 talking to y'all and the camera's not on. Morning everybody, it is, I don't know what time I am. I don't know, I don't know, it's Sunday morning. It's not raining at the moment, but it is overcast. It is 10.37 a.m. I think we're just having a quiet day at home. I don't think we're going anywhere or doing much. I'm in my Circa throwback, 1970s, 1980s, Velour sweats, I know, right? But they're comfy, I don't know what to tell y'all. They're comfy, I love the color. It's also a medium. Fun fact, before I started this journey, when COVID first started, I was an extra larger, an XXL. Yeah, anyway, as I was saying earlier, some of my friends have been playing with gessoing through stencils onto thin papers and then coffee dying or staining the paper after the gesso is dry. Now, I have a lot of stencils, not only design stencils, I love to collect them, so that wasn't a problem. And I had some dictionary paper from a dictionary I took apart. Now, I think my friends were mostly using rice paper and or tissue paper, maybe parchment, I'm not sure, of which I have, of course, all of those, but I thought, I've got this dictionary paper. One, I wonder what it would do. Two, I wonder, is there going to be a difference between stenciling on the dictionary paper that's already been distressed and died versus one that hasn't and then distressing or dying it afterwards. So I did a bunch of sheets with the gesso. These ones were already dyed. This is a stencil from my friend KP. And I did a few of those. This is one of my stencils called, I think it's called Crosses. So those were already distressed. When I did those, I did a bunch of plain, there we go, plain dictionary pages that hadn't been distressed yet. I did them right before Thanksgiving, so they've been dry for a few days. And just now, I had made some extra coffee this morning, I let it cool, and I just dumped it all over the papers. Now, my cookie sheets are weathered. I think that's a good word. Maybe it's a good thing we had to take too. They've been used a lot for distressing paper and fabric in a lot of different ways with lots of different pigments and mediums. So when I do this kind of distressing invariably, some of that other old stuff gets picked up because I don't clean them. I leave them weathered and seasoned, which I enjoy. So what exactly is going to happen? I don't know, probably some unexpected, but it's going to be exciting to find out. And so we're going to do that. And you can already see on this one, you see that wet black blob up there? That's like old ink that's gotten wet because I put the coffee on there. So we'll leave that to sit probably at least overnight and we'll find out what happens, I guess in the morning. I'll be back. Because they're in the trees there somewhere. But that's a lot of crows, a murder of crows. Yeah. We have no shortage of wildlife around here. All right, let's go home. Because now my knee is like, I'm done. Hey everybody, it is Monday morning, November 29th, 9.53 AM. So I've already done my sort of to-do list for the week, which is downstairs. I'm going to try to limit my trips out of the house, not for any other particular reason other than I just hate running errands. Fun fact. So when I do come out, I'm going to go out, I'm going to try to use my time wisely. Anyway, I have physical therapy on Wednesday this week and my booster shot on Thursday. So yeah, I'm going to try to get all of my errands I need doing before Thursday morning because that's when I have my booster shot just in case I feel like crap afterwards. I need to do the social media posts for the week. I've already done the Christmas shopping that I can do from Amazon for the two girls and Becca and Jenny, I'll let Bob to do the boys or we'll do it later. And yeah, otherwise it's a quiet day. We have been planning on or doing calendar stuff this morning for the holidays. I'm trying to write things down because December will get really busy. I have these two rings here that I found recently in my jewelry box after my mom passed away. I don't know where they came from. I'm pretty sure this one at least is from my mom. I don't know where this other one is from. I'm pretty sure this might be costume jewelry but I'm going to take them in to the jewelry store. I have to go there anyway because I need to get my wedding ring resized because it is like, it is really loose. So yeah, that's kind of in the back of my mind. Will it happen this week? I don't know, but it's going to happen at some point. My paper's coffee dried paper experiment is still drying. Yeah, so all the things for the things because of the things, right? Okay, only one of them was dry, which was this one. And remember what I said yesterday and yesterday's clip? These, I only put coffee on these and then whatever other colors, dark or light or whatever were picked up from the seasoning, quote unquote, on the cookie sheet. So that is how that one turned out, which I think it actually is pretty cool. These are how the others are turning out. And it's interesting that the Gesso, I think because it was prior to previously dry, isn't picking up a lot of the coffee and or ink stain. I got my friend Leslie helped out with her issues she had with her computer and a computer file last night. My coffee dye papers are still drying. I got the posts done. I got the dishes done. You can hear the dishwasher in the background. I also just got off the phone with what's probably going to be my new podiatrist next week and I have an appointment next Tuesday to have that first visit and talk about getting new custom orthotics because my knees bothering me because my feet aren't supported. Cause yeah, it's all connected. Doctors, have I mentioned that? All right, I'm going to sit down for a minute or more than a minute and I'm going to put my foot up and rest, maybe put some ice on it because we will go walking later but I'm going to get it as feeling as good as I can before we go do that. It's probably a good idea. I'll be back. I'm going to come in here and turn the lights on. We are waiting for Mr. Bob to finish on his last work call of the day, I think. We need to go walking. He wants to look at a couple of things on the computer for Christmas gifts. I ordered for the girls already. We're looking for some kind of couples gift or we got a shop for the boys. So it's just always a problem, right? Anyway, I'm going to come in here for a second while he's on his call. I get asked a lot about my diet. I'm losing weight and I'm going to hesitate to call it a diet. You know, I'm just careful about what I eat. I drink my bone broth every day. If I forget, I can really feel it. I did just cut my nails today but if you've been watching the clips at all then you've noticed my, they got pretty long. No cracks. The one nail that's cracked, which is that one. I don't even know if you can see that. Hold on. I'll go over here, maybe in the light where it's, you know under the light, this one. So that's not from bad diet. That's because when I, 1984, right before I met my husband, I locked my finger in a corridor. I was coming off a three day shift. Night shift, I hadn't slept in the three days and I was tired and yeah, whole nail came off, broke my finger. I had longer acrylic nails at the time, like it was a thing, anyway. I damaged the nail bed, that's why that one cracks. Anyway, when I do snack, because it's not that I don't snack, I have a low calorie protein bar or some fruit, occasionally some nuts and of course my bone broth and yeah, I just, I'm very careful about what I eat. I have, I also, when I eat too, I go to the doctor and I am honest with all of them about my health journey and why I'm doing what I'm doing and what I'm doing and yeah, I've got an appointment with a podiatrist, like I said, which I'm looking forward to. It's way past time to update my custom orthotics and so we will get that done. I can't wait for these to dry, sorry, distracted. Anyway, so yeah, it's gonna be good. There's one more piece of paper sticking out of my prayer. That's for the podiatrist. I take this downstairs. Anyway, so it's all good and I'm waiting for Bob to just finish his job today. We're gonna go walking, look for the Christmas gifts. He's feeling okay, I'm not pain free, but it's much less pain post shot. The physical therapy and the new orthotics should help tremendously and yeah, I just wanna encourage you all to do for you. Take care of yourself, go to the doctor if you need to get what exercise you can, eat healthier, do some art to work out the stress and the pain and physical mental. Like let's just work on what we can do to take care of ourselves, right? All right. Hey you guys, it's a little dark here, but that's okay. So we didn't even get out of the neighborhood before we had more bad news to report to the HOA person who we happened to see just come home and be in her driveway. We only got a couple of houses down and we saw what appeared to be packaging from a delivery that was ripped open, tossed aside in the woods and it had the address on it so I walked down to the house and said, I don't know if this just fell out of your trash can because today was garbage day or if you had a package stolen and they took the item and left the packaging. She had a package stolen. What the hell is package from Target? What the hell is wrong with people? Really? Really? God. Tuesday morning, November 30th. I only know that because tomorrow is the first of December. Anyway, it's 9.15 a.m. and I have decided instead of doing all my errands and physical therapy tomorrow that that was probably a really bad idea because I don't know how my knee is gonna feel after therapy. And so I'm gonna go do the errands today and I am not gonna do the jewelry store one because I still need to go to the jewelry store. My wedding ring is too big, just FYI. I've lost so much weight that my ring is huge and so I need to go get it resized and so but I'm not gonna do that today. If my knee is feeling okay, I might go do that tomorrow. Hang on, I need to set the blower or the window's gonna fog up, hold on. All right, so I've been practicing some of my lessons from the Felix Scheinberger class I'm taking at Domestika. I did this, where are we? Got that, based on his lessons from the class. No, I'm not gonna explain what I did or how I did it because you gotta go take his class. I'll link it below. But I do love the way it turned out. Very expressive, which is the point. I also was playing with, and this is not part of his class, but I got the idea because of something in his class, a lesson in his class to take some of my inks, not acrylic inks, because I don't want him to dry up in here and clog, but the water soluble inks that I have, specifically the brown tones, and put them into some water brushes. And I have sepia and black mixed together and then walnut and black. The sepia and walnut are slightly different colors. The sepia is very much more red and the sepia is the ink I used here. Anyway, I mix them together and they work just great. I'll let you know as we go forward how they work in the pen, do they dry out, do they ruin the pen, do these leak all over the place? Like, let's hope not, but you know. Anyway, also my gesso through a stencil, coffee, dyeing, paper experiment. Some of the pages are still wet. They're up there in the back. You can see them in the background. But I do have enough that are dry that we can go over a couple of things. So hang on. So we're gonna go over this one first. These are both using the same stencil for my friend KP, which is a stencil girl stencil. And this one was stenciled with white gesso onto dictionary paper that had already been coffee dyed quite a few weeks ago. And this one was stenciled with gesso onto dictionary paper that hadn't been dyed with anything yet. I let it dry and then I coffee stained it. Now, you will notice in both of these, there's some purple on this one. There's some pink on this one. My cookie sheets are well, as I say, seasoned. And I do a lot of distressing in them with different colors and pigment powders and water-soluble materials. I don't clean them. I let whatever is seasoning is going on in the bottom of the cookie sheet when I go to do a new round of distressing to have it purposefully, interestingly, affect my papers. For instance, I can see all that. How cool is that? And by the way, it looks a bit more purple than it does in real life. This one, you can see the big pink that got there because there it is right there. There must have been something red on the cookie sheet. Now, this one is a fish fossil stencil. And I remember where I got this. It might be from Stencil Girl, I don't remember. This one, again, was done on paper that had already been distressed a few weeks ago with white gesso. This is how it dried up. This one, I stenciled the fish on the paper, let the gesso dry and then distressed it afterwards. And again, do I like one over the other? Not really. I like them both. I do think this one, where you gesso first, is more interesting. And it did also pick up more interesting colors and patterns from the cookie sheet. Now that may be because it was just wetter than when I did this one. But because this one doesn't look like it got super wet, whereas this one got drenched. And you can see this one underneath here. Look how red this one is. That's because obviously there was something red on the cookie sheet. But they all turned out interesting. You can see this one, this is one of my stencils from my Etsy shop. This one was done on paper already distressed. This one was done on paper that I distressed it afterwards. So I, it's an interesting idea. I really like it. I can't wait for the other ones to do it. I have all these dictionary papers from taking a dictionary apart. And as any of you know, who have done that, the paper's pretty thin and I wanted to see what would happen. Plus it already has the text on there. So that gives it some more interest. I like the way it turned out. I would recommend trying it if you want some homemade distressed, interesting papers to work with in your artwork and in your collage. I don't generally make a whole bunch of journals. Usually when I do this kind of thing, this is gonna end up being torn up at some point and used on a journal pager in some kind of mixed media application. But maybe you wanna just have that be a cover of a journal or something. It would work for that too. Anyway, give it a try. And I just, you know, maybe your normal cup of coffee wasn't anything special. I use cheap coffee for this. So coffee from maybe the dollar store or if you are traveling, I never drink the hotel room coffee. It's always gross, but I bring it home to coffee die with. All right, that's it for the minute. I'm going to finish watching my soap opera and go check the mail, I guess. I think I'm done. Last month of 2021, it's gone by very fast. As you can hear in the background, I've got laundry going, doing some stuff on social media. Hang on, let me get the cell phone holder so I don't have to hold the phone up the whole time. That's better, hands-free. Move that out of the way. Okay, it is 9.16 a.m. Exactly. All right, so anyway, I got some stuff on social media done this morning, some posts on the Facebook groups. I created a couple of different documents for date stickers for next year. One is just plain, it just has the date and one has the date with a creative inspiration word. That I'm going to use for next year and at least in one of my daily books and I'm going to continue with doing two daily drawing books. One that has some collage and a quote and a little quick sketch and one that just has a sketch. So I'm going to continue with that next year. I'm already ready to go. Anyway, the patrons got the list with the word and everybody in my Facebook group, A Life of Art and Self Expression got the file without the words. Now, or they're going to. Did I remember to put it over there? I will check that in a minute. Anyway, yeah, so Patreon is not very expensive. It's like $2 a month and I'll put the link down below. It's also in my link tree list of links and you get periodic downloads from me. I try to post as often as possible my daily work and what I'm doing. There is also an private unlisted YouTube channel for patrons that I'm trying hard right now to be very regular and consistent with putting video up for them. Either preview video that you guys will see at some point here on the regular channel or video you never see or maybe video you see here that's sped up and they get the long version. Here's me blathering on. So I don't know if you'd like to hear my blather. Maybe anyway, you can't get that channel if you're not a patron. Anyway, I'm going to check it and see and make sure I put that file over in a life of our self-expression and then I didn't forget because I have this feeling I forgot and get that fixed because it's been a day. I start physical therapy later today on my knee. So that's a thing. I also have mission inspiration video on this thing. I need to edit that and get that scheduled out on this regular YouTube channel today. And I have one or two errands to do on the way to physical therapy. So be a busy day and I have a feeling when I get home from therapy, I'm not going to want to do anything except sit on the couch. I have this feeling and then tomorrow morning I have my booster shot. So I think it's going to be two or three days of just me not wanting to do a lot. So I'm going to try to get it done this morning. Yeah. All right, I'll be back. It's 1115 ish a.m. Friday, December 3rd. I have an Etsy order that's got to go out. I don't really want to drive to the post office, but there is a mailbox walking distance from the house. I've got my knee brace on. My knee's actually doing pretty good, by the way. So we're going to walk over to that box and drop it off. Plus I, you know, because I got my booster shot yesterday was kind of feeling like crap most of the day afterwards. I didn't get any steps in really. I think 3,500 or something at the end of the day. That's nothing. Good morning, everybody. Oh, sorry. Good afternoon. It's 12 21 p.m. We are out obviously in the car running errands. We went to a local craft Christmas craft fair and bought a couple of things and met some people. That was great. Dropped off some real estate cards for the daughter. She got realtor of the month for the month of November just FYI. If you need to buy or sell real estate in the Portland, Oregon area, I'll leave her link down below. Anyway, shameless plug, I know. We also... As I was saying, I was headed outside to go check the mailbox because I hadn't done that yet today and we came home and had lunch. Picked up my wedding ring. Had it resized. J. Joe Jewelers. They did it quickly. They did a great job. They cleaned it up. It hasn't looked so polished and shiny in a really long time. She said it was really dirty. Come in anytime and we'll clean it for you. I think she felt bad. Anyway, it was a pretty good day, but of course we had to go to three different stores to find what we needed because you just can't go to one place and buy anything anymore. It just doesn't work that way anymore. And this is an order from Jetpens. I have particular pens that I like to use in my drawing, in particular colors and particular nib sizes. And I can never find them in the store, not in the colors that I like. And even the stores that do carry them, those particular colors must be popular because they're always out. One of them is Faber-Castell Pitpens, the brush pens, the brush pens. And this is 272. Which is a light gray. Then you have 274, which is dark. Is it warm gray? Is this cool gray? I don't know, hold on. No, they're both warm gray. This is 272. This is 274. This is my light gray. This is my dark gray. Then we have Asipia and Faber-Castell colors. That's 175 and then black. Now I also have, these are all a brush tip. I love the Faber-Castell brush tip. It really, nobody else's really does justice for the fine tip and sort of my medium tip or thicker fine tip. I like a 0.1 or end of 0.5. And I will use Faber-Castell when I can find them in the same color range. I will also use Unipen and Micron pens. You know, light gray, medium gray, CVM black. I will include the pen options that I use in the video description. If you guys are interested, let me know. Put something in the comments or I can create something over in the Facebook group. And yeah, but anyway, I needed more specifically this one. I used this one a lot. And I figured I might as well order some backups. So anyway, they came in. They're very fast. Bob is downstairs for asking the icemaker again. Our Samsung fridge. It's a love-hate relationship. Anyway, it's been an interesting week. We've just been potatoes today. I don't think we're going to go do much. It's just one of those Saturday evenings where you just wanted to sit on the couch. And we'll probably make up for it tomorrow. I'm feeling much better for my shot. I'm feeling almost 100% so it didn't last long. And my arm is still sore. That would be the leftover percentage. My arm is still a little bit sore, although it's getting better every day. Yeah, it just takes a little while. We went to the craft fair. Bob bought me this beautiful spalted wood bowl made by a local crafter for a Christmas present. And it is just gorgeous. And then I also, there was a lady there that did knitting and crocheting. And I just don't do much of it anymore, although I have done it and do do it occasionally. And she had these knitted sort of trivets, cotton trivets. You guys, you could use it as a dishcloth or you could use it for anything. It's just a flat, like. So she had this really pretty aqua color. It's cotton by the way. And so I bought three, three for $5. Like the materials cost more than that. So yeah, I was like, yeah. So I supported the local crafters a little bit. And yeah, it was all good. We dropped off the Dodgers business cards in a few places and got everything done today, which I didn't think we were going to. So anyway, I hope you've all had a great week. I hope you guys continue to have great weeks ahead and that you get through the holiday season, however you celebrate it, safely and happily and celebrating with your friends and family. Yeah, you know, take a deep breath, enjoy life, get your booster shot if you're eligible and vaccine if you haven't done so yet. And you feel like it's something you can do. Please wear your mask and let's keep each other safe. Watch out for our communities and yeah, all of that stuff. Be decent humans, always. All right, that's it for this week. Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself. Cause you deserve it, you really do. Check out the video description for relevant stuff. Like, share and subscribe. And I will see you all next week. All right, bye guys.