matchbooks

Ew, gross. Plain, white matchbooks?

No thanks.

Decoupaging everything in sight yesterday, I really like these guys.




I need a craft sale to join.

Trees

I have been dying to go to Flax to slowwwly puruse their papers section for a few weeks now. Last week I walked all the way there from my house (uphill both ways, srsly) only to find that it's CLOSED on Sundays. Which? I don't know, just doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, I digress. I spent about an hour and a half there today - how is everyone who works there so friendly? - and came home with a bunch of huge sheets of super-adorable printed papers, a new exacto knife, a glue gun with the wrong size glue (BLARG!), paper mod-podge and the coolest thing - a bag of about 100 different 3x5ish-sized papers, all different colors, prints, textures, etc etc etc.

Obviously, when I dumped it all out on my bed I was quite overwhelmed. But then I remembered my doodles. I doodle a LOT in class. A. Lot. And I seem to always doodle the same sorts of things. Mostly it's a tree with pointy branches. So I decided to do some papercuttings of my tree using different squares from the big bag o'love.
One of them started to behave very weirdly once it hit some mod-podge. It started to curl in on itself. So. I decided to make it into a vase.



I also liked this one:


mmm, paper makes me happy.

I got in!

*jumps up and down!!!!!!!!*

Audre Lorde

A classmate of mine lent me "Sister Outsider" by Audre Lorde last week. As I read her speech "The transformation of silence into language and action" I felt it was something I had been needing to read for years. It's for everyone who feels they must keep quiet, or even fights to keep quiet a piece of themselves. I think that maybe we all do this. I think that the better you are at un-ignoring those parts of you which you work to ignore, the closer you are to self-actualization, or self-knowing or true self-confidence.
Here's an excerpt, and read the whole thing. She wrote this speech after finding out she was going to die of cancer (she later survived).