Feeling Creative

A few days ago I wrote about my addiction to Pintrest and how awesome it is but this site is changing my life. All of a sudden I have this immense amount of information and images of projects and parties and design and decorating and architecture and style and just color and texture. And with it comes this extremely effective way to organize all this information and keep track of these things with very little effort. I'm feeling so inspired in regards to everything. I want to make stationery, throw endless parties, paint, wear my hair in something other than a messy bun, I want to design a whole entire house and decorate every single corner of it. I want to visit Spain and Greece and Italy. And I all of a sudden have such a passion for all of these things.

If I were the kind of person who flit from thing to thing I would feel excited right now but also know this was likely a phase. Instead I feel a genuine change happening. Trust me, I realize how silly this sounds, but I'm starting to picture myself gardening or buying a house or...building things. It's crazy.

These are some of the things inspiring me right now but really, it's just a tip of the iceberg.

I'm Not Dead

I have a feeling this isn't totally normal but I really like being alone. I like doing things on my own, at my pace, the way I like them. I can be a bit bossy and controlling (less so with the addition of Zoloft to my life) and I can be a pain in the ass to do things with. In school whenever we had group projects I would take over and do the entire thing because I wanted it to be perfect. I'm impatient and while I've gotten better at not just snatching away all the materials and doing something myself it can be a challenge.

The one thing that allows me to be both alone and work on my 'being okay with it not being perfect' skills is painting. I go through phases where I don't paint for months and then all of a sudden something inside me decides to break out the brushes and I feel right again. It's calming. I like the look of a brush stroke so I tend to be more okay with them being where they shouldn't. Sort of like puppies.

I've been kind of MIA from the internet this week. I needed some time to be alone and to paint. I needed some quiet evenings full of bright colors. I have things to show and tell you but for this week I'm just going to not. I'm enjoying this little vacation. I'll be back Monday with clothes and craft projects and adventures.

A Sprinkler...

I've decided that pretty much every piece of available wall in my apartment should have art on it. This is going in my kitchen where I will never stop being happy when I see it.

New Ink!

So, I got two new tattoos this weekend. Both are in white ink as are all the rest of my tattoos. The first one is a tree drawn by Lauren Child, one of my most favorite artists, for a fabric she designed. It's on the side of my left leg on my calf. You can go ahead and ignore how incredibly pale I am.



The other one is a little sleeping cat on the nook of my right arm. I'm thinking of him as my Javier cat except not in a creepy portrait tattoo way. Note the claws. It's all in the details.


I couldn't be happier with them and it makes me smile just to look down at myself. All this adorableness came courtesy of Sean Lanusse at Infinity Tattoo here in Portland, OR.

Way Hardcore

I got two tattoos today! When they aren't covered in plastic wrap, Aquaphor, stencil ink, and dried blood I'll totally show you.

Nothing is forever. Except a tattoo. Also probably being paralyzed. Or dead.

I want another tattoo.

Actually, I want four new tattoos.

I never thought I'd be that girl who was all covered in ink but that whole "once you get one you'll want more" thing is true. I got my first thinking I'd never go under the needle again but here I am a couple years later with four.

I've been collecting images for awhile and here are the things I'm craving. All of these would be in white ink as are all my current tattoos.

There is a book called The Happy Lion by Louise Fatio. When I nannied I read this book to one of my girls nearly every night. In the book there is a lion who lives in the zoo. Every day the people from the town come and visit him and tell him "Bonjour happy lion!" and then, when they leave, "Au revoire happy lion!" One day the zookeeper leaves the happy lion's cage unlocked and he decides that he should return the favor and visit all his friends who come to visit him. When he gets into the city though everyone must have lost their minds because they're running about and yelling and frankly being quite rude to the happy lion who simply came to say hello. I won't ruin the ending for you but the reason this book is so special to me is that every night my little monkey and I would snuggle up and read it, I would tuck her in, turn out the lights, and tell her "Au revoire!" and she would respond "Au revoire Nanny!" Even to this day, years after we've stopped reading this story, she will still call out "Au Revoire Nanny!" when I leave the room after tucking her in. There are few things that bring me as many good feelings as the happy lion. And for that reason I'd like to carry him around with me everywhere.


I love my cat. A lot. Probably kind of a ridiculous amount. But whatever, call me a crazy cat lady, that furball has been with me through a pretty rough time and was one of the few things that got me out of bed some days. I love coming home to him, I love waking up to his cold little wet nose touching mine, I love when he bolts across the apartment in his best attempt to hunt something nonexistent. I would love a little line drawing of a cat with some Javier in him.





I want this, just because I like it. I don't always agree with Bansky's politics but he's fascinating regardless.


Lauren Child is possibly the most talented children's book "illustrator" of all time. I put illustrator in quotes because her work is really mixed media. She creates the most magical worlds that are full of color and pattern and texture. If you haven't read her version of Princess and the Pea you absolutely must. It's so refreshing. I'm not really sure of what I want from her work yet but these are some of the incredible things she's done.

I made some more art. Sort of.

I bought these really fantastic frames at Z Gallerie a few weeks ago. I wasn't really sure what to do with them or where to put them but I fell in love and they were 25% off so I pretty much had to buy them.



See?

So now I needed to decide what to put in them. I have a whole wall of photos in my living room so I wanted to do something different. I decided these were going to go in my hall and I wanted to put wallpaper in them. Except I didn't really want to buy rolls of wallpaper and I also didn't really feel like finding a wallpaper store and flipping through books and pretending I was going to buy something so they would give me samples and then get the wrong sizes and...the whole thing seemed like too much work. Know who has beautiful wallpaper though? Anthropologie. And their samples come in exactly the size I needed, 4"x6".

On their site you can request up to 13 samples of wallpapers so I decided to go big or go home and request the maximum 13. When I got them I was quite impressed.




The samples came in this really adorable envelope that someone had written on in very loopy letters with hearts and it was really just too cute. I wanted to photograph it but I also don't want to post my address and have all of you coming over for snacks and to look at my walls and all the things I super glue together.

Anyways, the samples came with this very handy and informative little card full of info. If I actually intended to buy wallpaper this may have sealed the deal. Also each sample had all this important stuff that I'm sure would be very helpful if you knew about wallpaper and were trying to map out how to hang it.

These are the samples I got.



I only had eight frames so I knew I needed to cut out five of the options. I decided I would use these ones somewhere else.



Then I mixed and matched to my heart's content.



And then two weeks later I got around to hanging them.

I made some art.

I'm pretty sure it's all the glitter involved that makes this my favorite holiday.

Lana and I wanted to do crafts on Thanksgiving but once it rolled around and everyone was together the boys didn't run away to watch football as we had predicted so we stuck around and all played games. But we had all this crafty stuff for a craft project and so we kept making half-hearted plans to make our crafts but instead watched Glee. Until this weekend when we decided we had better do these Christmas crafts before we'd have to wait a whole 'nother year.

Originally I'm not sure what we had in mind for a craft, or maybe we had nothing, but we ended up wandering Michael's one cold November day in search of a Christmas craft when we came upon these in the dollar bin.


I'm not really sure what they were intended for. They each have a hole in the top and come with a ring although I can't think of anything you'd want to do with these that would involve keeping them on a ring. Except maybe making flashcards. But the holes do make it possible to make a pretty awesome garland out of them. We stocked up on tree shapes, stars, and ornament shapes. And also pretty much everything else there. Especially all the sparkly things.


There was a lot of glitter involved.

These are my trees which I left to dry and will tie together with twine to make a garland.


This one has teeny tiny jingle bells on it.



I used to use a lot of letter stickers for something I can't even remember now but it's left me with sheets and sheets of letters that don't really spell anything so I put them to use.



Rhiiiiiiinestoooooones! I tried to type that the way Oprah talks.



This one is Lana's favorite because it looks like a quilt.


This was the first one I did and I definitely contemplated just making an entire garland of these but then the possibilities of other trees lured me in. I think I'm going to do some star garland in this style though and leave it up year round.



This one is my least favorite. I'm not really sure what I was going for so I just kept adding more stuff.



These are the stars that came from the pieces on the quilt style tree.



Little baby Scrabble tile sticker letters! I've had these forever and never do anything with them so this seemed as good a time as any to use them up.



This is my favorite one. When I did it I actually didn't have a ton of control over how it would turn out. I used a glittery puff paint to make the dots then poured little sprinkle heaps of glitter all over in different colors then at the end I just dumped it all off to see what happened.