all finished. I'm going to give her to a friend who has a heart of gold and seems to attract people who hurt and/or take advantage of her. I tried to take a pic and upload it straight from my phone with "mobile blogging" but it didn't work and my horrible computer doesn't recognize USB devices (yes, I know how to temporarily fix it, but really - how many times a day should it be necessary?) so I had to upload it to facebook and download it from there again.
The beeswax that I often use on paintings looks SUPER yellow on her for some reason. If it looks this bad tomorrow I'm going to reheat it on her face and wipe it off. Bleck.

On another note, a friend I've recently reconnected with on facebook called me today and we had a very amusing (to me) conversation about how she seems to attract crazy people. Apparently they hide it well for about a year, then LET IT OUT and start terrorizing her. The best part? That means I am NOT one of the crazies!! Who knew? See, people - I'm not as odd as you think I am!

Love IS blind.

This is me, fresh from the shower, eyes barely open. Mini looked up at me with those huge blue eyes of his and said "Mommy, you look like a princess." So of course I used my iPhone to take a picture. This is what my three-year-old son thinks a princess looks like. Poor kid.

Oops

I was late making my calendar this month! This one was really fun because of how it started. Last week I was playing at my friend's house after we went to a couple of art stores. We both got a new type of shimmery paints we'd never tried, Lumiere. It's super fun, thick and shiny. Not as translucent as Stewart Gill Alchemy, but just as shiny and pretty. So when I peeled off the tops on the jars, I smeared them onto the pages of my journal to see how they looked. My friend took out the world's tiniest paint brush and was about to dot them onto a piece of trash, but I made her use her sketchbook. She made these teeny little marks and I made a mess. But the mess turned into this background!

Of course, I added some things, but I won't bore you with the details. The days are one inch squares (I'm a stay-at-home-mom with no car, I don't really do much that involves making an appointment) and the silhouette is from a picture I took of my aunt getting ready for her wedding.

I almost forgot to include where this idea came from!! I got it from here and she got it from here.

Photo shoot

OK, so I have a kind of nice camera. It was REALLY nice when I got it for Christmas four years ago, but technology changes and now there are phones with 8 megapixel cameras and my digital camera is 6.1. Anyway, it's big and people see someone with a big camera and think "Hey, she can take really good pictures because she has a BIG camera." It's true, you know it is. It's automatic, it's digital, there's an option for manual focus but it's not SLR - it's "SLR-like". I swear to God, that's how it was advertised. My husband didn't know the difference and it's fine because I love it. It takes amazing pictures. The point is, I've photographed a couple of weddings, done some engagement pictures, head shots for some people, and today some friends asked me to do their family photos. I was a little nervous. OK, super nervous. But they came out pretty good!! I'm actually pretty excited about them and so here are a couple.


Of course I'm going to play with them - make some black and white, tweak the colors, carp like that...but I'm pretty dang proud of how they came out! :)

Spread your wings...

Journey

I HATE the thought that "life is a journey, not a destination. I don't like the journey part of a trip. I just want to be there. Anyway, my BFF moved to London February 25th. It's far, far, far away from here. Really far. We still talk every day on the phone or skype and we text, email, and ping...but the time difference took us a long time to get used to and sometimes she still calls me at 3am. So, I painted this for her. If you can't read it, it says "No journey is too great if you find what you seek."

Her birthday is the 4th and she's spending the weekend in Ireland, a place she's always wanted to go. We've been looking up locations to see if they really existed or if they were just in Nora Roberts books. We were talking about the Gallaghers of Ardmore and in the first book of the triliogy (Jewels of the Sun) Jude is talking to Aiden and she tells him she feels like she "ran away" from Chicago and he says "What's wrong with running away if where you are doesn't suit?" I love it.