Last night in the chat room we had such a wonderful time.  It was great to connect with people I hadn’t talked to at all and others that I hadn’t talked to in a long time.

I hope you can join me Thurs night at 9 PM Eastern time.  It’s very informal and we can laugh, have fun and talk about whatever you want.

Next Tues. night at 8 PM Eastern time we’re going to make a Dreamboard during the chat time.  So bring your magazines, glue, scissors and a piece of poster board or cardboard the size you want your Dreamboard to be. This will not be a formal class, just a fun thing to do.

In case you don’t know what a Dreamboard is – it’s a visualization tool that helps reach your goals, or bring the things you want into your life.  The act of creating it seems to put the goals in your mind, and by seeing your Dreamboard daily it keeps them there, which seems to help you manifest them.

So I hope that you’ll join us next Tues and create your Dreamboard to make all your dreams come true!

Tonight (Tuesday)I will be in the Creative Clown chat room at 8 PM Eastern time. Please join me! There is no topic or agenda. I just want to spend some time with other artsy folks.

If you can’t make it tonight, I’ll be there again Thurs night, so stop by if you can.

To get to the chat room, click the link at the top of this page that says “chat”.

I am celebrating my imperfection today.  I am taking some new medicine and it is making me feel like a slug, so I haven’t done much the past few days.  And you know what?  That’s okay!  American society puts so much importance on our value being in what we produce.  But there’s so much more that’s important than that.

I see perfectionism killing creativity every day.  If we didn’t have this perfect ideal of whatever looming over us, it would be so much easier to just enjoy all the things we do.  So, I’m making a conscious effort to pat myself on the back for all the ways I flip society off by being imperfect.

For example, I am messy, I am a picky eater, I smoke too much, I don’t sleep enough,  I cuss and I don’t send birthdays on time – ever!

So there!

This is a repeat of a post that I lost when my blog crashed a few months ago.  It is one of my favorites so I’m bringing it back.

He was my first born.  He was my baby.  He was so incredibly bright, sweet and unique.  He was 19 years old.  There”s nothing that could have prepared me for this day or kept it from hurting.  I just wasn’t ready.  But he was.  So I helped him move.

After 19 years of knowing where he was all the time; knowing if he”d eaten; knowing if he had clean clothes to wear, how could I leave him alone?  I felt like I wasn”t going to be a mother anymore.   How could I still be his mother when he was so far away?  This is it, I felt.  I have one more day to do it all.  There isn”t enough time!  I panicked.  Had I said everything I meant to?  What if I”d missed something really important?  What if he forgot and I wasn”t there to remind him?  I wanted to hold him in my lap and rock him.  I wanted to hum the lullaby I”d hummed so many, many times.  I wanted to read all his favorite books over and over.  I wanted to sew the tail back on his stuffed lion like he”d asked me to so long ago and I had forgotten.

But, instead, I helped him unpack.  I put dishes in his cabinet, food in his pantry and organized his kitchen.  I put candles in their holders, hung the skull on the wall and helped him alphabetize his CD”s.

I went to bed that night knowing that when I left the next morning everything would change.  I experienced such pain.  Pain that I would not have thought I could bear.  It felt as though my heart was being ripped out.  And yet, I had a desire to pull my heart out and give it to him.  I couldn”t sleep.  I got out of bed trying  not to wake anyone in the one room apartment.  I was tiptoeing across the room and heard a soft, “Mom?”.  He couldn”t sleep either.

Finding the closet the only place to go and not disturb anyone sleeping, we gathered pillows and candles and quietly went into the closet.  We stayed there in the closet a long time talking.  I told him I was afraid that I hadn”t prepared him well enough, and that I wasn”t ready to let him go.  He told me that he was terrified but needed to do this.  We talked about music and movies.  We remembered family stories.   We budgeted his money and talked about job possibilities and where to shop.  What he knew, but I didn”t say, was that I knew he”d be okay without me, but I didn”t want him to.  What I knew but he didn”t say was that I had always given him  my trust and that”s all he needed to be okay without me.

During those candlelit hours, cuddled in pillows on that closet floor, my son and I shared possibly the most meaningful time or our lives.  We came together as mother and child, then we let each other go.

Creative Clown now has its own chat room!  You will see a link at the top of the page.  Just click on it to join the chat room.

You are free to come here and chat with each other any time you’d like to.  It’s free and you dont’ have to register to use it.

I will be hosting regularly scheduled chats  so be sure and check the blog posts to see the schedule as it develops.  I’m going to be in the chat room tonight at 8PM Eastern Time, if you want to join me.

It’s just for fun!  Come hang out and talk about art and life with other creative types!

I do not define myself by how many roadblocks have appeared in my path.
I define myself by the courage I’ve found to forge new roads.
I do not define myself by how many disappointments I’ve faced.
I define myself by the forgiveness and the faith I have found to begin again.
I do not define myself by how long a relationship lasted.
I define myself by how much I have loved, and been willing to love again.
I do not define myself by how many times I have been knocked down.
I define myself by how many times I have struggled to my feet.
I am not my pain.
I am not my past.
I am that which has emerged from the fire.
~Unknown

I have had a really hard time getting anything done since I got back from my trip.  I’ve been beating myself up over my lack of motivation.  I’ve had what I thought were allergies since I came home, and tonight it dawned on me that I have some sort of respiratory infection.  Duh!  Sometimes I am so out of touch with my body!  I haven’t felt good and that is why it’s been so hard to get anything done.

While I was gone I went to a lot of stores and places where I got a lot of inspiration for some new art projects. I hope to go to some estate sales this weekend because I need some things for these projects that I dont’ have now.  While I was gone, I did get one box of art supplies to bring home, but I forgot it and left it in my son’s car so I still don’t have them here. :::sigh::::

I am home from my trip. It was so good to be with my kids. I need a kid fix pretty often

Here’s a picture of me and my granddaughter, Bella, at her 2nd birthday party. She is such a diva!! I’m learning a lot from her. Seriously! She was born assuming that she has the right to have what pleases her and she takes no guff of anyone, let alone her three older brothers.

I was not born with that innate sense of what’s good for me. So I’m watching her and adapting. Many times I find myself in a situation that feels uncomfortable and I don’t know what to do, so I think “What would Ms Bella do?” When I do that, it’s always easy to find what I want and to just ask for it. The trick is believing that I have the right to ask for it.

I’m glad to be back to my blog and have some exciting things coming up soon. I’m late with the newsletter this week – so sorry! But stay tuned because as soon as I adjust out of vacation mode, I’ll have some really fun things to share!

I am leaving tomorrow for another trip to TX.  I am going to get some things that are in storage, including some art supplies. Yea!!

I’ll also be celebrating my granddaughter’s second birthday.  Sadly, I am also going to see my ex mother-in-law probably for the last time.  She is 92 and in poor health.

I’ll post when I can from the road, but plan to be gone about a week.

I decided that today I would draw my stripey feet. I used Dewent watercolor pencils. I colored it in and then went over most of it with a wet brush. You can see the bottom few rows that I didn’t go over. I like that it takes away the white areas in the color and makes it smoother, but I don’t like that you can’t (or at least I can’t) control the shading. The color is on the paper and when I use the wet brush it moves the color around but I can’t seem to control where it goes.

Anyone have any suggestions for me on using watercolor pencils?

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