a month-long project comes to a successful close

yesterday, we wrapped up a group project, decorating the wall in our new library's minibib - the library for the littlest kids (age 0-6). seven of us in total worked on the project over the month of september. the brief was to take inspiration in the children's books illustrated by swedish illustrator helena davidsson neppelberg. her simple style, filled with bright colors and flat illustrations with no shadows or contours is perfect for a children's library. but, we also decided that we wanted it to feel very contemporary, so the figures would have a street art quality - where although we didn't use templates, we wanted them to look like they were done from templates and if there was color, it would be one single color or at most two. we wanted whimsy and without violating any copyrights, to create imagery that the children would recognize. i think, in the end, we achieved this, but it was an interesting process.

reining in 7 different creative people and keeping them on track is no easy task. each of us wanted to leave our mark and sneak in our own unique style somehow. it presented some challenges along the way. again and again, we discussed the brief and all agreed and again and again, people went ahead and did their own thing.

it was inevitable that some of those things didn't work in relation to the brief. and it was inevitable that they had to be done over. and because of the nature of women and how hard we are on one another (why do we do that?), we didn't always talk about it constructively. but we kept coming back to the brief and what our "customer," the library, wanted and needed the wall to be. and in the end, it worked out.

there are touches of everyone's personalities. and there are plenty of fun and sweet details for the children to discover. the silhouette of a little girl on the far side will be lifted by papier maché balloons (once they dry and can be attached) and the steps, which husband beautifully constructed, will have a whimsical papier maché dinosaur fixed upon them, to discourage climbing and keep them a bit safer than they are now (we had visions of those tiny ones crawling up and falling off the sides). we hope the children will enjoy it for years to come.

a day in the life of the world's happiest people starts at home

a few of us from the drink & draw group got to talking about this whole notion of denmark as home of the world's happiest people. i still maintain that if the danes are so happy, you definitely can't see it on them. even my fellow drink & draw-ers are a bit provoked by the whole notion and they are danish! so, we are putting together a project where we are going to ask a wide variety of people of all ages, backgrounds and from all over the country, to keep a diary for a day (all of them on the same day). we will collect the diary entries and see if they shed some light on what it is that makes the danes so darn happy. we don't want it to be a scientific, clinical look, we want it to be personal and intimate. our intention is that then we will invite a variety of artists - painters, actors, storytellers, filmmakers, playwrights, sculptors, whatever - to gather and give creative expression to the diaries. in my head, there's definitely a podcast in it, undoubtedly with multiple episodes. i think that also in my head is something along the lines of the wonderful and profound humans of new york - with short, poignant stories that tell so much about the culture at large. but i'm also trying to reserve judgement and remain open, because once we have the diaries in hand, they may point us in another direction entirely and i want to be able to move in that direction.

yesterday, we all tried the task on for size ourselves. we figured we should feel it under our own skin if we were going to ask people to do it. we agreed that we would write it all out - good and bad and try not to hide anything. we have shared our diaries with one another and will get together next friday and talk about the next steps in our project.

i wrote my day on my marquee blog (see sidebar if you're interested), but i also did some much-needed art journaling to go along with it.  i think i needed both the linear timeline side of things and something more abstract and creative. and i can definitely tell that i needed those moments of creativity and the different sort of concentration that accompanies them. in fact, i've continued them today and they helped me settle down and get back to work again. they quieted some of yesterday's restlessness. i also thought it was quite wonderful that i came across the quote in the one on the bottom while paging through an old magazine, looking for collage materials. it's a bit uncanny how you often come across the thing you most need to hear at precisely the moment you need it.

i realize once again, working on this, that i'm happiest when i'm setting an idea out in the world and seeing what becomes of it. i can't wait to see where this will take us, but i'm also definitely enjoying the place it's helped me occupy right here and now. and to be bringing this to life with a group of awesome and creative women is pretty magical as well.

telling stories, weaving meaning and figuring out why the danes are so darn happy

my computer has been acting up for more than a week now, which is why i've been so absent again. this weekend, i gave it a thorough vacuuming, upgraded my smc fan control and it seems to be behaving like its old self again. i made sure it's backing up, as i do fear it's on its last legs. it's been a good iMac and it has served me very well. i hope to get some more time out of it, but i guess we'll see. computers aren't made to last forever, after all and those shiny new iMacs look pretty cool.

i'm down with my first flu of the season. i've got a headache that won't quit, a low grade fever and aches in all of my muscles. it really rather fits with the grey, dreary weather we've been having and if one must be sick, it may as well be in these dark, rainy days. there's no better time to curl up in bed with a book and a cat or to listen to the serial podcast again from the beginning. (seriously, if you're not listening to serial, you're really missing out, there's even a reddit where people are discussing it endlessly obsessively.)

serial feels to me like it's somehow reviving storytelling or retrieving it from the trite hollywood ending kind of storytelling that we've become so accustomed to. and i know that serial isn't the only place where a great story is being told slowly...there are spoken word festivals and other great story events/podcasts (like the moth), but it's such a sensation that it feels like it's moving us in a good new direction with stories. something sort of akin to the slow food movement, slowing down and enjoying the process, whether it's of a story or a dish.

apropos stories, at drink & draw on saturday evening, we got to talking about that whole thing with the danes being the happiest people on earth. and we talked about ways of drawing out people's happiness stories, since we did agree that all that happiness isn't necessarily visible to the naked eye. and i think that maybe investigating the happiness and talking to a whole lot of people, in a kind of a slow storytelling way ala serial just might be the ticket.  slowly gathering all of those individual happinesses of different colors and gathering (weaving?) them in a whole carpet of happiness (i had to make that photo go with this post in the end) sounds like a pretty good idea for a project, doesn't it?

in the company of women

our torso project approaches. 26 women. a shitload of plaster for casts. nudity. breasts. i'm both excited and worried. honestly, there will be no hiding. i'm not super fond of my body. and it's going to be cast in plaster for all to see. and for posterity. and let's face it, gravity isn't kind. and i'm not getting any younger (tho' i did recently realize that i've thought, for nearly a year, that i was already thirty-sixteen and it turns out that i will only be that on march 22. however, i'm not sure at this age that it makes that much difference.

but i'm looking forward to the laughter and high spirits that will undoubtedly ensue on friday afternoon and most of saturday. bonding. laughter. art. in the company of women. they all have breasts too. and they're undoubtedly about as fond of theirs as i am of mine.

if you were going to pick music for such an event, what would it be?

the torso project

i need a boost of positive energy after the day i've had (tales of troglodytes and deeply unprofessional and unserious and manipulative behavior, which i will process a bit more for myself before i share), so i would like to share an amazing project i'm going to be part of at the beginning of march.  it's called kvindeportrætter (women's portraits) 30 women (some artists, some not) will gather and make a plaster cast of our very own torsos. afterwards, we will decorate them as we wish - collage, paint, whatever - telling the stories of ourselves and our lives. 

aside from the torso mold, which makes me a little light-headed when i think about it (there will be nowhere to hide), i can't wait! it's running in the back of my mind, the things with which i want to adorn my own torso - tickets i've been saving, interesting articles, snippets of text, something along the lines of a gift i once received from a friend, perhaps some stitching or stones or driftwood. it feels delicious with possibilities. and the sense of community of two days spent with like-minded creative women - just the thought of it gives me a sense of calm and a feeling of happiness that i was much in need of at the moment.

this torso in the photographs was made by the woman who will lead the project. she did it in the context of an art relay - where they artists were to make a piece of art, then send some piece of it on to another. they would also receive a piece of another's art and have to incorporate it into theirs. the triangle in the center was what she sent on. and the little doll hanging inside is related to what she received, as is the red color of the inside. she said there wasn't a single piece on it that isn't laden with meaning. 

isn't that awesome?

i'm so happy to be finding the artistic community i was missing. i will share more once it gets underway. the results will be exhibited locally and in a real art museum. but more about that as it happens. in the meantime, here's the pinterest board where i'm saving my inspiration. 

intersections 2: denmark meets iran

more of the shots from the film swap with shokoofeh. i'm still finding it difficult to put words to how amazing and profound i think these layered photos turned out, so i think i'll let them speak for themselves...

intersections 1: copenhagen meets tehran

since shokoofeh shared the album of our film swap pictures with me on picasa, i have poured over it again and again. on first viewing, i felt that only a few of the shots had turned out. some are aligned and some split frames. the one i was most hopeful would turn out - a shot of a bus in copenhagen where it was spelled cOPENhagen was a split frame and not as good as i had hoped. i was initially fixated on the technicalities - should i really have doubled my ISO to 800 when i took the intial shots here in denmark? what could we have done to align? should we have left well enough alone on the cross-processing? but then, i looked again, and the technicalities melted away and suddenly the magic jumped out at me.

~ a parted curtain in tehran opening onto a copenhagen street.

~ a chocolate cupcake on the ghost of a bicycle

~ another ghost of a bicycle viewed through a magical white curtain

~ a peaceful afternoon coffee scene on a graffiti-covered window

~ a cup of colorful pens and pencils juxtaposed on that copenhagen bus. 

the magic was there. all of my hopes and expectations were there after all. all of the layers of meaning. the surprises. the beauty. quietly profound. calm and zenlike.

for more, please visit shokoofeh.  i will be sharing more as well in the days to come.

a sustainable life

this whole move we made in the past year to our farm property was a major part of a decision to live a more sustainable lifestyle, so that's a topic we discuss around here quite a lot (often in the context of me being browbeaten for just acquiring a shiny new apple product). i also have a couple of friends who i discuss it with quite a lot - we send article links and have long email and in-person discussions about recycling, upcycling, thrifting, produce that's in season and local, the danish view on being green and ways in which communities are adjusting themselves to a more sustainable way of being. in that connection, we decided to take our conversation public and how better to do that than with a blog?

so i hereby give you a sustainable life. please come and join our conversation.

pure creative potential: film swap

on the flickr blog the other day (thank you flickr front page), i learned of a flickr group called "film swap." people shoot a roll of film in their analog camera, leave the tail sticking out then swap with someone else and double expose the roll - two different photographers, two different sets of eyes, many different subjects, preferably two distant locations. once i read about that, i knew i had to try it. so i loaded up my old canon AE-1 program and asked if anyone in the blog camp 365 group would like to do a little film swap with me.

the film swappers in the big film swap group are pretty advanced and into lomography, and naturally so am i (stop snickering there in the back), so i loaded it up with expired (in 2007) fujichrome sensia 400 so we could cross-process it in the C-41 chemicals in the end.

so basically it's got like this mind-blowing exponential creative potential going on. slide film, negative chemicals, analog cameras, two different photographers in two vastly different locations, expired film, and double exposures. one photographer's eye imposed on another. i'm so excited about this i can hardly contain myself.

and i'm hopping up and down happy that the lovely shokoofeh of a new simple something fame is who i'll be swapping with on this first attempt! she has the most amazing, artistic eye and that alone is mind-boggling. but for me, the whole notion of views of iran layered on views of denmark and vice versa adds so many layers of meaning to the creative potential that it very nearly takes my breath away. i feel like an entirely new topography will open up and you know how much i love topographies!

i've finished my first film and just loaded a second one. i made some mistakes with the first...i didn't set it on double the ISO as i should have, which may mean that shokoofeh's pictures don't shine through as much as they should. i was also so worried about losing the tail of the film when i rewound that i opened the camera a little bit early and spoiled the first 5 or 6 exposures. but hey, i learned two things and i won't make those mistakes again. and so i'm sure this second roll will be even better. i think i'll send both to shokoofeh. i really can't wait to see how this turns out.

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psst. for those of you who sew and quilt and aren't so into photography, there's a very cool new project here. i'm going to be doing it as well. after all, sometimes one should use the stash and not just stash the stash.

we're really going to do this all again

trucks will come with supplies

things will be built

you see, we've put in an offer on this place and it needs quite a lot of work:

don't mind the iffy bricks, they're part of the barn.

REALLY a lot of work.

waiting on pins and needles to hear whether our offer is accepted. and in the meantime, that slavedriver of a husband has gone to pick up boxes, so i guess i'll be packing this weekend. i wish i could just get some pretty shoes, click the heels three times and say, "there's no place like home..." and just be there. :-)

the soujournal project

ever since the fabulous stacey childs of disco underworld fame wrote "writing is the new praying," to me in an email, i began to spread it through the blogosphere like a sort of life philosophy. the phrase, which resonates with so many of us, seemed to be begging to have a project attached to it. and somehow, behind the scenes (in this case, via email) - which is where so much of the good stuff goes on - an idea was born. it was inspired a little bit by the 1000 journals project, somewhat by this,  a titch by a project at the brooklyn library, but mostly it was inspired by the notion that writing is the new praying. we got together with B from cuttings on a blog and the soujournal project was born.

the idea is this. we would each start a journal - written/art/whatever - and then exchange them amongst ourselves and continue writing/working in them - sending them off once a month. it is wide open what we want to write and how we want to approach it. eventually, the plan is to open it up and people can "apply" to receive one of the journals and be part of it. in so doing, they'll start a new one and put it into circulation with the group. it was a given that there would be a blog where we would share all of this.

originally, it was to be just the three of us. but the strangest thing happened to me as i was working on mine during the week between christmas and new year's. it kept popping into my head that i should pass mine on to polly. i tried to shake the thought, but it kept coming back, so we decided we had to loop polly into the initial phase of the project. you just can't ignore a feeling that strong, so i'm certain that there's some reason that polly needs to be the one i pass my journal along to. thankfully, when she came to blog camp a couple of weeks ago, she agreed and didn't (at least outwardly) find it too strange that i had this strong feeling about this.

we have all made our initial pages and are at the stage of sending our journals to the others. we have created the soujournal blog and we'll be sharing our pages and our thoughts over there. we have lots of plans for this, but we will reveal those as the journey unfolds. i hope you'll check in and see what we're up to. here's my first page as a teaser. it's also up over on soujournal.

weekend creativity

it has been a wonderful weekend of nonstop togetherness and creativity with sabin. we had signed up weeks ago to attend the stitch café at our local yarn shop so that sabin could learn how to knit using a knitting loom. and learn she did. she finished two beautiful scarves and has started on a third. so if you're related to us, you can guess what you'll be getting for christmas this year. and it won't be one of those presents that you wear for show when you know the child is going to be present. we bought gorgeous mohair yarn in jewel tones and it has been transformed into soft, luxurious, beautiful scarves by a child consumed by a new craft.

while sabin took breaks from her knitting loom work, we made invitations for her upcoming halloween party. we clipped and glued and stamped and drew spider webs and drank countless cups of sweet, milky tea. did i mention that husband was attending his quarterly port wine evening on saturday and so it was just me and sabin at home together? tho' we love having him around, it was quite wonderful to have time together, just the two of us.

#72 - halloween invitations

we also came up with a new idea for a plushie design (inspired by the fabric i got last week in panduro). i helped sabin cut it out, but she's making it all herself and he's gonna be cute. we couldn't finish because we had run out of stuffing, but here's a preview:

at the yarn shop (very dangerous kind of place for me, despite the fact that i can't knit - i adore yarn anyway and they also have all kinds of embroidery things and quilting stuff), i bought two Drops knitting pattern magazines. tons of beautiful, gorgeous patterns for only 10 kroner (that's under $2). apparently the patterns are available for free online, but it seemed worth it for the pretty photographs.

doesn't it look worth learning to knit or crochet to be able to make such beautiful things? that beautiful sweater on the left above is only a knit stitch and variegated stocking yarn. i could do that. i'm sure i could. so i came home and got out my crochet bible book that i bought in singapore and gave it a whirl once again. of course, with the idea of making a little outfit for a stone. this one of some fine silky gorgeous decidedly mermaidy blueish-green cord.

i didn't get far enough to assign it a number in the year of creativity scale countdown. but i'm going to go to the wednesday evening edition of the stitch café at the local shop and get some hands-on lessons.

and speaking of hands-on lessons, the other activity the weekend was taken up by was sabin's riding lessons. she rides on both saturday and sunday and she's doing brilliantly.  here, she waits her turn to go into the ring, holding onto felix, who is quite a big larger than she is (and i realize she's a bit out of focus, i managed to do that with a lot of horse-photos this weekend - i was playing with my settings a bit in an attempt to learn something. which worked, tho' it meant i got quite a few pictures that weren't as in focus as i may have liked).

* * *

and starting today, my new project together with the divine bee. domestic sensualist. not your run-of-the-mill cooking blog. we hope you'll stop by and check it out, we've got some fun planned this week. and it's already been so inspiring to me that i just ordered three new cookbooks from amazon!

happy monday one and all!