 Good morning everybody. Hello, there we are. Good morning. How are you all? As usual, I'm a couple minutes early and we're going to get started here in just a second. Let's see how many people are watching. Why do I look frozen? Is it just me or do I look frozen to you guys? Thank you so much, Michael Ann. I appreciate that. Our connection on my iPad is not great this morning. Hang on one second. Yeah, that's what I'm getting to, Michael Ann. It's blurry and the video is like weird. I might have to go out and come back in, but let's see. Hold on. I'm going to try a couple things. I don't know if any of them are going to work, but it's possible we need to start over again. You guys let me know. I know it takes a second for you guys to see any difference in the camera. Did that help with the blurriness? Is that better? Is that sharper? It seems sharper to me. I don't want to have to stop the live and then go back out and do it again, but I will if I have to. You guys let me know what you think. And hi, Louise. Louise, how are you, Michael Ann? Good morning, Laura. Good morning. Video is moving smoothly. OK. On my iPad, the screen looks much clearer. I don't know about you guys. So the screen looks much clearer to me. I'm just doing this to give the camera something to focus on. Lots better. OK, good. It was a camera setting, you know, because it's the decade of Mondays. Anyway, all righty, so we have some, you know, I have lots of projects I could work on today. And I'm getting texts from my sister, family drama. Anyway, I'll deal with it later. I have lots of projects I could be working on. One of the ones is that I want to do is these two pads of canvas. Now, these are artist pads of primed canvas like you find on a stretch canvas. It's already cut and primed and cut to size. In this case, these are nine by 12 and this one is 12 by 16. This one's primed with a watercolor ground, and this one is primed for acrylic paints. Now, I think I bought these like who knows how long ago to experiment with. And I never use the pads up. They're OK. They're not my favorite way to paint, but I have them and I want to use them. So my thought is what I need to do is I need to paint these up and mix media these up and we need to make journal covers out of them. And I could make journals out of journals out of them. Use this is the cover and fill it with a really nice 70 pound drawing paper that I have in my stash. So that's what we're going to do this morning is we're going to just get these covers done. I don't know how many of these we're going to end up doing, but I have two pads of paper I need to work on and good morning now. So I think first we're going to work on the smaller one just because to be honest, because it fits on camera better. And I have my drying rack off to one side. Now, I do want to use up all of these. So that being said, I am going to rip them all out of this paper. Now, you could do something like I'm using what I had. Let me start there. I'm using what I already had. That being said, you could use any sort of thick fabric. For this, it could be plain or patterned. That's up to you. I like like a canvas duck cloth. I usually buy some when I have a fabric coupon and I buy this sort of off white natural color. And then you can prime the one side of it with Gesso. You don't have to, but you can. And then you have a nice blank surface to work with to create fabric journal covers and fabric art. But if you have one of these canvas pads or maybe you're thrifting or you're at an art salvage shop, when we can get back and do that kind of thing safely and you see one of these canvas pads. Well, OK, buy it. And this is what you should do with it. Maybe like me, you've created you've painted a lot of canvases in the past and some of them, excuse me, don't turn out so well. Well, just cut them off the stretch canvas and then use the fabric for a journal cover. That works, too. Let's put these here and we're going to just work on this one. I've got some paints I want to use up. I've got some stencils to my left. I've got a few markmaking tools, some pens and pencils and a cork of a blending plate. To be honest, I was going to do something else this morning. And again, and then I saw this and was like, you know, we should do that. So. All right, let's just grab some paint and get started. I'm not going to do any thing particular in mind. I'm not going to have any particular design in mind. I just am going to just start painting. I have a bunch of these little tubes of acrylic paints, and this is Liquitech's Basics in Yellow Ochre that I want to use up. I used to travel with acrylic paints. I don't really do that anymore. It's too messy, too hard to get through TSA, all of those things. So I don't really do that anymore. Grab a couple of paint brushes would be handy. All right, let's start with a stencil. I've got some of my stencils here. I've got some of Mike Deacon stencils here and I've got some Tim Holtz stencils here. All right, and I think I want to start with this one. This is a Tim Holtz stencil. I don't know which one it is. Does it say at the bottom? Yeah, it does, but I can't read it. Now we're doing these kind of things. It's not necessarily about creating a particular composition as much as creating an overall pattern. So, you know, just have fun with it. I don't know how pretty is that. So for those that don't know, I've been on a self-care journey recently. It started a few weeks ago when I challenged myself to see if I could do 10,000 steps a day, five days in a row, which I did. And then, although I haven't done 10,000 steps every day since then, I have, on average, done 10,000 steps a day since then. And I've lost some more weight. And to the point where I had a doctor busy yesterday and we are going to try lowering my blood pressure medication and see what that does. So cross your fingers, that goes well. So that's all good news, I think. Oh, yeah, maybe this color. This is what colors this. Helps if I put my reading glasses on. Um, sky blue light. Thank you. So one of the things I've been talking about and you'll see in probably a lot of my upcoming vlogs is, you know, caring about and making your art a priority and your family a priority is all the well and good. But if you don't make yourself a priority first, then you're not going to be around to do the other ones. And there's been some family stuff that's gone on, some of which has gone on because of COVID, some of which has not some of which has nothing to do with COVID. But anyway, I have used it as a lesson. I'm using all of trying to use all of it as a lesson and find, you know, the bright spots in all of it and lessons in all of it. One of them is to take care of myself. And so I'm going to do that. So every day I go walking, it helps clear my head. And really, I mean, I changed my eating habits a little bit, but I didn't really do a huge change. I don't eat like carbs at night too much or sweets. I do occasionally and I did last night and my blood sugar was fine this morning. My mom is diabetic, so I don't want to go there. And so I check it all the time, but it was fine this morning. But I don't often eat carbs anymore or sweets at night. And that's helped a lot. That's helped tremendously. It's not that I never have them. I do. I just don't eat them at dinner right before I go to bed and see. And I have never managed to lose enough weight where the doctor has said, you know, let's try lowering your blood pressure medicine. I've been on it a really long time and that's never happened before. So I'm pretty proud of the fact that the doctor said, you know, let's try it. It might not work. We might need to put it back up again. But let's try it and see what happens. So the new pills come in, I think Thursday. Oh, hey, Petra. All right. So I like where this is going. Let's see. I think I'm going to use the Tim Holtz numbers. Yeah, I think the numbers would look good on there. What color? What color? I like the sort of beachy, sandy colors that are going on here. It might be my way of hoping springish weather would come. I don't care if it gets super hot. I'm not actually a big fan of super hot weather, but something that's above twenty eight would be nice. I don't mind the cold, but this is crazy. I think I'm going to do green and this is yellow green. I'm going to get out that book of painy scrap papers because I can wipe my brush off on it. I'm not going to like be super crazy about cleaning it. But there you go. All right, let's put some here. Yeah, Michael and so where we live in Oregon, we were supposed to be warming up a bit and my husband actually was working on his sport, his barracuda over the weekend. And he had it out and, you know, the weather was great and he had it out in the driveway and he was doing some work on it. And it just out of the blue started hailing like hailing. I didn't stick because it wasn't cold enough. But yeah, it was just crazy. So we are not done with the weird winter weather yet by any stretch. OK, next. Do I want to put more on that right now or do I want to let that dry? I probably should just let that dry and let's grab a new one. I do have my drawing rack off camera to the side so that I can put things over there to dry. Hey, Lisa. And it's sunny today, but I guess it's going to be rainy tomorrow and for a couple of days again. And so our contractor, I guess, who he's got a couple of jobs going, he always does. And I guess the main one he has right now is outside. And so he can't do that one. So he said, can I start on your project early like tomorrow because yours is inside? And we said, uh, sure. So let's I'm kind of liking these colors that we're using. So I'm going to keep them out for the minute because I'm kind of enjoying the yellow ochre, this really light sky blue and this yellow green. For the moment, I'm really feeling those colors. So we're going to stick with them for the minute. I don't know why I'm just following my instincts. I have no idea. They're definitely not colors that I would normally choose often, not together. And so what I'm doing when I do that, I'm pretty well known for like being heavy handed with the paint in the stencils. And so I'm just tapping off some of the paint through the stencil lightly, barely, barely tapping. And then once I have very little paint on the brush, then I'm doing more of a scrubbing motion to hopefully get like a cleaner, a cleaner mark. And so then you get something that works better for me. Let's see. Yeah, Kathy, it's supposed to be back in the 60s for and then after the rain. But since it's going to be rainy and Ruben can't work on his other project, he said, can I do your he's going to put a sink in our laundry room? We said, sure, canvases that I don't like, whether it's one of these or it's on a stretch canvas. I either paint over it. But if I have some that I've painted over like two or three times and I still don't like it. So then what I do is I remove it from the stretch canvas frame. And I honestly I cut it up and I make some of the small fabric mixed media embellishments, a stitch through it, add paper to it, maybe add a piece of driftwood to it. These are not supposed to be like complete compositions. These are journal covers. So you're just looking to make an interesting overall pattern. If there's something about it that you don't like, you know, can collage paper over that. You can collage a napkin over that, some tissue over that. Yeah, I do sell some of the, you know, bad canvas. I think that might be what it's called, bad canvas in my Etsy shop. I tear apart and I do usually tear them apart on camera. And, you know, you might get a piece of a face that I think that didn't turn out well. But then when I tear it apart, you just get the eyeball and that's interesting. So whether it's on fabric like this or it's on a stretch canvas, some of those are interesting. I do have envelopes and boxes of art on paper that I don't necessarily care for, that nobody seems to want to buy. So I think for those, I'm going to. I'm thinking about what to do with them. I might. Do a few videos with them where I'm painting over them. I might rip them up into smaller pieces and put them in bags. I don't know. I might send some off to a couple of friends and see what they can do with them. Some of them are really bad art. So but they're art on paper. They're not on fabric. Every art and I'm not looking at your comments right now. So if you're asking another question, forgive me. Every art project I've ever done, we duckling stage every single time. And so the fact that something doesn't turn out the way I want it to the first time, it's not necessarily a.