Night Thoughts ...

 I believe the tendency to insomnia increases as you get older - apparently you just need less sleep?  Well its an occasional problem with me, particularly (and perversely) when I get over-tired.  That's what I was trying to journal about on this occasion .... and yes I was doing it in the middle of the night :(

 I had this blank background ready prepared, from a time when I'd been experimenting with painty effects.  As you know, I have a slightly uneasy relationship with paint - I know I ought to love it and splash it about liberally, but that just doesn't come naturally to me.

I'd even done blotches by adding paint with a baby wipe on this, so in the middle of the night all I had to do was write on the page - and you can see below what was uppermost in my mind at 2.30 am!  I cut this picture out of a newspaper, don't you just love it?  I liked the image of a grey-faced sleepless person, and this somewhat fed up looking expression really hit the spot in terms of how I was feeling.  As usual I just wrote the words in a simple print to begin with.

As you can see below I then went back to embellish the letters and add bits and pieces - not sure that I can explain the whys and wherefores of any of it (bear in mind it was the middle of the night) I was just sort of going with the flow and waiting to see if I felt tired ...

And this was the final version - that poor chap got more and more grey-faced and haggard looking, and the red eyes really finished him off!  Obviously there had to be some dotty embellishments there somewhere as well.

Still it was better to go downstairs and produce this than lying awake, tossing and turning, and wondering why I wasn't asleep wasn't it?  Things to do when struck by insomnia No.1 - go and play in your art journal :D

SEEN DANCING

This was one of those times when I just put pretty colours on the page and waited for inspiration to strike - which took some weeks!  I'd intended to use the page portrait wise, but it insisted on being landscape, and it was only when I turned it sideways that I was able to write on it.  I'd come across this quote some time back and written it down in the notebook of ideas I keep for journal inspiration.   I have a wheel stamp by Stampin Up which I was able to wiggle along the lower edge - the music couldn't have straight lines could it?

I deliberately took a picture at the stage above so you could see how I put the words down very simply at first, and then go back and sort of "fill out" the lettering, adding thickness and shaping.

The white parts above were done with my Posca Paint pen, and the finer details added below were done with a Uniball Signo pen.  These are the best of all for white coverage - and no they're not paying me to say that!  You know how I love doodling about anyway, so lots of it here.

You won't be surprised to know that I'm somewhat distraught at the recent vote going against Women Bishops, and deeply sad about the result.  I was angry at first - we've waited SO long, but I can't hold on to that.  However, this quotation seems just right for my attempts to understand those who opposed the Measure - they just can't hear the music.  We will find a way forward somehow, whether together or apart .... I just wish that the church didn't look like an outdated eccentric dinosaur, totally irrelevant to much of the world.  :(

SEARCHING ....

I made this page some weeks ago, when I felt unsettled and uncertain, wondering if there was something I was truly MEANT to do, but not feeling that I'd found it.  I decided that what I had to do was open up my mind and heart to the possibilities that might be out there by doing something new with a journal entry.  So I drew this blob thingy.  I liked it - curved sinuous shapes always please me more than straight lines and boxes.  I gave it a stripey edge and attempted a bit of shading into the corners, but then I got stuck and left it for a while ...

When I came back to it suddenly I was off - with a vision for the orange and yellow centre kind of representing the side of me that's brave, bright and adventurous.  The patterns around the splash of colour represent the neat, obsessively organised side of me that needs to control everything in order to feel safe.  I know what I mean even if it doesn't quitemake sense to you - after all a person can be both of these things at the same time can't they?  The compulsively organised me tends to come to the fore if I feel a bit threatened I think, or insecure in some way.

I'd really like to be the kind of artist who can throw paint around with total abandon, but I'm not, although I do try to be sometimes.  I finished all the doodly drawing (which of course I loved) around the outer edge and the inside was still empty because I didn't know what to write in it, having no answers.  So what I eventually wrote some days later came from the heart - that perhaps in the end it is the journey which matters and not necessarily reaching a goal or destination.  Its taken me quite a long time to be comfortable with that - I'm a person who always wanted to measure progress, tick off goals as I achieved them, so its a huge thing for me to say that the journey itself is enough, and that it doesn't have to lead anywhere but home .....

I'M A BRAVE GIRL ...

I've often mentioned the Brave Girls Club of whom I'm a long time member and fan!  I did their original course Soul Restoration 1 a while back and loved it - it was a lot of time to commit to the process but so worth the effort. It was a lot about healing the past and  I often go back to the book I made as part of the course.  So anyway, I'm doing Soul Restoration 2 now (the time just seemed so right) which is about actively working for the life you want to live, rather than just plodding along dealing with whatever comes, and this is the book I've made for this one.  Its actually not so much a book as a ring binder (I've covered an old one) because Melody who runs the course anticipated that you might want to go on adding to it in the future, so I thought this format would work best.

I used stuff from my (large) stash of scrapbook papers to do the covers, and plan to cover the result with clear plastic eventually, because its so pretty that I don't want lots of handling (which I expect it to get) to spoil it.  One of the first parts of the course was to write your own mission statement - harder than it sounds.  You had to write a long one and a shorter version - my long one is in the envelope and the short one is written out below it.

I thought putting this together would take ages, but because of the work we'd done in Week 1, this week 2 exercise was actually easier than I'd thought.  The Week 3 exercise of setting some goals is proving MUCH harder than I thought, and is taking some time ...

So a bit of a change from my journal, but very much in the same vein of striving for personal growth and development.  I'm a brave girl and can cope with that, even if some of it is scary.   I am still working in my journal as well, but this project is in the forefront of my mind right now so  I thought I would share it.