Orange Dream Monkeys

The tension was finally over: The Orange Dream Monkeys came together for their first meeting last Wednesday night. I wrote about my dream of having a group of women get together monthly to play in their visual journals in a blog post last December (click HERE if you want to read more about the formation of the group). My dream became reality last week. And I wasn't disappointed!

Since all of our meetings will be held in my studio, we're rotating the responsibilities of being a facilitator. The role of facilitator involves: arriving early to set up, bringing a few snacks, keeping everyone on track for our three hours together, and then staying a little late to help clean up. Well, Bobbie was our first facilitator (we're going alphabetically) and she arrived with SEVERAL BAGS of treats. Yes, plural. She had brought grapes, nuts, hummus (two kinds), crackers, chocolate covered pomegranates, strawberries, spicy mango bits, and pita chips. And she had brought cupcakes from Cupcake Jones in honor of Dawn K's birthday. We teased her that she had set the bar pretty high (and Candace is a little nervous about what to bring next month!).


Oh, and did I mention she brought party favors? She had a gift for each of us . . .


Here are the cupcakes from Cupcake Jones in Portland:


We eventually settled down enough to being playing in our pages. As I wrote in my earlier blog post: We decided that for our theme each month we would keep three jars stocked with one-word ideas, the categories being: Color, Concept, Noun. Each month we'll pick a piece of paper from each of the jars and that will be our theme, allowing us to focus on the color, the concept, the noun, or all three. The name of our group was born out of our three-jar plan; we are the Orange Dream Monkeys, which also happens to be the theme for our first meeting in January.









The pages:











We took time at the end of our meeting to sing Happy Birthday to Dawn K!

Then we drew slips of paper from our three jars so we'll know what our theme for February will be. Looks like we'll be focusing on an imaginary black bird!

PS The folding chairs I purchased for the studio are an off white and a little too pristine for my taste. I'd begun putting little marks on them, but at the end of our three hour visual journaling session I told the ladies to make their mark on a chair -- this is the beginning of some furniture art that I'll report on after each session!