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.