July 7

click on images for detailed view

           

You would pretty much have to be living in a cave not to have been exposed to some part of the Michael Jackson coverage since his death. I've done my best to avoid the whole media blitz.  I'm just not drawn to participating in the memorializing of lives of people that have ended and I don't know personally.  I appreciate the need for some to do so, but I can't think of any figure, past or present, that I'd want to win a lottery ticket to get to go to their funeral and see performances commemorating their lives.  Just not my thing.  So while the concert memorial service celebration mourning was going on, I decided to work on my journal.

I picked up my book and the first page it opened to was the following:

Sorry, I already gessoed it when I thought to photograph it, but if you click on the photo for a closer view, you'll see the words beneath the surface include "Ceremonies, Funeral rite, State ceremony"... "Celebration".  Seems the energy of the day was unavoidable.

As the pages above indicate, I haven't been in the best of places physically, but I'm fully with it all emotionally.  

Part of the reason for that is because I've pushed myself through a few days of creating .  Ideas have been percolating, so I went with the simplest of them, including carving the stamp below.  I really enjoyed the process while it lasted - just got rather pissed off later when I couldn't open and close my hands.

I stamped the images onto pieces of muslin from Lynne (that I believe was tea stained, Lynne?!) and had come wrapped around a number of little treasures she sent me a few weeks ago.  They were the perfect size for this two sided stamp!

I've also had the desire to make a book, even though I knew it would cause more problems for my hands (I can be stubborn that way - I did spread the activity out over a few days) so this seemed a good place to use the swatch as decoration.  It's a chunky little book with 120 pages, made from a light weight paper that is 92% post consumer waste and 8% coconut fiber.

For those that are wondering, I'm still waiting for the appeal process on my insurance company's approval of the new medication treatment to unfold, after their initial denial.