Back to reality

I spent a busy weekend socializing with various art buddies, and now I’m sorry it’s over.
Saturday I went to Debbie Smith Doyle’s house for a day of eating, stamping and yakking with the Red Hat Stampers. I feel fortunate that they adopted me into their group three years ago. They’ve been together since 1995 and are still stamping up a storm (although I didn’t do any of this myself at our get-together).
At the moment I’m on a colored pencil jag, and spent most of the day meticulously coloring in ATCs I’d already stamped the night before. I find this a therapeutic activity—kind of like the way I felt about coloring books as a child, or jazzing up maps in high school geography.
Then last night I went to Cherri’s Moote’s house for dinner. She had some of her friends over to meet book artist Beth McKee who has created this amazing 44-foot long accordion book based on a speech about women given by Stephen Lewis. You can read about Beth’s project and see a picture on her website. To make the figures that run along the bottom of each page, Beth carved stamps out of foam and then collaged on their clothes. After she had shown us how to do this, we tried it ourselves. It was like a grown up version of paper dolls.
But now it’s time to retreat back into the work zone. I wish I was preparing to enter the Battistero in Florence looking all floaty and voluptuous like the Victorian maiden above. In reality, I’ll be in sweatpants wading through the mess my inner sanctum has become.