But we’ve still had some fun lately. Behold: The nearly six year old spoon boy!

And his crime fighting buddy: Orange Girl!

If that’s not enough to scare the evil pants off of the bad dudes, here is the even scarier formation: Tower of Granades! to get the bad guys attention. Stephen is welding the pickle-pult for full defensive action.

How do I fight crime, you ask? Well, I bore them to death with tales of organizing my office and photos of cross stitch projects. See below!

Here is The Fortunate Traveler as I packed it up this past week. I’m moving on to a new stitching project so I wanted to show off the progress I made over the past four months.

This is the box of thread I worked out of for Traveler. I remember when I organized this box I thought it was the largest project I’d ever undertake. I was so very wrong.

My next project is Starry Night as reproduced by Golden Kite. This is one of my favorite pieces of art and I’ve wanted to work on it for a while. Several companies have done a repro but none of them get it right like Golden Kite. I got the pattern for Christmas.

The box on the left is thread I had to purchase for this project. The box on the right is thread I already had. I also had to purchase another box like the one on the right to hold all the thread.

The second box I purchased holds about 1/3 of the regular colors and then 2/3s of the box is blended colors. What is a blended color? Take two colors, separate the individual six strands of each and them combine one strand out of each two. Makes for a beautiful color set. Starry Night has 88 blended threads. I know, because I’ve numbered the cards for easy reorganization. Getting the thread wound took three separate nights of work.

Previously, I’ve kept track of my blended threads on the symbol card by sticking the needle through the card next to the symbol. It makes for a very messy symbol chart! The needles then fall out and I end up trashing thread because I don’t know what the colors on the needle are. So blending the threads on their own cards before I start stitching is a new method for me. I can already tell it will, at the very least, be neater than my earlier setup.

Fabric! I bought a slightly undersized piece of linen to use. It was 40% off and I decided that if I ever actually got the piece finished it would have to have fabric sewn to it so it could be stretched anyway. I stitched about 30 stitches and realized two things: I needed to stop and pre-blend all the thread AND I desperately needed Aida fabric.

I’ve not used Aida much in the past few years. It’s the fabric you use when you start stitching. It’s heavier, starchier, and even the best quality Aida doesn’t look as good as the lowest quality linen. However, for this project, I realized that it would go much faster if I wasn’t counting holes in the linen to get the stitches right. Also, since the finished piece is solid stitches the fabric wasn’t going to show anyway.

That ruler? Inside the frame in the center of the fabric? It’s seven inches long. That piece of fabric is 36 inches by 31 inches. The finished piece will be 29 1/2 inches wide by 24 inches high.

I got it all stretched on the frame last night and almost, almost got the 30 stitches done I’d made earlier in the week on the linen.

Are you dead yet? A couple of photos of the office since it looks so amazing right now.

The monument to paper! Notice I have labeled all the drawers!

New boxes! New books! New labels! I might be able to actually find things! Crazy talk!

As with different kinds of style, it seems that craft work can be a bit faddish. Things look nifty and everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon. Looking at artist’s magazines really emphasizes this. I love them and look forward to my monthly trip to B&N to sit and troll the mags while Liza plays with the trains. I even buy one occasionally. What I’ve discovered from looking those over for the past year and cruising 100+ blogs a day is that there a whole lot of people doing very similar things. I’m not saying that what they are working on is bad, I’m just saying I’m starting to see the cycle. And oh boy, does the internet feed that beast.

Here’s the thing: when I look at what’s swirling around out there, I realize that my stuff doesn’t look like that.

A few weeks ago I found a set of videos of a well known artist journaler explaining her process step by step. (Incidentally this is the same blog where I first found out about artist journaling.) I was really excited to see how Teesha made her own notebooks out of sheets of watercolor paper. That bit of info solved a problem about my own journal that I’d been working on for a while.

I immediately got a sheet of watercolor paper and, just for kicks, decided to follow her process. Wow, was that hard! Staying inside of her lines was nearly impossible for me. And what I ended up with only bears a passing resemblance to what she does. As a copy of her work it stinks. But what a learning experience it was for me! And hard! So much harder for me than my own process. So I came away armed with a solution to a problem and also a bit of security in what I do on my own.

So my angst comes down to this: I want to grow as an artist. I want to find my own style and be more comfortable with it, be willing and able to claim that style. I want to proclaim, “I am an artist!” And I never feel as if I’m quite ready to do that. How can I call myself an artist when I don’t have a body of work? I can’t stay focused on one thing. I want to try every little thing that catches my eye. (Maybe that’s where my contribution to the fad kicks in.) One week, I’m all about ATCs. The next week, I’m all about artist journaling. I make notebooks and cross-stitch. I want to try traditional bookmaking and printmaking. I want to do better graphic design. I want to start drawing again like I did in college. I want to figure out how to combine some of this stuff and cook up something awesome. I’ve got so many irons in the fire, I don’t know which one is hot.

After the holidays, I’m gonna sit down and come up with a plan. Christmas has depleted my Etsy store stock. I’ve been making custom-order notebooks for a couple of people for Christmas and also making a few personal gifts. I want to get my store up and running ASAP after the first of the year, and then carve out some time to start working on all this other stuff.

Maybe all of this is just part of what an artist experiences. The desire to figure our our artistic selves. The search for the idea that opens up our life’s work. The time spent working on every little thing until the big thing grabs our attention and doesn’t let go. Maybe I’m more of an artist than I’ve ever given myself credit for before.