Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Outstanding Soldier

Earlier this week Liat was given an Outstanding Soldier award by the Major General who commands her unit. We are so proud of her, but more than that we are delighted to know that she is appreciated. She deserves it!

Saturday, April 14, 2012

I Like Nonsense

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells." ~ Dr. Seuss


I've been having a lot of fun lately playing around in a composition book given me by a friend years ago. She decorated the cover beautifully and left it up to me to take care of the inside. I've done some journaling and stamping inside, but just lately I've felt more like playing than being serious. It's a challege to saturate the thin pages with color without ruining the paper; I've been using dye based and pigment inks mostly. The really fun part comes when I grab my bag of words I've cut out from magazines and put together a random phrase. Okay, sometimes they're not all that random (I'm learning to be more free form when it comes to art, but I still tend to have control issues when it comes to words).


I especially like to take the photos of models, singers and actors and mess around with them.


What can I say? I like nonsense!

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Socks, at Last


I am very happy to have finally finished these socks (men's size 13). The pair I made before these also used the brownish/gray yarn, and I am rather tired of looking at it! These socks are for a wonderful young man, and I hope he enjoys them.

Now I'm making some purple striped socks for Liat, and believe me I appreciate the change to bright colors! I'm also working on finishing up a shawl. One of these days I'm going to post a photo of all the projects I have on the needles; there are too many of them and some have been neglected for a very long time.

I'm still playing around with my altered book and some other artsy type things. I find a lot of inspiration and ideas on Pintrest (my new addiction). I'll share some in in my next post. I hope you're all having a great week.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Under the C


The next few pages in my altered book are done in the same theme. I finally convinced myself to start cutting up those National Geographics from 1998, and I had a lot of fun finding images to use in this spread of pages. Once again I just played, chosing things that appealed to me as soon as I saw them, not worrying too much about why or where or what. Now that the pages are done, they suddenly make sense to me.


I had fun turning this girl into a mermaid with the body of a shark. Yet she is frightened of the other creatures that inhabit her world.


Hmmm, are you getting the feeling that the inside of my head is a scary place? Ah well, the idea I have for my next altered book is entirely different from this one. This book was started as a sort of therapy when I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of 2008. It was especially helpful to work in the book in those early days of fear and anger, but I can see that even now, almost three years since my last radiation treatment, I still have things I want to express about that experience. I have finished preparing the last few pages of the book and as I did that I realized that I wanted there to be 36 pages, because in gematria (basically a system of assigning numerical values to the letters of the alphabet) the Hebrew word for "life" equals 18, so 18 and its double, 36, (really any multiple of 18) are considered lucky numbers symbolizing life.