I'm in the Mood, crayon and black marker on 11 x 14 dry media paper by Tammy Vitale. In my "vision" journal, where my "inner child" is playing these days.

Bought a beautiful package of 124 (124!!!) Crayola crayons on Sunday while out with Grandson.  Alas, they were left in Daughter's car so I must continue to use old, paper peeled off crayons (they go fast on paper with a tooth to it).  But it makes me happy to know that they're there waiting for me.

Have been doing yet more cleaning – this time getting our cottage ready for rent (I think we have a rentor!) by cleaning out the shed (9 years of accumulated stuff) and sprucing up the yard by mulching the dead pile.  Looks great – feels great too!

Back at home packed for two shows that are happening this month – I need to go back through and price things but at least I have the bulk planned out – I need more containers.  I actully thought I was going to get through all this by just using the containers I have – but I need empty ones to fill up for shows, so that means I need to buy a few more.

For those of you who are visual, here are studio pictures after the clean up.  Am starting the garage section today, and will take a before photo since it is hard to understand how things pile up in the midst of working.  Sadly, the basement studio is still pristine since Inner Child is coloring and not playing with clay these days – parental voice is too strongly saying we must get rid of what we have first (what we have is loaded into those numbered containers you see in these pictures below. 

If you were to come into my basement studio, you would come down stairs, take a left and another quick left and see this:

To the right of the picture are my drying racks and stash shelves.  In the right corner is my kiln.  On the back wall are pieces that are not catalogued yet (ah, even more containers – I didn't think about that!).  There is an "L" of space – a piece on the back wall and a piece you can't see behind the trash can – which is where I do my glazing and wiring.  Those bins you do see are Fish! (the green one) and word and prose tiles (the middle blue one) and shards (the left blue one).  On the very edge of the left hand side you can see my plaster shelf for use when throwing pots.  I don't throw pots much anymore since I have lent my wheel to a local non-profit to use since I wasn't much.  It's been about 3 years, I think.  I may be ready to pick that up for something different and because folks seem to buy functional ware more than decorative these days if they buy anything at all.  In the near right corner you can see my dehumidifier.  Couldn't live without it!

Here are the bins I was telling you about.  I was actually looking for a piece yesterday and immediately found it listed in #2 bin.  Needless to say, it is still there.  I need a way to stack these so when I need the bottom ones I don't have to unstack everything.  That may come, but not until I get the garage cleaned out.  At that point, perhaps I'll have a better stacking place.

But it took me all of 3 minutes to find that particular piece and so I can't complain – the system actually works the way I planned it!

Except I haven't typed it all into a data base – yet.

This stack is directly to the left of the above view.  The screen on the right hand abuts the "L" wing that is behind the trashcan.

At the trashcan, take a left and this is what you see (the above bins are just out of sight to your right).

The bins here are all shards, and there is one box of drift wood.  The tables are 4ft long each so you can figure the size.  Those tables were custom made for me by my son.  I have 8 of them and they formed the base for my public piece, Chesapeake (you can see a video on the making of Chesapeake here - in the garage studio – which it almost completely filled).  I could not have made that piece without them!  They are higher than normal tables and that alone saved my back from breaking!  Back to the basement studio, in the left hand corner you can see the armature that I hoped would be a shard woman.  It is made with chicken wire covered with plaster tape.  About $25 worth of plaster tape.  It needs more layers and somethings to help it all hold up (and inner armature) if it is to be a shard lady.  She has been in this state for about 2 years now.  To the left are my bookcase and glazes which you can see better below.  That left wall backs up to the under the stairs area (I didn't take a picture of that but when I got in there I found my card table that's been "missing" for months!  You just never know!).

To the right you can see my collection of 3D stand-alone work.  That's what I really wanted to make in the beginning.  But it just didn't sell.  So I moved on to wall plaques and then to torsos.  I'm wondering, these days of hiding Inner Child, if creating with an eye to selling actually feeds the soul as much as it should.  It has to be better than a 9-5, but not as good as creating just to see what happens.  This creates a good bit of dissonance in the interior voices.

I'm very pleased that it is all so organized and I can not only see everything (I'm so visual) but I can also find everything because there is a place for it that makes some kind of logical sense (illogical though my right brained orientation is).

thought for the day:  I never gained control of my mind – how do you dominate an ocean? – but I began to form a real relationship with it.  Through writing and meditation I identified monkey mind, that constant critic, commentator, editor, general slug and pain-in-the-ass, the voice that says, "I can't do this, I'm bored, I hate myself, I'm no good, I can't sit still, who do I think I am."  I saw that most of my life had been spent following that voice as though it were God, telling me the real meaning of life…when, in fact, it was a mechanical contraption that all human minds contain…I realized its true purpose:  monkey mind is the guardian at the gate….I've seen it over and over.  The nearer I get to expressing my essence, the louder, more zealous that belittling voice becomes….But this intimacy with my mind did not come quickly and I never gained the upper hand.  Instead I've learned to maneuver in the territory.  Natalie Goldberg Thunder and Lightning:  Cracking Open the Writer's Craft