Artist’s Date: Take 2

So I am reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way. A spiritual path to reawkening one’s creative soul/spirit. This book has been around in one form or another since she started living this way in the late 1970s. She has two main calls to action that she advocates for: Morning Pages and the Artist Date.

Morning pages are stream of consciousness writing when you first wake up in the morning before the ego/censor part of your brain starts functioning. Ouch, I am not an early bird. And to start writing before I even make it out of bed to the bathroom. Yeah. I have had to modify the timing on morning pages and I am trying to get the kinks out.

The second and the meat and potatos of this post is the Artist Date. Basically it is taking your inner creative on an outing for a couple of hours. Some examples were going to see a movie alone, taking a walk, driving down an unfamilar road etc. She wants the “date” to last long enough that you are willing to open yourself up. Kinda like when you go to a kids birthday party and all the adults are standing around stiff as a board. Then something breaks the ice, a favorite childhood game, a song, and they get in the groove. They relax and have fun.

So my first date didn’t go as planned. I originally planned to grill out then make s’mores and watch the stars. Fun, easy way to dip my toes in. Except I couldn’t get my fire started. Over an hour I tried to get it going, I guess the charcoal was damp. I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times I couldn’t start a fire.

So I was like okay, let’s regroup and think about it. I settled on spending Saturday reading a book series I have been thinking about. Daniel Potter’s Freelance Familars series. He had the first three books on sale for $2.99 and I love a good bargin. I sorta read all three books in a day and half. They are a fun, witty, take on urban fantasy. Highly recommend them if you like urban fantasy. I’ll do a review of then in the next week or so.

My second date was last week and I spent the day hanging out with Mom. So Saturday night I found a gorgeous pattern for a knitted half pi shawl. I have been looking for an easy introduction into lacework and have a super squishy varigated ball of yarn for the project. Hobby Lobby’s Yarn Bee Rainbow Wrapsody in Teal of Fortune. Beautiful cotton and acrylic yarn, but super fine almost thread size.

So the pi shawl was designed by Ms. Elizabeth Zimmerman back in the 1950s or 1960s. And it is a complete circle that uses the theory of math and pi to make a perfect circle. They are huge, labor intensive, skill intensive, seriously gorgeous projects. I have niether the skills or the attention span for a whole pi shawl. But I think I can do a half pi.

My second date was to start a practice shawl with my regular cotton yarn that I have left over from various projects. I knitted for about three hours in the peace and quiet. Everybody else was in bed asleep except me. I had serious doubts about the pattern and Sunday I frogged (unraveled) the whole thing and started over. I had made a miscalculation on which row I was suposed to knit and which one to purl. This is exactly why I chose the bits and pieces of yarn over my project yarn to do a practice piece.

I’ll see you guys on Thursday and hopefully Saturday. Cheers nd happy hump day. james

DIY Journal Planner Update

Back in April I wrote about making a planner (here) and then I wrote another post about making the signatures (here). I have since made a second book that is better than my first attempt.

This is both journals. The left one is the second larger journal. And the one on the right is my smaller first attempt.

The new book is more for writing and less for work. My first one still works well due to the smaller and more portable size. I have hopes of reworking and making a new cover for it. The second journal is 9×17 inches and holds eight 8.5 H by 5 3/4 W signatures.

The signature paper is good quality copy paper in 8.5 by 11 folded in half. I used five sheets and then added a second insert of five sheets. Make sure to do two seperate inserts. Five sheets fold better than using ten sheets. Make sure you have a good even crease before you punch your holes. Put two together face down flattening the crease and put four evenly spaced holes. I kept trying to measure, but I did better eyeballing it. I used the inner core of some paracord my husband had lying around to sew them up. I started with the first hole inserted from the back holding about an inch and a half tail and sewed the holes up. To make sure the stiches held I went back through the stiches and tied it off.

This the inside of the signature.

The outside of the signature.

For the cover I used some green buffalo suede I ordered from Distant Drums Online. A store I found on Ebay, super nice folks and great customer service. My husband with the help of Youtube Darkchild 57’s high capacity travel journal video. Cut the leather and set the cover to hold eight signatures of ten sheets each or 160 pages. If you want to try this, I highly recomend watching both of his journal making videos. He offers a lot of great tips. We did add a pocket to the front cover and we haven’t put the buttons on. Once those and a few other loose ends are tied up it will be finished.

It took all afternoon to set up, cut, sew and put everything together. Cost wise I would say $15 for the leather and there is enough leftover to make a second cover for my work planner, $7 for the 500 pack of paper, $1.47 for the elatic cord and the paracord was scrap from another project. So $13.25 plus time spent with my hubby makes it a one of a kind special.

Cheers, james

#Handmadebooks