Productive Playdate!

Is there such a thing as an UNproductive playdate? Not so much, probably. Usually Kelly and I show each other crap, yap a lot, and scribble in our journals. Honestly, most of the art we do together gets done over skype. I don't know why, something just makes us want to sit on the porch and drink coffee (which I say like a New Yorker - because I'm from there). Also, I'm super super SUPER impulsive and impatient. Kelly will buy something from the art store and it stays in the bag until the next time I come over. When I buy something, I open it and start playing with it in the car - sometimes while I'm driving. Be glad you don't live near me.

First things first - spaghettios (the meatball kind):

Then the sewing machine - Kelly wasn't sure how to use it, now she's an expert. We even got it to sew letters and penguins. That's right, I said PENGUINS.

THEN because we were feeling particularly feisty, we went art shopping. I got a pencil I've been wanting for 6 months (.3mm lead), some new prismacolors, some textile paints, blah, blah, blah. RIGHT before we left, I remembered I wanted to get a yard of canvas because I was thinking that Donna Downey painted on canvas with her new paints and made a cool little tote bag. Then Kelly says "To make a journaL?"

Well, of COURSE now that you put the thought in my head I'm going to need a canvas journal! Then because we're ten-year-olds in disguise she said "If you're getting one, I want one." So we took our canvas back to her place and check THIS out:

She used her She-Ra muscles to tear BOTH yards (Goog has a little bit of an issue with her right arm, and can't do the tearing thing) into twelve 10 by 16 inch pieces.

Then came the annoying part for me. See, I like to figure out what I want to do and do it. I get very easily discouraged by mechanical failures and operator errors. The sewing machine didn't WANT to sew through 24 layers of canvas. The needle broke. Just to make sure it really wasn't going to work, I tried it again and broke another needle.

Kelly suggested sewing each page by itself to make it seem a little less bulky, so I did that and THEN tried sewing them all together which resulted in break number 3. By this point, I've HAD it. I'm discouraged, I'm over it, I suck. I would TOTALLY have given up.

Kelly is THE BEST about getting me to keep trying stuff. (Look what she did with transfers, she finally convinced me that I WASN'T a curse!) She's always like "Well, what if we tried doing this instead?" You might not know that at first champagne happened by accident. Wine bottles started popping their corks (cotton wadding at the time, actually). A monk decided to see what would happen if they used thicker stoppers - and the bottles broke. But he was determined and got stronger bottles. That's what it reminds me of. She always has another suggestion and then another until the problem is solved. Of course, she said we didn't HAVE to keep trying, that we could try again another day - but I knew if it wasn't happening right that second, I was totally over it and it was going into the UFO pile.

So what we did was sew together two signatures of six pages each, and then sewed the back of one to the front of the other. Just like when I glue the pages between coptic-bound signatures together because I don't like the gap between the pages. And there you freaking have it!

Now that I have it to hold and play with, I freaking LOVE it. EVERYONE needs a canvas freaking journal, it's amazingly fun!!