A Peek

Oh, I had sooooo much fun yesterday with Deitra and Donna! I didn't finish any of my three mini-books, but I did do all of the other things I mentioned on Thursday... yes, even the belly-dancing! I laughed so hard that people turned and stared... and I kept right on laughing. If you knew how I used to hold my laughter in and try to laugh as quietly as possible you would know what a victory this is! Awesome, Dude. Pure awesome.

I want to keep working on my books this week, so until I finish any of them here are a few peeks into what we did yesterday!

My favorite class of the day was paint. watercolor. doodle., our first class. We got to use those Neocolor II's I've been talking about. They are water-soluble crayons, and they are awesome.


Oh my goodness how I love a new set of colorful pens/pencils/crayons arranged so prettily by color! I played with these crayons for a second when I first got them delivered, and I must say that on regular plain old cardstock they left a lot to be desired. I used them as I'd use watercolor pencils, only they didn't work as well. Wow, imagine that, crayons didn't work as pencils as well as pencils do. Duh! That's like trying to use a screwdriver on a nail or hammer in a screw; good tools wrongly used. So in class we learned how to use them as crayons, and they are freaking awesome crayons.

This page is a chipboard arrow primed in manila paint, then colored with three colors of crayons (orange, white, and yellow) and then "painted" with water to dissolve and blend the colors.


I think I'm addicted. This is the first book I'm going to work on finishing. [Oh, by the way, underneath the page is an old catalog--I put it on my work surface and painted away and when the page got messy I just flipped to the next page and voilà! a clean work surface and no unwanted color transference.]

Then we had an hour break for shopping lunch before the next class, 100 eyelets or die trying. :) This class was smaller so we had more chance to chat with Donna. I asked her a question about Cathy's upcoming BPS class since I know those two are friends. So Donna just called her up on the speakerphone! It was pretty funny; Cathy loves Deitra's accent and just couldn't get enough of her at Inspired... so Donna had Deitra start talking and Cathy immediately said, "IS THAT DEITRA?!?!"

By the way, the discussions we had in this class made me want to look into the different "types" of people. Everyone talks about "Type A's" but you never hear anything about the other types... when I mentioned this in class the MCP (Most Competitive Person) in the room said, "That's because they're the only ones who matter!" Oh my goodness! Well, alrighty then. Why don't you tell us how you really feel? :) I am "Type A" in a lot of ways (perfectionistic and over-achieving) but I'm completely not competitive (although I am into fairness, which is often mistaken by certain family members as competitiveness... but that is a whole different blog post!). And I'm definitely not hostile about it! So I'm going to research the whole Type thing (if you have a good resource for me let me know!).

Back to the photos! These pages are pre-eyelets, obviously. :)


After this class we had a three-hour break before the last class. I had wondered what in the world we'd do with three hours, but they flew by in an instant and we ended up rushing to get dinner so we could get back in time! We could have filled eight hours, let alone just three!

The last class was the journey of me. Of all three books this is probably my least favorite, but it was the one that gave me the most ideas for different ways to make books (and one super-cool idea for taking photographs).


It is sort of a journal-book, so I can't imagine that it will ever really be "finished," but I'll show you when I've completed a bit more of it than I have already.

Enjoy what's left of the weekend! I'm off to color! :)