Best playdate ever!

First there was dirt drinking:

Kelly is chasing it with water, clearly it didn't help:

Then some art:

Three-way collaborative painting - step one:

And Suzi telling Kelly she wants to take a serious picture:

Believe it or not, we also watch True Blood, got Caribou, carved stamps, drew and colored other faces, made dinner (OK, Kelly cooked, but I chopped stuff), and painted about a zillion layers of our collaboration. 

C-Faces Play Date

Play Date!

We spun the wheel and I won a sketchbook, TJ a hat - but the man gave us BOTH sketchbooks and hats!

A Carving Date

What are we carving? What else: zombie bunnies!

Goog & TJ love 5 Guys...

MN Center for Book Arts

My pal TJ belongs to a co-op that's part of the MN Center for Book Arts, so she's taking all kinds of fun classes and learning to play with all of these really big machines and stuff. She'll be typesetting and using presses and bookbinding. So, she took me there the other day and I got to play, too!! It was awesome!

There are rooms FILLED with type:

And this is what lino-cutting is for!! I totally didn't get lino-cutting because I was like "Um, can't I just carve a stamp out of the soft rubber stuff?" but this lino blocks are for PRESSES. She did all the hard work for this one she let me print, it's for a swap she's in (she might kill me when she sees I posted this), but she let me make this print! Isn't it AWESOME? I had the best time, I hope she lets me go back and play again!

TJ's first PanPastels

Here it is, bloggy folks:

And just like that, another happy addict. I'm just going to carry them around and get everyone I know to give them a try, I think. They're just happy-making. Instant, soft color. Not "soft color" as in pastel, it's just soft to use and touch.

Here's a PP portrait:

And, of course, us being nutty. What else is new?

TJ worked in my journal!

That's ME!! How cute am I?? I love it :)

Introducing - TJ!

This is my new friend TJ! We met and hung out at Archiver's in my local mall and it was AWESOME!

She just moved here from Germany, and look - she bought me that Germany tag to put in my journal! 

It was SO fun to hang out. I'm not usually good with people, so it's always a relief to meet someone who seems to like me!! She said NOT to post pictures of her on Facebook, and so far I haven't, but I told her that any pictures I take are fair game for Facebook, blogs, etc, and that it took Kelly about six months to get used to it and now she doesn't care anymore. :) We just chatted and journaled and it was really cool. 

GRID!

Look what Kelly helped me with! She has the best paper stash, but even so when it was JUST papers I was like "gross". But I brayered and stamped and now I sort of like it! Every time I look at it I like it a little more.

 I'm still kind of confused by the "want to keep everything in one journal but can't make myself write my grocery list in my 'good' journal" mentality...working it out by trying NEW journals. I just got a new Moleskine and a small sketchbook that I'm using as a slap journal. Maybe. 

Who knew??

That thing peels, cores AND slices the apples into thin rings. Then Kelly gave them a chop and tossed them into the crust for apple pie. Who knew such a thing even existed?? I love tools, it was good times. I got to try it, but I F'ed it all up, of course. I'm talented like that!!

Play date!!

When you're giving a friend LATE birthday gifts, the least you can do is bring donuts, right?

And cupcakes (it was a celebration, after all)

So, when I said "Kelly, I'm getting you the BEST birthday present! You're going to LOVE IT!" She said "Is it a toilet paper holder? I need one of those." So, I went to Target and got her a toilet paper holder that sticks on the wall. 

And while I was there I saw this really fun notebook and special pen and got one for each of us (I need a partner in my silly antics) and today we played with them!

But HERE is the fun present!! I don't know why, but I was SO AMUSED with the idea of getting her this giant jar of our favorite color of paint: quinacridone magenta. She found it amusing, too - I knew she would!

Then we did a little shopping...

Journaling Meet Up!

Here we are, Goog and Tammy! Just hanging at Archiver's. I was late, late, late. Like 25 minutes late. She waited. How awesome is that?!? It really wasn't my fault, there was HORRIBLE traffic and then there was an accident right in front of me. I left my house an HOUR before our meeting time and I was twenty-five minutes late. But she waited and we had fun!

In The Sun

Kelly and I are...hm, it sounds silly to say "taking a course"...we're participating in a free art journaling group, how's that? OK, Kelly and I are participating in a group called In the Sun. And even though we're a few weeks late, I made us journals for the process. (What? Goog made another journal? Shocking!)

I started with this:

And finished with these:

Today, we made our "introduction" pages. Since I don't need to introduce me to myself, I wrote a little note to summer. (Please remember that it was still snowing at the end of April here in the #1 place to live in the US.)

Oh! And the cover:

Yes, the cover should be first BUT - 1. We didn't do them first, we did the inside page. 2. Blogger is a pain in the ass when you try to position pictures.

Travel Watercolors

I'm not usually someone who wants something just to have it. I have a lot of video game systems - I play them all. I buy DVDs of shows I like - and then I watch them (over and over and over). If I buy expensive paints or paper I use them. I don't save things for special occasions and I don't buy things just because everyone else has them and I need one, too. BUT I really like those little travel watercolor things. I don't even use watercolors!! I don't like things that are water soluble! Why would I want one of those? I don't know. But I do and I have for a long time. I won't buy it because I won't use it (probably). Then I saw this idea and I had to do it.

Kelly gave me this when we were drunk arting:

We used paper clay for this part, and the tops of Glimmer Mist bottles:

Then you just squirt and let them dry!!

Don't lie, you know that's awesome.

Kelly is NOT amused

She didn't like that I said stamp carving was easy, so we got stuff and carved some more today - this is SERIOUS Kelly.

I got a different substrate to carve with at Blick's, that gray stuff she's using. I thought it was the same as the pink stuff and it kind of is, but it's a teeny bit softer. We also got a couple of new blade for our carving tools!!

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!!

PLAY DATE!!!!

Kelly and I haven't had a play date in a million years (OK, a couple of months, but STILL).

Today we went to Wal-Mart and got these:

And these:

And made THESE!

We sprayed shit to test them out

And Kelly's hubby came home and caught us making a giant mess...

It was f-ing fun, I gotta tell ya. SO freaking fun. We spent about $25 total and made twelve 2oz bottles and had enough to make at least one more of each color. So, I have one glimmer mist and one chalkboard spray and they were $6 each. This is SO much cheaper and the colors came out AWESOME. Freaking awesome, people.

New journal...

I LOST my awesome Fabriano journal. Lost it. How do I do these things? I'm a complete airhead. But since Tim has worked every single day for the past month and I don't have a car, I can't get to Blick's to get more amazing paper. So I used a coupon at Michael's (walked there, it was 38 degrees) and got some Arches paper.

Broke it in immediately because I've been jonesing for my journal! Just another girl...OK, this pic is cool because that magenta on the left side of her face is Shiva oil paint stick! It was mega fun. Kelly has a few (she has everything) and I played with them. Cool stuff, I gotta get some of my own. Oh, and I colored her face with a whole bunch of colored pencils Kelly has, too. I'm totally a creature of habits - Prismacolor all the way - but Kelly is awesome about trying different stuff. There were Polychromos which turn out to be water soluble even though they say "permanent" on them. I used another kind, too...I forget what they were. (Then why mention it, Goog? Do we need to know these things?) Yes, yes you do.

PS Arches paper cracks when you fold it.

PPS It's pronounced "arsh" but that's too close to "arse" and my BFF lives in London so I can't bring myself to say it like that...