Walking in This World: Discovering a Sense of Authenticity and Dignity

Last night was the final gathering of my Walking in This World 10-week Creative Cluster. We did our usual check-ins, then took time to share a pot of Stone Soup (yep, there really is a stone in the pot), a tradition I learned from my Artist's Way mentor, Gretchin Lair of Scarlet Star Studios in Portland.





After a bowl of amazingly delicious vegetable soup (and some hearty Great Harvest Dakota bread), it was time for the women to share their Omega Projects, another tradition from Gretchin. The Omega Project serves as a capstone to our ten weeks together, a final artistic project created by each woman.

Kathleen made a mobile using the ATC cards we created a couple of weeks ago.

Katherine created a collage using images from her Walking in This World experience and then made up individual cards for each of us!


Jill did mini collages on four glass tiles . . . .


Dawn made two sno-globes! Fanciful and funky they were.




Destree shared her work in progress, a People Web, which was inspired by a dew-covered spider web she saw last fall. She has woven fishing line back and forth across a large frame and will later attach different sized little round mirrors to emulate the dew on a web.



Shelby is a photographer and shared some self-portraits she did for her Omega Project.



One of the ladies shared her Walking in This World experience in this way:

In the dreary and depression soaked days of winter and joblessness, I took a step to come out of my self and spend extraordinary and exotic time with a group of women who value the creative soul within us all. My soul was ecstatic. In our too short time together, I have re-committed myself to art, bought a condo, and begun a journey with a man who seems to be my life partner. He and I are good together and I am uplifted every day with hope, vitality, playfulness, and an honoring of who I am. There are no coincidences. Thank you, dear sisters for your presence in this life.

Twirling in My Studio

After a long weekend of helping with a garage sale and schlepping a bunch of stuff from Astoria to Salem, I woke up Monday morning feeling a little antsy and anxious. I did my Morning Pages and from them, realized what I needed was a big dose of studio time and in particular, to work on several, mostly small, unfinished projects. I got what I needed to get done at my computer, then dashed over to the studio, arriving by 11:00 a.m. I didn't get home until almost 5:30 p.m.It was just what I needed. I won't go into too much detail right now about what I worked on, but in a nutshell, I touched the following projects: My Visual Journal, a "page" for a baby book at ArtFest, a Steampunk card for a deck project, a little heart art I've been doing just for fun, my "name tag" for the Portland Art Collective monthly meetings, and the current piece that I'm working on in collaboration with Destree. Here's the studio as I put things out I planned to work on.






By the end of the day, I had actually made quite a bit of progress!

But then, there's always more to do!

Walking in This World: Discovering a Sense of Camaraderie

Colorful wool roving was the focus of our Tuesday night Walking in This World session. I thought it would be fun for the ladies to learn how to felt soap, something I learned last October when I attended the Portland Art Collective's fall retreat. The technique had been taught by Tory Brokenshire (who is now my friend!) and I thought for sure I had taken notes (I'm sure I did, I just can't find them). So as I was preparing for Tuesday's class, I frantically got in touch with Tory asking for her guidance and a refresher course on the process of felting wool. Tory to the rescue -- and by the end of Tuesday's group, we had each made a lovely bar of felted soap! Here's our colorful journey:

A Winter Respite

I've just returned from spending five days on the Central Oregon Coast in Bandon, Oregon. We had horribly rainy weather on two days, and gloriously beautiful sunny weather on three days; that's the way it is this time of the year. While Howard golfed 72 holes of golf over two days, I spent my time reading in the sun (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle) and playing in one of my visual journals (it's a self-portrait journal that I started last October at Art and Soul in LK Ludwig's class, The Poetic Eye).







When we came together on non-golf and non-art days, we roamed around the area in search of good thrift, junk, and antique stores. Since my regular camera is being repaired and I didn't want to lug our big 35 mm around, I didn't take many photos during the trip. But I did snap a few shots of my rusty, antiquated treasures.