My Artful Friday - 1 March '13

Wow… I haven’t had an “Artful Friday” post in almost 2 months!  But don’t think I’ve not been being creative!  My focus has been on remodeling my studio, doing photo shoots, taking classes, and having company in our home.

My artistic endeavors are picking back up.  Besides my “Artful Reader Club” projects like you saw yesterday, I’ve joined another art based book club.  All the members are reading the same book and creating art based on prompts given by the group’s leader.  The book we’re all reading is “Fabulous Friendship Festival” by SARK.  It’s a journal style book about the different types of friendship.  I’m enjoying it so far.

Each week we do an art journal entry based on what we’ve read and/or prompts by the group leader. 

 

My cover.

My album is an 8x8 scrapbook album (easier for me to work with).  I have based my album on the Chinese quote "An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break."

If there was ever a ‘red thread’, it was my meeting Himself.  Me… a small town Missouri girl just graduated from high school.  Himself… a North Dakota farm boy now a Special Forces sergeant stationed in North Carolina. 

Yet God brought us together.

 

Title page.

Simple, breezy...fun. The writing looks 'white' but is actually done with a silver pen. I used that color because of the old Girl Scout song "Make new friends but keep the old; one is SILVER and the other is gold."

 

Prompt 2 – Self Friendship

Our second prompt was to read the section in Chapter 1 on “self friendship” and journal it.

I cruised thru this chapter pretty fast because so much of it was about learning to like yourself and making time for yourself.  That’s never been an issue for me.  Guess you could say I have a very healthy self esteem! 

As I thought about it, I realized there has never been a time that I wasn’t ‘friends with myself’.

As a child, even tho our homes were in nice neighborhoods…we lived around some strange neighbors.  At one home, my friend’s mother would not let him leave the yard… period.  Not to come into our yard to play (yard…not house), not to ride his bike, not to play in the field behind our houses.  (We lived in a very small town with no real crime in the mid 60s – almost ‘Norman Rockwell’).  Anyway, I would get tired of only playing in his yard and would head out into the fields and woods to play and explore.  We moved from there when I was about nine into a nice neighborhood with worse neighbor kids.  To our north was a family of nut cases (the kid my age ended up going to prison for grand theft auto where he was killed) and to our south, that kid ended up being an arsonist who went to prison also.

Needless to say… I played alone a lot.

Now that I’m ‘all grown up’, I still find myself enjoying solitary pursuits.  When I married Himself, he was a Special Forces soldier and was deployed a lot.  When he retired… he went to work seasonally on a ship in the Bering Sea. 

So I am still playing alone a lot.

 

Prompt 3 – Creating New Friendships

 

Prompt 4 – Friendship Nourishment

 

Early in February a challenge at Artist’s Play Room was to create a piece of mail art.  Since I try to send something thru the mail to the babies at least twice a month, I thought I would be fun to start sending their wee gifts in a fancy envelope.  So my very first one was a present that would come in around Valentine’s Day.