Friday night crafting

I have been making a mess all night. It feels so good to relax, grab a soda, turn on the iPod, and just make a mess. I will post the back of my board book tomorrow. I had to completely re-do it because what I first did turned out very wrong, nothing like I had intended. Tonight's attempt was much better, but it's still very wet with gel medium. When it's dry, I'll take a picture, and then I'll put it in the mail immediately. It was supposed to be out today (bad, Michelle, bad, bad!).

You know, until last night, I had never listened to music while stamping/painting/crafting. I didn't know what I was missing! I'm so amazed at how much more creative I feel when I'm not distracted by the surrounding noise of my two teenage boys bickering like an old married couple or the yapping of the television. I did learn a few things about wearing headphones and stamping. First, don't sing along to the music that only you can hear. Not unless you want people around you to come and tell you to stop it while rolling their tear-filled eyes. It's also very difficult to dance and stamp accurately at the same time. Same with trying to paint a line. It isn't possible to be shaking your booty and still paint straight. It just isn't. I listen to my music loud. Chalk it up to my 80s' upbringing and the entire heavy metal/hair band movement. Some music is not meant to be listened to at a conversational level, so if you listen to your music loud like I do, your kids will groan because they can hear music seeping around your ear buds. Sorry, kids, but Beds Are Burning just doesn't have the same impact unless it's blasting. Oh, and I'm guessing it's not so pretty for me to be singing London Bridge into my paint brush and dancing like a Solid Gold dancer (I did mention the 80s, right?), not at my age nor at my height - those dancers were tall and leggy. I'm short and stubby. And certainly not judging by the looks my kids gave me when I was doing it. Thank goodness I'm the only one in my house who knows how to operate my digital camcorder. I don't want to end up being humiliated on YouTube like that poor woman on the beach (my daughter, Angela, would be just the person to do that to me, too - she really loves me).

The way I see it, when my teenaged boys stop teaching my three year old to come to me singing lyrics by Cannibal Corpse or Murder Dolls, I will stop singing Billy Don't Be a Hero as loud as I can. Fair is fair, right? And if it makes me more creative, I think it's more than fair.

I'm going to go run my shimmering cardstock (painted with H20s) through my Big Shot now so I can make Christmas cards for swap I'm in, then I'm going to head to bed. Goodnight!

EDIT: Whoops, decided to edit this post to add the pics of my board book that dried before I got sleepy.












These are backwards - the back of the book is the picture on the left while the front of the book is on the right. It's ready to be sent out tomorrow! I'm so happy with how this turned out. On the back, I pasted the lyrics to Octopus's Garden by the Beatles, which is the song that inspired the choice of theme for this project. Not that I'm a Beatles fan, but I've had that dumb song stuck in my head for weeks. So when it came time to pick a theme, it seemed to make sense. The turtles are cut out from my favorite fabric ever. I bought it to make a quilt for Dylan but found out that making quilts bores me. At least the way I was trying to do it (I might give an art quilt a try here before too long). I painted the anemone/seaweed stuff at the bottom on Japanese rice paper with Lumiere paint in a pearlized green. That's what I was trying to paint while shaking my butt to the music. The fiber on the spine of the book is actually thin strips of the same fabric braided, and then the fiber/yarn is woven in and out of the braids. So neat, for me.