An Experimental Life

Thursday, January 19, 2006

The rabbit population in South Oakleigh




We have baby bunnies! Turns out Gemma must have been pregnant when Monty died, because she had babies a few days into the new year. We never planned to go into the rabbit breeding business which is the whole reason we took Monty to be desexed in the first place, but they're so cute. There are five, and we plan to keep 2 of them probably, finding good homes for the others. I can't believe how small they are - I've never seen newborn animals before, but it's exciting watching them grow a little each day and learn how to do new things. Their eyes have been open about a week and they've mastered walking but not hopping yet. At least one of them has made his/her first tentative steps out of the nesting box into the rest of the hutch. What's really hard to believe is that six months ago I knew nothing about rabbits, and now I could probably write a book. (Well, OK - a short book!)

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Technical woes

Aaargh, this image loading thing is driving me crazy. I just spent 20 minutes trying to add 4 images and I still couldn't get them to line up properly. Right, from now on, everything's going in the centre! No more left-alligned, right-alligned text-wrapping hassles.

Some more pages...


I'm so pleased with the last one - I was trying something that Teesha Moore suggested on her site, about using water-soluble crayons to integrate collage elements a bit more so that it doesn't look like you just slapped everything down. Not that this is anything like as good as hers, but I like the effect I got, so I'll try it again some time.

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More journal pages


Here are some journal pages that I've done since the start of the year. As soon as I made the commitment to start journalling everyday again, I found that I started having heaps I could write about. I promised myself that if I was too tired or didn't have time to do something arty, I would still write, even if it was only a paragraph. Once I started visual journalling about a year ago, I started feeling like every page I did had to have something on it other than just words - and I put so much pressure on myself to make my journal look all nice and brightly coloured and artistic, that sometimes I'd go weeks without doing anything. So this year I've given myself permission to have blank pages with just words, if that's what I feel like doing. I won't be scared of white space anymore!

I was playing around with some ideas for mosaicing a mirror frame as a present for a friend. Her birthday was back in November but I didn't get around to working on it until after Christmas. Ikea had these great mirrors that had 2 straight edges and 2 wavy edges and they came in a four-pack, so I bought some and used one to glue to a board and mosaiced the edges with coloured glass. I'm so pleased with how it turned out, so now I have to do one for me! The original ideas I had are somewhat different from what I eventually did.

The final product - in sunlight the dark blue looks a lot better, more irridescent, like stained glass. I love the colour, but it doesn't photograph well unfortunately.

Anyway, I gave it to my friend today when she caught up for lunch - I think she liked it. She's moving house in another couple of weeks, so she'll have something original to hang in her new place.

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Monday, January 02, 2006

Happy New Year!

I know, it's been ages since I posted. The last six weeks of 2005 were stressful and saddening since my cat died at the end of November, and then one of my rabbits 3 weeks later, which makes three beloved pets that I lost last year. So I haven't been in a journalling or artistic mood for a while, but I'm hoping 2006 will be better.

On the Gluebooks group we were talking about what new challenges we could come up with, and my idea was a "Blindfold" Challenge (or an "Eyes Closed" Challenge for the lazy people like myself who couldn't be bothered with an actual blindfold). The idea is this:

1) Grab a magazine - either one of your favourites, or one at random.
2) Close your eyes (or be blindfolded), and flick through the pages of the magazine.
3) With eyes still shut, tear out 3 complete pages - any 3, and no peeking!
4) Open your eyes and make a gluebook page using only what's on the pages you've torn out.

I used an old 'O' magazine and tore out three pages with my eyes shut - I ended up with an ad for sports eyewear, an ad for a hayfever medication, an article about the benefits of confession, plus a few pages of text on the reverse sides. And this is how it turned out! The tiny words at the bottom read: "We think we're hiding our secrets, but really our secrets are hiding us." It's really weird how this page just sort of came together on its own once I'd picked the pages. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

I've also signed up for the Embodiment project over at livejournal, where the challenge is to keep a paper diary every day of 2006. I signed up on a whim, mostly because the deadline to join was yesterday and I had to decide quickly. Personally I think it's unlikely I'll be able to keep it up every day, but I'll try. If I miss a day, I'll just do two entries the following day, which I imagine quite a lot of people will begin doing before the year's over! But I do like a challenge, and I want to journal more than what I have been, even if I don't make the effort or have time to paint/draw/collage with it. I found that sometimes I was journalling less last year, because I didn't want to write on just a blank page but I didn't have time to add anything to it - so that frequently meant I wasn't journalling at all.

Anyway, I hope there will be lots more scans in 2006. It's quite likely I'll post them here instead of on LJ (or as well as), because there's about 2000 people who've signed up to the Embodiment community and the number of people posting is just insane. I'm sure it'll quieten down a bit if people reduce their posting to once a week, but right now it seems like mayhem. I can't keep up! Plus I finally worked out how to use Blogger but I'm completely new to livejournal and haven't found my way around yet.

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