ArtCycle!

I am ready to share ArtCycle! It's my new blog that I've dedicated exclusively to visual art made from recycled materials. Hopefully this will help me follow-up on many of the ideas I have and create new work on a regular basis.

Look to the left of this message and you will see the link you can use to hope over there and take a look-see. I hope to update if frequently with new items.

Enjoy.

More scarves

This is the first scarf I made.

All my scarves feature pockets and are made from recycled sweaters that have been felted.

This one has hidden pockets...

behind the petals. It's my favorite one so far.

String Resonance

What is Ann Marie doing?

What is Lily doing?

Lily goes to Collin County College. Friday we visited their latest gallery exhibit. It's called "String Resonance" and consists of a long multi-string instrument that runs diagonally through the center of the room. You clean your hands, rub them with resin and walk down the room rubbing your fingers along the strings. Lily made this video of me experimenting with the strings. The sound on this tape is so-so. The sounds that we were making were much more interesting and varied.

New Blog...

So, I've begun a new blog. Yes, that's right. Like I need one more thing to keep up with in my life.

The thing is, this blog due to it title of course, is about storytelling and things related, like writing for instance.

But, I am one of those folks who have more than one passion in life. My other passion in visual art, or more accurately, the creation of visual art. My visual, artistic side is less concerned with behaving oneself. It's more free-spirited, more liberal, more spiritual in a middle eastern sort of way. Yes, that's right. MY inner artist is way more "out there" than I like to admit. So, I've created another blog where I can express that side of myself.

Currently my new interests happen to involve using previously loved, 100% wool sweaters. I will post images of my new creations soon on the new blog. I will keep you posted on when this will occur. If you would like the connection to the blog, let me know in the comments.

Oh yes, I still do tell stories and do programs. Today, I gave an improv workshop for teens at a nearby town's library. I had way cool teens and it was a BLAST!!!

Look what I made

I made another "Phony Flower" using old phonebook pages. I need to make a few for Earth Day programs in April.

My new hobby is taking old, 100% wool sweaters, felting them, and creating new things. Here are two scarves. I just finished a third one tonight, but there is not a photo of it here.

This one is for my mom. I have it in an envolope and ready to mail tomorrow.

By the way, you ever look at a photo of yourself and ask, "who is that person?" That is what I do when I look at the picture above. I really want to grow this last haircut out! Ugh!!! This is a nightmare that began last October. I have had one adjustment, meaning I had a trim to help it grow out better in early Dec., so you can only imagine how short my hair had to have been.

Oh, the torture of a lousy haircut by a cruel, heartless beautician - evil woman!

It was just sitting there, waiting...

Jeff, Lily and I went into a local Borders Book Store the weekend after Christmas. We were actually out together on a trip to the grocery store, but Borders is next door to it and since we are a bunch of maniacal bibliophiles the temptation was too much. I mean gosh, there were giant red Book Sale signs pasted all over the windows for heavens sake - what else could we do?

We walk in and Lily goes dashing off to the graphic novels section, Jeff wanders over to look in the boxes of $3.99 books and I wander around aimlessly trying to figure out what to look at first. (Sometimes I can get overwhelmed when faced with a lot of choices okay.) Eventually, after not having found anything that caught my eye, I walk over to the racks with cookbooks. I'm just killing time, I really don't care too much for cookbooks. Suddenly my eye spots a book on the shelf that does not belong. It's called "The Book of Lost Things". Odd name that. Kind of like the sound of it and the book certainly looks lost here amongst the cookbooks. Intrigued, I reach out and take it off the shelf. I open the front cover to read about it. My, it sounds good, but let me read the first few paragraphs as well, I think to myself. I have been fooled before by fancy words on a book's dust cover. I read the first two pages of the first chapter...oh my goodness. THERE IS NO WAY I AM LEAVING WITHOUT BUYING THIS BOOK!

And oh look - it's on sale for $5.99! Oh happy, happy day.

I finished the book last night. To read more about it, see the post below.

The Book Of Lost Things

I began the new year by reading the thoroughly satisfying and magnificent novel, "The Book of Lost Things" by John Connolly. If ever there was a book written for storytellers, it is this one. John Connolly has brilliantly interwoven ageless myths and folktales into the tale of a boy who is teetering on the brink of adulthood. He suffers through the death of his mother, the arrival of a new stepmother, a new baby brother, a world war..and so he finds escape in books and the wisdom of the tales in them.

Here is one of my favorite excerpts from the first few pages of the book:

"Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring the music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for a chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. The needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life."

This is one of those books that begins grandly, poeticly - immediately enticing one to read on and on. The reader can only hope that the author can maintain that kind of momentum and come to an equally (or even grander) finale, and god bless author John Connolly, because he does!!!

I can think of few better ways to start the new year than by reading such a marvelous story.