Mail Art and why I've been gone so long.

#20

#21

#22

#23

 Some lovely person, who's a member of IUOMA (International Union of Mail Art) sent me a piece of very old newspaper, plus a friend gave me some old books. I enjoyed playing with this old paper, though carefully, as some of it was quite fagile.  I felt like I was getting back to my collage "roots."


I made a number of these red cards to send out to friends. Now I want to make lots more in various color themes.

  Hostage colors, someone once said - must have red for Valentine's day, and red and green for Christmas, etc. But red IS such a lovely color.

Here's Mona with a red ball floating in the water behind her. She doesn't seem to notice, or doesn't care, or maybe she's the one that tossed it in?

If you haven't checked out my latest Mona post, check HERE.

So things have been busy. We went to New Orleans NOLA for a few days to celebrate our 48th wedding anniversary. Yes, we've been married since we were babies, in case you wondered. It was sooo much fun. That is a fabulous city for celebrating. They're all about hospitality!

And I've been working on a couple projects, which I'll tell you about in a few weeks.
And I've been spending time hanging out with our grand-girl, who is delightful.
And I've been knitting the never-ending toddler sweater project, which I unravel and reknit trying to get it right.

I'm actually trying to distract myself at this moment, by writing this post, as I've news from afar that my mother is in hospital. She's 101, so one never knows.
So it goes.

Do you have something you do when you want to distract yourself from thinking about something you don't want to think about? Share, if you'd like.

#71 and another scary thing.

 This is such a cliche, yes? And so close to St. Valentine's day, too.  I had an incomplete deck of cards left over from an Artist Trading Card workshop and I had this heart diagram from an old book, so what else could I do but use them for the letter "H" postcard.  Because I was worried about the postal machinery chewing this up, I covered it with laminating plastic. I was given quite a little stack of it by my neighbor a few weeks back. I'm not sure I like the edge it created around the playing cards. Hopefully, however, this will make it through the machinery. It's going to someone in my same zip code so should arrive in a day and I'll get input from the recipient. She's getting it because her last name starts with an "H."

Here's something scary. I cut slices of my ciabatta a couple of days ago and found this!! I put it near the toaster for the portrait, which seemed appropriate. I did not toast it in the end, however, just slathered it with butter and strawberry preserves. Yum!

Bonding

My younger sister and I had a bonding experience. We gave ourselves purple hearts. Ever since we each broke something in our bodies spring of 2006 (withing a month of each other), and went through our healing, we talked about getting a tattoo. Lots of talk about what to do resulted in nothing. Then I went to LA for Mom's birthday and, one night, the idea of a heart came up. I'd been thinking about it, after reading my friend Sara's last dialogues with her Mom, where she'd said "follow your heart."









The heart is purple, the droplets are aqua, it's colorful, kinda comic, joyful, and was a good thing for us to do.