Decide to fly

These are a pair of pages in one of my composition book journals. Of course, they don't have lovely unlined pages, but using something so inexpensive freed me to actually journal. The ones with the blank pages that cost a little more have so far intimidated me, but when the book only cost a dollar and so did the gift bag used to cover it, there seems to be less fear of "messing up". I just play with different techniques and usually don't do any writing on the pages until later. Sometimes I gesso the pages first, while at other times I gesso around the images to cover the lines. On this spread I glued down some magazine/catalog images first, but never got around to using any gesso. Then I colored around the images with oil crayons to blend and to add the swirls.

I hope to get in the art room today and make some atcs. I've not made any in a long while and hope my muse shows up to help me. On one of my art groups I asked and have a 3/3 swap lined up.

It's totally hot and humid in Alabama right now, so even though I really should go out and hoe the garden, I'm going to cop out and try to do that maybe tomorrow evening. (We have a women's Bible study meeting at church tonight.) My ancestors would be ashamed of me. The ones who planted acres of cotton AND had huge gardens which fed the family throughout the winter. They toiled endless hours in the hot sun, planting, cultivating, hoeing, picking. I have an image in my mind of my grandmother, who worked in the garden wearing a dress, one of my grandfathers LONG SLEEVED white shirts, and always a bonnet to protect herself from the sun. We used to have to help them when I was young so that we would have a share in the garden harvest, I guess.

My Mom tells stories of picking cotton and how, even when she was little, she had her own child-sized bag so that she could work along side the family in the fields. My grandfather paid each child, some of whom were teenagers, some money based on how much they picked.

Interesting how times have changed. Where once this was a family working together to make their livelihood, now someone would probably call the Labor Board and have the parents arrested for violating Child Labor laws. My personal feeling is that hard work made them better, stonger people who learned to persevere. Today's generations are much weaker, less able to endure hardships, expecting life to not be hard. I include myself in that generalization(see above comment about not wanting to go hoe the garden in the heat, lol). I could wax on about this topic, but will stop for now.