The more I worked with these things, the more I knew it was going to become a grave  marker of some sort. With Dia de los Muertos on the way, it seemed to make sense. Also, my family recently finished engraving our grandparents’ headstone to include my grandma’s info and my sister had sent me a photo from back east. They’ve been on my mind a LOT lately. Grandpa’s been gone over 20 years and grandma’s been gone about 4 years, but I still miss them like it was yesterday.

I thought about how awesome they were and their special little quirks that made them my grandma and grandpa, that made them my mom’s parents, that made them the hard workers their neighbors knew them as, and so on. Most of their friends and family are gone and once my siblings and my mom and aunt are gone, all of those memories will be gone, too. Wouldn’t it be cool if their headstone had a little drawer where we could store photos and stories and mementos so that when people came by the cemetery, they could read about these people I loved so much. I spent the month of October thinking about this kind of loss that happens when nobody remembers us anymore. I can’t even count how many times I have said to my husband, “I wish you could have met grandpa; he would have loved you.”

Using plaster of paris, I created a grave where the figure is partly above ground to signify that he’s gone, and part of the earth and the universe, but still very much a part of the living world as well. The little dresser is the headstone, with flowers and lights and glitter inside the glass to pay tribute and celebrate the life that once was. The tiny drawers hold symbols of the life the person in the grave has left behind.

And yes, he’s holding an umbrella. Just in case it rains.

And, because I can’t just see the positive in anything (ha!), I’m also a little disappointed in myself because somewhere in the middle of the project, I lost steam and ended up rushing through the book near the end. I don’t think it helped that this project spanned two months over the holidays, but it was a really good exercise for me and I’m glad I participated. And as if luck would have it, the postmark deadline was moved to today, rather than last Saturday, so I had a little more time to work on it.

I uploaded my favorite pages to my flickr account:

Despite being disappointed with a bunch of the work I did in this book, I’m especially pleased with a good amount of the work. I gave myself permission to play, to doodle, to be silly and childlike. I scanned my favorite pages, which are in the flickr set here. I particularly love the happy accident that is the first picture in the above slideshow. She’s a little pink girl, who I found in a random watercolor scribble. She reminds me so much of my niece, Devin, in her Christmas photo from 2003, when she was almost a year old:

Just for context: Devin just turned 8, is in 2nd grade, is an awesome artist, is about to make her first communion and has brown eyes now…

My other favorites in the slideshow are:

- the papertowel I used to clean some brushes (I save everything), which ended up looking like a mountain range. I collaged it onto the page  over some book page scraps.

- the little running doggie. I want to practice more of the watercolor scribbling — I’ve been doing that a lot on my own, but my class a few months ago with Carla Sonheim really “enabled” me.

So, that’s my story for today. Happy January, folks!

My arthouse co-op profile is here.

More info on The Sketchbook Project.

I just got caught up with Jamie’s videos and I am woefully behind on seeing what everybody else is doing. I apologize to all of you who have been so kind & supportive by visiting my blog and commenting. I fully intend to do the same every week and then life got in the way. Big time.

I have a good excuse, though!

The last two weeks I have spent getting ready for opening my very own art studio. I am working with this cool group called Poudre Studio Artists here in Fort Collins. We “live” in the Poudre River Arts Center, just north of downtown. I’ve also taken on the role of marketing manager for the center as well, so you can imagine how hilariously crazy things have been here.

So, I don’t know what week it is, really. I don’t remember what I did when, but I need to realize that’s not important anymore (which is REALLY hard for me, because I love tracking and archiving things). I did make a week list of the stuff I’ve done since the last time I posted:

• poked holes
• drew thin and fat lines
• scratched with a sharp object
• tore strips
• starting adding office supplies
• drew a nonstop line
• wrote four-letter words
• listed more ways to wreck

ALSO, I put the book out during my first First Friday, marked at the page that says “hang the journal in a public place and invite people to draw here.” Not many people wanted to do that, despite my big basket of crayons. I was surprised, actually! My MIL drew a horse though. My SIL drew a penguin and a blackeyed susan (that’s the “logo” my husband and I have – long story for another day). My husband drew a tiny alien and his space ship. That’s good enough for me!

I was carrying it around a lot and then that sort of dropped off, but I intend to pick back up again. It’s comforting to me.

Things I am learning from this process and how it’s spilling over into real life:

• I am following the rules less and less. I used to be the “good girl” — who has to please everybody and do the right thing. I’m NOT that girl anymore.
• I didn’t clean my house before my in-laws came over. Twice.
• I am playing more. Today I was in the studio and I was prepping some pages for a journal and all of a sudden decided to do my process in reverse order, just to see what would happen.

So that’s it for now. If anyone reading this doesn’t have a “give away your favorite page” partner, please consider swapping with me. Leave a note in the comments.

And here are some photos of what I’ve done recently. enjoy!

Be Brave

Last weekend, I did do some doodling in one of the pages. Easy enough. Stuff I do every day in other books. Not a big deal. I made a sign for myself.

But last night I tried to do something more daring. There is a black page that says “Lose this page. (Throw it out.) Accept the loss.” I ignored it for a while and looked for another page to work on. Then I went back and tore out the page and crumpled it up. Then I sat the wadded up ball of paper aside and freaked out a little. And I know exactly why.

I love recording things. I love complete archives and histories of events. I want to leave behind stuff that doesn’t make people wonder about Tracey. “Why did grandma tear a page out of this book?” one kid might wonder.

Lose this page

And here’s the other thing. We had barely any money growing up. I learned the value of a dollar very early on. I also learned that if I leave my stuff lying around, my little brothers would destroy it and then it would be gone and there would be no more because there was no money to buy more. So I’m very protective of my stuff.

And that’s why throwing away this page is so hard.

But I’ve done more difficult stuff in the last week. I’ve gone out of my comfort zone at least twice and both times were very rewarding. Also, things aren’t as scarce now as they were when I was nine.  So when I post this entry, I will throw away this wadded up page (in the dumpster outside!) and move on with my day.

Mini quilts. These are fun and I’m finally getting the hang of using my machine. I’m no expert, but I like the way these are all coming out. The base fabric is stuff I painted in workshops with Lisa Englebrecht (Maybe I’ll actually finish the projects I started in Lisa’s workshops someday!) last year. The two that say “hope” are for my youngest brothers and there’s a pocket made from a Hambly overlay that holds a prayer card from our dad’s funeral, which was last year on 2/14. The card is of St. Jude, who was my dad’s favorite saint (and is my second favorite). St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases (and policemen) and I thought my brothers would like a little something to remind them to have hope for whatever their dreams may be. Recently I thought that gluing pony beads on the ends of the hanging stick would finish off the look nicely and I was right! Very happy with these.

Mini quilt for my brother Steve and his wife. A belated Christmas 2008 gift!	Mini quilt for my brother Mike. A belated Christmas 2008 gift!	This was Jennie’s Christmas gift and it was less late than the ones for my family.

Collage stuff. I’ve been trying each week to find a little time to participate in the Collage Play With Crowabout challenge. Here are a few of the recent collages I’ve done using images from that challenge. If you are interested in playing along with us, email Nancy and ask for an invite. Let her know traypup sent you! I’m really enjoying art journaling lately and will be posting more pages from my journals in my next post.

Crowabout challenge week 20.	Crowabout challenge week 21.	Crowabout challenge week 22. The heads are my mom and myself about 40 years ago.

Cards. Sometimes I have a hankering to make a ton of cards. I can’t bear to buy them in the store because I feel like making them from scratch means so much more. Plus, I have all of the stuff! So I collected all of my Valentine’s Day-related supplies and sat on the sofa watching movies with my husband and made a ton of cards. Here are a few:

Vday 2009 card for Devin	Assorted Vday cards	You make my heart whirl

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately! There is lots more that I’ll be writing about this week. I’m excited to get back into the swing of things.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

I did this spread on Day 5 and didn’t think a lot about it. Used a background I did over the weekend. Cobbled together a silly little bird I drew on a book page. Played with watercolor crayons. TA DA! This is also in the same calendar journal as featured on Day 4.

I did most of this journaling while we watched the election returns on Tuesday. I felt hope and excitement and like I can do anything…just like Twyla Tharp appears to feel in this photo from a Gap ad.

This is in the calendar journal belonging to Terry, a member of Calendargirlz.

There’s a client of mine, a scrapbooking store in Plymouth, Indiana, that needed a rush post card mailing to be done today. It took a while to get it all to come together, due to a number of circumstances completely beyond my control and I am about 85% pleased with the job I did. I don’t get to do print work for my clients very often, so I find it to be a nice change of pace. I had to be very creative today, believe me!

And when that was completed, another client asked for a rush job on a business card layout, so I got to do it all over again!

Now I’m going to go sit on the sofa and doodle (which I didn’t actually get to last night after all) while my awesome husband makes dinner.

• I made a big batch of pizza sausage tonight, managing to turn $10-12 worth of meat into the makins for a total of 6 easy meals for Tim and myself. Yay! And pizza dough was on sale, so that was an extra bonus.
• Started writing a letter to my aunt.
• I created our menus for the upcoming week.
• I began planning the autumn and Christmas decorating (in my head).
• I doodled in my daily journal, setting up my November calendar page spread.
• I jotted down a couple of pages of ideas for canvases.
• When I went to look for my canvases, I realized that stepping over everything and not being able to find what I’m looking for was hindering my creativity, so I did some filing, organizing, recycling and trashing. I filed a bunch of ATCs from swaps and figured out how I’m going to handle inchies (now that I am in love with them and am compelled to make many more).
• I came up with my plan for revamping an area of my office that isn’t making me happy.
• Informed myself and my husband that my “office” is now officially my STUDIO and we will never refer to it as an office again.

And, just so this post isn’t devoid of pretty pictures, I’ve added a photo of a recent journal spread I did in an RR. I am in love with this spread and luckily, the owner of the journal in which I did it loves it too! yay!

And after I post this and finish the letter to my aunt, I am going to doodle some more.