Tagged & Pock-et-full

I’ve been tagged by my new friend Kim Logan in England with this meme.  Kim is far more interesting than I am, but I’ll do my best for her.

I’m supposed to divulge 7 unusual things about myself.  Here goes:

(1) I have never said "no" to a stray animal.  at one point we had 12 cats. currently, we have 5 cats, 2 dogs, and a lizard.

(2) My postgraduate degree is in law, even though art is my life.

(3) As a child, I believed the trees and the flowers talked to me.  My 8 year old daughter now believes the same thing, even though I never told her about my experience at her age.

(4) Like Kim, I always tell the truth about my age and weight.  I’m going to be 47 in July.  I’ve packed on 25 pounds since last fall (yuck) but have gone back to Pilates and started dieting, and am hoping to return to the "normal" me.

(5) For about a decade, I only wore black clothes.  I wasn’t depressed, I just liked black.  I still have probably five suits in my closet from that period (they no longer fit).

(5) My first nickname for my dh was Sugar Muffin.

(6) I always desperately wanted siblings growing up as an only child and am eternally grateful that my three first cousins adopted me as a quasi-sibling.  I’m so happy that I have four children so they will always have each other.

(7) I like anime movies from Japan as much as my kids do and just invested in a full set of Miyuzaki movies. 

There!  I did it!  As your reward for sitting through that, here are some photos from my new round robin book that i am mailing out to Karen tomorrow morning.  The RR is called pock-et-ful and it is a concept Karen and I came up with while we were driving back from Art & Soul.  Each artist made a book full of pocket pages, and each artist makes art to put in a pocket in each book and also gets to art up the pocket.

My is by far the most grunge of the books.  It’s very rough and open to lots of interpretation.  I wanted each artist to play with the concept of the kind of art would they make if no one else was ever going to see it — making art that made them happy without thinking about anyone else.

  I sewed my little bags out of both paper and fabric and clipped them onto pages in the journal, which has rusted tiles for covers.  I didn’t like the pockets empty, so I decided to fill them each up with a little something —  a vintage cabinet card photo, a turn of the century postcard, a piece of fabric.

  And off my little book will go.  I can’t wait to see what it will be filled up with when it comes back.