I'm In Love

Today my husband and I celebrate our 28th Wedding Anniversary.  All these years, two children and all my crazy creative fads and he has stuck around.  I am looking forward to celebrating tonight on the town with a nice dinner in Boston. Hopefully the rain will clear up like it is supposed to, otherwise we will be driving to a nice local restaurant for a nice quiet dinner.  Boston is fun but we like to go into the city by train and then walk around and that is no fun in the rain.  Crossing fingers that the weather chooses to celebrate with us!



So I decided this weeks blog post will be about things I am loving right now in my creative life.

In the limelight of this loving feeling is my knitting!  Just two sticks and some string and you can end up with some beautiful things.  Yet it is more than that....the beautiful colors and soft loftiness of the yarn, the repetitiveness of the stitches, the magic of cables and heel turns just keeps calling me back to make something new.  Here is a most recent Finished Object that needs blocking.
Project Stats:
Name:  Bridger Cowl
Yarn:  Flight of Fancy (Handspun by me!)
Designer: Kris Basta

Spinning yarn is another magical thing about knitting.  Just over a year ago I bought myself a Spinning Wheel.  It is a Lendrum and I named her Lexi, as she was purchased from an Alpaca Farmer outside Lexington KY.  I have enjoyed watching the process of turning beautifully dyed fibers into yarn and knitting them. This cowl started as this fiber:

Then I spun it into this yarn:
I love the magic in this.  I am still so new to this process that I still cannot intentionally spin something.  I am in awe of the spinners that can look at fiber and say, I want the outcome to be "THIS" and they can get that look.

I'm still Tangle'ing away at Zentangles.  This week I participated in a challenge by:  Diane & Carolien
to use the Zentangles that start with the letters F-M-T.  This was a lot of fun.  Here is the result, I am calling this my Tangled Landscape.  It reminds me of hills, water and mountains.  I used the following Tangles for this picture:  TEARCE by Pam Pincha-Wagener, MEER by Maria Thomas and FOOTLITES by Carole Ohl.  I just love the combination of these three tangles together.

My last love of the week is Writing Letters.  I don't care what anyone says, handwritten letters are an art form of the past and I am so glad I have found a couple of Pen-Pal sites on Ravelry.  I have met a few interesting people and I am enjoying writing and corresponding with them.  It is so fun to find people that share your creativity and passion.  I have received some very sweet gifts from people that will help to further my creative pursuits to living a life filled with color, patterns, textures and things that make me smile.  Everyone I have met so far have been lovely people.  I also am continuing with the PostCrossing.  I have sent out my first four postcards and I have just gotten the address for #5.  My posts have been sent to Germany, Russia, China, Netherlands and soon to Taiwan.  I am still anxiously awaiting my first received post.  I hope it is from somewhere interesting!  

I will leave you now with this week's quote: "I have found that if you love life, life will love you back." by Arthur Rubinstein

Meeting Challenges

Where do you get the inspiration to create beautiful things?  Do you create as a career, to make things to use for gifts, or just for fun?  What holds your attention so you continue to create?

I ask myself these questions a lot.  Art and crafting use a lot of supplies that can get costly, so why am I willing to make that investment in this form of self expression?  I do not make things to sell, though if someone would ask me to make them something, I would.  I don't even make things to use as gifts.  Honestly, most of the people in my real world don't really understand what I do.  I've gifted a few items but not very often.  I think that I do it because it brings me pleasure and enjoyment.  I find I am a process artist/ crafter.  I enjoy the process of creating something, not so I can have the object, but just so I can broaden my skills and learn more techniques.  This goes for all of the different mediums I have worked with over the years.  This brings me back to my first question.  If I really don't have a purpose for what I do, I just want to do it, where does my inspiration come from?

Challenges - the internet is full of art and crafty challenges.  I love a good challenge.  There are challenges for everything.  So as I go through my projects this week, I will link you back to the challenges that inspired me to create.

#GreatoutdoorsKAL2015 hosted by Emily Snow of the Knitting Butterflies Podcast group on Ravelry

In order to participate in this challenge you need to knit something while in the great outdoors, and what could be greater than my trip to Walden Pond last Sunday.

Knitting my Conjunction Cowl designed by Susie White

The weather was glorious and the area is so full of literary history.  The pond is a public beach area open for swimming and boating.  There is a trail around the pond that takes you to the original site where Henry David Thoreau lived while writing his book, Walden, or Life in the Woods.
My daughter and I went to Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord MA.  We saw a replica of the cabin, walked the trail that led to the original cabin sight where this sign stood with a quote from Thoreau himself.  If you get the chance to visit Massachusetts I would highly recommend this as a destination.


As challenges inspire me and get me thinking and planning, I also tend to see how many challenges I can make a single item fit into.  Here are the list of challenges being met just for this Conjunction Cowl I am knitting.....
1.  #greatoutdoorskal2015 (mentioned above)
2.  PAL/KAL (PodcasterALong/KnitALong)  hosted by Michelle of Actually Kniiting Podcast
3.  Alphabet KAL by Lisa Beamer in the 90%Knitting Podcast
4.  Around Your Neck KAL by Diane of the Suburban Stitcher

It's not just the knitting that has me addicted to Challenges.  There are a lot of challenges out there for the Zentangles as well.  This week I combined a few different challenges into this simple Zentangel design named Bunzo.  You can find directions on how to draw Bunzo here.

Bunzo was designed by Maria, one of the Zentangle founders.  This was a new to me pattern.  I have never used this in any of my doodles before. Bunzo was introduced to me from a Blog Challenge posted on the "Madebyjoey" blog.  She is running an alphabet challenge right now and Bunzo was the Tangle chosen for the letter "B".  Check out these alphabet challenges using the link above.

I also used this Tangle design to incorporate into a couple of other challenges.  Check out these challenges and websites:
1.  IamthedivaCZT - Challenge #222 - this challenge was to use color in your Tangle design.

2.  Twinkle, Twinkle - Summer of Color 5 (SOC) - this meets the Week 1 challenge which was from a week ago.  Here she is pairing up 2 shades of one color with another color. The first week was 1-Blue + 1-Blure + 1 - Green.  This is not specific to any medium or art process.  If you created something, anything, using the colors for that week you can post your creation.
After seeing some of the examples posted, I can see my art journals coming back out and all my paints and stamps.  I put them away when I started knitting and I need to incorporate all my loves back into my life.

Thanks to my discovery of Pen-Pals again, I am also starting to pull out all my paper crafting supplies again.  I used to have a craft table in my basement that is not working for me so in my head I have this idea of setting up a new workspace.  More to come with that later.

This week I want to leave you with a finished knitted object from this week.  Yesterday we drove to NY to celebrate the recent wedding of my cousin and the soon expected birth of their first son.
We also go to meet our other new cousin, Leo.  Unfortunately for the rain and cold he was bundled up all day so we did not really have a chance to see him.  Now that I delivered the present to him I can post it publicly.  I finished a baby sweater for him.

Sweater Stats:
Pattern name and link: Beyond Puerperium 
Yarn:  Cascade 220 Superwash
Colorway:  Summer
                                            Yardage:   226 yards








In closing I would like to leave you with another quote from Henry David Thoreau:

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment."

My Creative Life

Welcome.  I am blogging again.
Yes....I am aware this is the 5th blog I have started over the years.
Yes...I do plan on keeping this one going.

I have removed all my previous blogs.  It's not that my thoughts at the time were unimportant, it is the fact that I need a space to assemble all parts of my life into one blog.  Here is where we will travel together on my creative journey with some getaways into my personal life.  I needed one spot to cover it all.  Together we will travel.  There will be family and friends that drop in, but mostly we will talk about my daily excursions through my creative life.  I want a place to share with the world what I am creating, why I'm creating, how I'm creating and the joy I get out of each of the processes I do.

Most people find  a hobby and stick with it to the end.  You will see my journey will take you all over the creative map. My primary creative joy is playing with sticks and string in the form of knitting.  Included, is making the string itself by spinning.  I always have multiple knitting projects going at different stages so there is always something to work on to fit my current needs.  I have projects that will make me work and think and others that are Zen to make me relax.  Either way, as long as there are sticks in my hand I am happy.

Talking about Zen time brings me to my second hobby.  This is one that I have played with over the years, but I have recently taken joy in art form and dabbling my hand at it.  It is the art of Zentangles.  What are Zentangles you ask?  Why they are intricate designs, created with pen on paper.  You can learn about them here.  This form of drawing is the perfect way to relax and unwind at the end of the day.  I keep pens and pencils and my zen journal next to my bed and doodle before going to sleep.

This blog will also be a place where I post about my letter writing experiences.  Back in the teenage days, before e-mail, computers, free long distance phone lines, the only way I could communicate with friends that lived far away was to write them letters.  I have found a community of people (ironically enough, thanks to the internet) who also enjoy writing letters so now I am establishing Pen-Pal relationships all over the world. I have always had a love relationship with pretty papers, good pens in a variety of colors, and stickers.  What a great way of putting this love into decorating stationary and sending notes to people.  I know every time I get a note in the mail it puts a smile on my face.  The stationary supplies available now are endless and the sky is the limit on what you are able to create with them.  I also love other people's stories, as we know every one has one.  I probably won't be sharing most of the letters being exchanged but I will be sharing the Post Cards I receive through a site called PostCrossing.  I am a new member to this site.  I have sent out my first 2 post cards and I am so excited to be receiving post cards from all over the globe.

I wish I could say my hobbies in the creative world stop here but they don't.  As we journey together you will learn about many more ways I get inspired and dapple in other creative outlets.  I get inspired by reading, cooking and journaling.  These too, at times, will sneak into the blog as I have something to say about them.  My mind is always on, active and ready to jump into action to make the world a more beautiful place.

This blog will explore my creative experiences, where I am creating, who I am creating with and glimpses into my personal life as it relates to the creative process.  Sit back and I hope you plan on coming along on this journey with me.  I will try to keep things fresh and exciting, but as you all know life is not always like that.  Everyday is an adventure waiting to happen and each week, mostly Sunday mornings, I will be reporting my weekly adventures to you.

My family and I went to see the movie Tomorrowland last night.  I will leave you with a final thought from the movie: Every day is the opportunity for a better tomorrow.