white picket fence

my sacrifice this Lent. yeah, I'm a little nervous.

(an old art journal page about my terrible attention span. this is relevant.)

Soooo. Ahem, hrrrhrm. Here's my announcement. (I know that posting this on my blog & announcing it to the world will make this that much harder to slack off on.) 

I'm giving up the internet during the day, while the kids are awake, for Lent. 

Okay, so. . . maybe some people would laugh about this. Maybe you think "what's the big deal, I do that every day?" My friend Renae has given up the internet entirely for Lent before, and I tip my hat to her.

Listen, it's not entirely practical for me to give up the internet full time. I'm not even sure if you can be an active member of society anymore without email, right? Being online to stay in touch with my family, keep track of our calendar, and work on my fledging little etsy shop are all good and productive things that I don't think are necessary to remove from my life. 

But bear with me. Is this a scenario that looks familiar to you?: "Hm, I wonder what the actress from Punky Brewster is up to these days? URGENT QUESTION!! TO IMDB, POST HASTE!! Well, while I'm on the laptop I might as well check facebook and see if that Anthropologie sweater is on sale and and and etc." Then it's 15 minutes later and David's toast is getting cold or the baby is crying or whatever. It's a cycle that repeats a lot during my days at home and I've known for a while that it's just not the best for me or the kids either. 

I've been reading, hearing, and thinking a lot lately about Quiet. And not just in the auditory sense of like, sitting alone on a mountaintop. But also the, "am I able to tune out the internal distracting chatter to really be in touch with myself, and in prayer and communication with God?" kind of way. It's a question I'm hoping will be a lot clearer after the next 40 days. It's difficult to have internal quiet when you're rushing to fill every spare moment with new information. So that's my hope for Lent: eliminating the distractions, focusing on my family, and finding some Quiet. 

giveaway winners!

Hooray to you! Since I'm feeling generous, I decided to choose 2 winners for my paper pack giveaway. Here are the random generated numbers:

That means Carlene Taylor Simmons and Benzie (Renae!) are my 2 winners. Congratulations friends! I'll be emailing you soon. 

And thanks to all of you for visiting my blog and entering. I really and truly appreciate it. 

shut it down!

Are there any "Cutest Baby Alive" contests going on right now? If so, they need to be shut down immediately. Because obviously this baby is the clear winner. All other contestants, take your diapers and go home. 

Norah is almost 11 months old. Can you believe it? She's crawling and exploring and eating all kinds of messy food. She loves looking at books and stealing her brother's toys. She loves to be held by me (like, a lot, like. ... almost all the time. We're working on that.) She can wave and point and make the signs for "all done" and "more" and she looks so proud of herself. She also loves to share with me and can't understand why I don't want to have a sip of her bottle. So I've gotten pretty good at pretending. 

Her separation anxiety, constant need to be held, and her charming ability to dump the dog's water dish on herself at least twice a day can be a little draining, but come on. . . Look at that baby! I can't ever stay frustrated with her. 

walls notebook: patterns and text

I'm so glad to have my Walls notebook. It's a really nice distraction from other projects or a fun break when I just want to doodle a little. 

In all my graphic design studio classes in college, our professors would assign us unreal amounts of prep work. Like 30, 50, 100 sketches or thumbnails at the beginning of every project. Back then I resented it, and in my work life it never really applied, but I've always seen the value in it. When you force yourself to just keep generating ideas, really fun things can happen. So, that's a really long-winded way of saying: look at all these patterns! I want to draw about ten more pages like this. It was really fun. 

I was inspired by a post about Creative Experiments on the blog Daisy Yellow. Tammy recommended drawing the same word in at least 25 different kinds of lettering. So I took it kind of literally and wrote "over and over and over." ;)

And this. These words are from a Taize hymn (this part is based on Psalm 139) that I love and that we sing pretty often in church. I find myself writing out scripture passages or parts of hymns sometimes; working on hand-drawn typography feels like my own form of meditation. Just writing the words and filling them in and letting them sink into the open spaces in my head. 

What are your favorite things to doodle?

january pages (part 1)

Some of these have a story I need to share, and some stand on their own. The stories will come later. For now, everything else:

It really is too bad that you can't see these in person, feel the weight of the paper, see the textures. The paper in this vintage yearbook is just SO lovely and tactile. Of course, I realize this is because back in the olden days they actually chopped down trees to make paper instead of just endlessly recycling other paper. So hey! Making art from old things is not only aesthetically pleasing, it's also environmentally friendly! Score one for me and my weird art-making techniques.