The 10 year cold

I have been married for 10 years. 9 years ago my marriage caught a cold that went untreated. 5 years ago that cold turned into pneumonia. Last year the pneumonia turned septic, leading to the death of my marriage. We've spent the last year banging on it's chest in an attempt to revive the marriage, but sadly, without success. Is their life after death?

The best movie I've seen in a long time...

PLEASE PLEASE see this movie. It is just beautiful, natural and inspiring. My husband and I both loved it and bought the soundtrack. Give yourself the gift of time spent watching this movie. Then, if you want, post your thoughts about it here...

The muse is back!

This is my latest doll, in progress. I received some birthday money last month and really treated myself to beads I would not normally splurge on. Although it looks quite planned out, I really just started with the middle round bead and the face (made by Linsart and painted by me) and went from there. I'm trying to work more with a limited color pallet rather than 20 different colors. The limited amount of color is what I like most about my first pieces, so I'm trying to return to my roots, as it were.
This is the most recently finished piece of work. The design is my own, and I did a better job with the gusset this time (always the biggest challenge for me). This time I tried making the pattern out of paper first, and taping the pieces together to make a paper 3-D pattern to see how the gusset would work. It was awkward but I like the results. The wings were my biggest challenge (simply put, I just did not want to do all the beading it would require to make fully beaded, front and back, wings). I finally found these awesome peacock feathers that I attached to wires which had already been embedded in the body, then beaded around the connection points. Yes, it was as much work as you can imagine, but I like the results.

It's been exactly one year since I've created anything. I don't know what happened to the muse. I'd like to figure it out so as not to piss her off and send her away again. I missed her! But now I have ideas coming out of my ears, and already have the next creature developing in my head as I've been working on these two.

Come and see me....

Look what came in the mail today! My name is on the Table of Contents, and pictures of my dolls and an article (pieced together from things that I have written) about how each doll was made is on page 42. That's from pages 42 to page 43, thank you very much. What next......

P.S. You can own your very own copy of this wondeful publication if you go to your local Barnes and Noble store. If they don't have it, it is probably because my mother bought every copy :0)

I'm Published!

I just got the good news that 5 of my pieces will be published in the Spring edition of Art Doll Quarterly! I'm so excited and proud that I accomplished this goal for myself. Self-esteem really does start from the inside out. I'm thankful to the people in my life who looked at my creatures and said "Wow!" instead of "huh?". I'm looking foreward to another year filled with new dolls and creatures and I hope I can build a community of friends who do what I do and love what I love.

J'adore la Cirque

My mother treated the kids and I to tickets to Cirque de Soliel. I have only seen them before on TV, and was thrilled by what I saw there, so had high hopes to see them live. What a thrill it was to see them. We had third row tickets, so could see them wink at us, see their face paint, and the seams on their costumes, see the sweat fly off their bodies as they twirled around. It was mesmarising. I fell in love with every single one of them. I wanted to know everything about each one of them; their life stories, who they loved, what they thought about as they did what they did. The most beautiful act, for me, was two brothers who literally flew through the air by one hand. They were a living sculpture moving and flying, and had I been alone I would have wept at the beauty of it. In fact, I was struck by the beauty of all of it, that a human could create something so fantastic, so majestic, something that started as an idea, a possibility. I wanted to run away with them, to be a part of them, to know them. What a treat!

Lucky Lady

Little lady luck is done. She stands, which was my goal with her, and I used a copper wire armature for her wings, which was a learning curve, so she was a good experience. And I'm so glad to have a beaded creature back in my house since I've sent off all my others to a magazine in hopes of publication. I hope she will bring luck. Or is that crickets?

I am sitting with loneliness. It is such an odd companion. Odd to be so lonely with these three children who don't leave me alone for a second. Never alone, but constantly lonely. I don't know why I resist the idea that I am lonely. I think I am hungry, or bored, or angry, or missing the prime of my life spending so much time single parenting. Underneath all of that is a river of loneliness. Sounds so pathetic. Hard to make peace with. Impossible to fix. I'm desperate for someone to come in after me, to draw me out, scared to death that someone might actually try. So cliche.

So, I make these little friends, keep my hands busy, " a world unto mine own". Beauty and joy and ultimate control when I create. Each little bead is my choosing, each color, each placement, each creature. And when they are done, they are companions, tributes to wishes.