While I'm posting links, here's some footage of San Francisco in 1906. The camera is on a streetcar so it's rolling through downtown SF, showing what everything looked like only four days before the earthquake. My great-grandpa lived in the city at the time of the quake. He was 14.

It's fascinating (for me, at least) to see the people walking around and the old cars and know that this isn't a movie set. Check out the ladies' hats at 3:06!

I've been enjoying this blog of Vivian Maier's photos. The blogger bought a huge batch of negatives at an auction without any idea what he was getting. They turned out to be the work of a woman who took thousands of photos on the streets of Chicago in the 50s and 60s but apparently never showed them to anyone.

Someone on Facebook posted the link and now I can't remember who it was. If it was one of my friends here, thank you!

I don't want to post any of the photos here without permission, but you should check out the blog.

Since I'm back to going on daily walks, I'm taking a lot of texture photos. It's a good time of year for that.

I was hoping to go to First Thursday tonight but it's not going to work out due to family stuff. Buuuuut, I just remembered that Christian doesn't have to work tomorrow! That just improved my mood quite a bit. Maybe we'll go to some galleries tomorrow. We won't get to see the artists selling their work on the street, or any of the usual hubbub, but on the other hand it won't be as crowded. Besides, it's raining steadily and there might not be much going on anyway.

Fungus on a log in my yard. It reminds me of hobbit architecture.



More crocuses, this time from someone else's yard.

Photo for today. :-)

I'm excited because the sun is shining and I started a new painting. I've been reading Rethinking Acrylics and it's given me some interesting ideas for materials I already have, as well as a shopping list for the near future. More tooooooys!

On the down side, I pulled out one of my larger blank canvases and it's warped. I'm not sure if that happened while it was in storage or if it came that way. It was probably from being stored, since it was packed in a box with several others. I looked around for ways to straighten it. One person said she was able to weight a canvas' corners and fix it that way but other people said there's not much hope other than restretching. We'll see. My skills don't extend to stretching my own canvases. Yet.

Edited to add the song I've been listening to over and over. Not sure why the uploader titled it "Sunday Shining." It's a cover of Bob Marley's "Sun is Shining"--appropriate for today!

I uploaded this one on Facebook a while back but never posted it here. A friend visited in December and we drove out to the Columbia Gorge, where the fog was so dense we stood at Crown Point and couldn't even see the river. I don't think I've ever seen fog this thick before. It was pouring down the hill from the right. If I'd had more time I would have taken a lot more pictures!

I've been waiting for the crocuses to poke up and they're here! I have a feeling I take this same shot every year but I don't care. I just love them.

It seems early for nesting but on my walks I've been seeing broken eggshells under trees. They're pretty big so they might be from crows. We have a lot of busy crows in the neighborhood.

judywatt recently linked to a great blog called Abstract Minimalism. It's written by an older gentleman in the UK. One of his past posts was about the wabi sabi qualities of dead hosta leaves and how he can't resist taking photos of them. I also like photographing wilting flowers and dry stalks. So here's my wabi sabi contribution for today:



Edited to add: Here's another view of the leaf. Which one do you prefer? I can't make up my mind between the two.

In the woods at the nature park, we spotted this guy crossing the path. According to my field guide, it looks like a Roughskin Newt.

The weather was surprisingly nice this morning. Maybe we're heading into our usual two weeks of false spring. It was great to feel the sun on my walk!

We started watching the Twilight movie last night. They did a good job with the setting and atmosphere. It's nice to see the actors infuse some personality into the characters, too. When I told Christian the basics of the story he said, "So it's like Roswell?" Once he said that, I kept noticing more and more similarities. I wonder if Stephanie Meyers has seen Roswell.

It was so beautiful today we went for a walk in the park.

Hope you all enjoyed the holiday!

One day recently an idea popped into my head and wouldn't go away. I felt like doing something different, sketching on fabric and then stitching it up into a primitive ornament. It didn't turn out as edgy as I expected. I seem to default to cute. But I'm pretty happy with the results, and the process was fun. I'll probably be making more of these in the near future.

I'm behind on reading my friends page so now I'm going to see what all of you have been up to lately!

A recent photo from the backyard. I'm sure those leaves have all blown away now. We had a big windstorm last night that blew down a section of our old fence. Oops.

From a walk in the woods this weekend. We walked over the same path a couple of times and each time I wanted to stop and take pictures of this tree. The range of colors was so amazing. As I tinkered with this in Photoshop I could see why. There are so many subtle shades of red, brown, purple and green here.

When I was younger fall was my favorite season because it had the moodiest weather. Now it's become my favorite because it's the best for photography.

Our backyard is FULL of mushrooms. There are at least four different kinds. This is the most spectacular, a Fly Amanita almost as wide as a dinner plate. There's a stand of four or five of them but this is the biggest.

Aidan was impressed. I gave him the speech about never eating any mushrooms he finds. Something is eating them, though. I'm not sure if it's slugs or squirrels.

After I posted yesterday I remembered that I still had 1000 Artist Journal Pages from the library. I glanced through there and was inspired by the huge variety of styles. judywatt is in there!

I'm trying to get back to editing my pictures when I upload them. Here's one from today's walk.

I was going to do NaNoWriMo for November but I didn't want to write a traditional novel. Since I've been trying to get deeper with my art and uncover my own symbols and meaning, I thought it would be neat to stretch the limits of NaNo by writing something totally stream-of-consciousness.

Then I started worrying that my consciousness would not be able to stream for 2000 words a day.

I had intended to re-read books like Poemcrazy and Wild Mind for inspiration. A strange thing happened. These books are all about words and I got irritated by the thought of dealing with words.

I had planned to try making an art journal with whatever images came out of each day's writing. I found that I was much more excited about the journal part than the writing part.

I decided to create my own challenge of writing around 300 words a day to get me going, then working on a journal page out of that.

Mixed results so far.

Man, this journaling thing is not as easy as it looks. First there's the challenge of just making a goodlooking page. I know a lot of techniques but it's not easy to combine them into something cohesive on the page. Then there's the problem of having to wait for everything to dry between layers, so each page turns into an all-day project. And finally, what am I supposed to write in this thing?? I feel a lot of confusion between the type of journal pages I see people sharing online, and the type of thing I would normally write in my journal.

Little by little I'm creeping along. I spent the whole weekend watching tutorials that Teesha Moore kindly posted on Youtube. I followed along and did a spread in her style.

Her pages are absolutely beautiful but it turns out her style is different from mine. I'm more of a "tear it off and slap it down" person, especially for something like this. It's important to me that it be spontaneous. I got frustrated with all the different stages. Of course, if I didn't plaster everything with gel medium it would dry a lot faster. Teesha uses adhesive tape so her work is faster and neater and her pages don't buckle.

But to me, the mess is part of the appeal. I like the idea of slapping something down that captures my mood for the day.

Next up, Juliana Coles, with her "Extreme Visual Journal" style. Her methods are geared toward getting at the raw heart of things and they're supposed to be scary. Which is good, because they terrify me.

That was a lot of rambling. Here's a random photo from the other night:

In case you haven't heard, November is Art Every Day Month. This is a daily challenge similar to artsomofo but organized through Leah's website. It's a little cumbersome because people post links to their blogs and you have to click on the different links to see what they're doing, but there's also a Flickr group.

It looks like a great group of people so if you didn't get enough daily art in October, you can sign up for this. Leah stresses that you can sign up any time so don't worry about missing the start of the month.

I looked at my Etsy shop stats this morning and my Ice Cream Sandwich cat toy got almost 450 views overnight. I don't think it's featured in an Etsy treasury but I have no idea where else it showed up. These little mysteries drive me crazy!

Oh well, I'm glad to get the exposure wherever it happened. Maybe it will show up later on Google.

From a walk last week. I wish today was as pretty. It's dark and pouring. If I'm going to get anything done I'll need to turn on all the lights in the house and crank up some energetic music.

I just looked over my 101 Things in 1001 Days list. Turns out I had completed several things this summer without really noticing. Those were the easy ones, the things that weren't too much of a stretch to do. I went to the Seattle Art Museum while on vacation and took Aidan to the Enchanted Forest while my mother-in-law was visiting. Things like that.

Actually, it seemed effortless to go to the museum while I was in Seattle, but one of the reasons I chose Seattle for vacation was because I had that item on my list.

There are a lot of items that I don't care much about anymore, either because my goals have changed or because I was padding the list in the first place. I have a little over a year to finish up and I expect about half of them won't be done. I'm not going to work on crossing off items that don't fit my current goals and it seems unfair to just delete them. So lots of money will get donated to charity in the end, which is also a good outcome.

( The state of the list now. )