Hello mojo!!!!

Remember how I said in my last post that my mojo has been taking a very long vacation??? (Thanks btw for your kind words on that topic!!!) Well, she's back yeah!!! The very same evening I told you about my mojo being gone, I was looking at some of my friends' blogs, and I came accross Lucy's blog. She had posted a page featuring a drawn face ... the page turned out absolutely beautiful. You can find it here if you'd like to see it. It's way better than mine, but I thought I'd share it anyway LOL.

Turns out she took a FREE class over at the "Willowing and friends" ning site. I don't usually sign up for ning sites unless there's something truly interesting to be found there, but this time I didn't even think twice about it. I signed up and immediately started watching the tutorial video's for week 1 of the Art, Heart and healing class ... over two hours worth of totally interesting footage! Tam (Tamara Laport), the owner of the site and teacher of the class is absolutely lovely, bubbly even, and I wasn't bored for a single minute. After watching the video, I immediately took out my supplies and got started. I worked on my page till far after midnight and finished it the very next morning. Bye bye frustration, hello mojo!!!

For our first week, we had to make a "healing" journaling page ... first we had to write down all of our negative feelings on the left hand side of the page. Then we had to look at our notes, and try to find out where they were coming from, like a need to feel loved, a need to feel accepted as we are, etc... Some of my sentences were "I should lose weight", "I need to spend more time with the kids", "I should be more organized in my housework", and so on. I found most of these feelings went hand in hand with guilt, with me always trying to be better than I am and feeling guilty if I fail at this. Then we were to go over these sentences with gesso, symbolically erasing them, and after the background was finished we had to write down one sentence, a positive one this time, expressing how we could deal with all of this. Haha, now people who know me, who've talked to me or even read my blog, know by now it's impossible for me to say what I want to say in just one sentence LOL. That being said, writing down feelings doesn't come easily for me, so I turned to a few lines from a song ("I don't want to be" by Gavin DeGraw). This is what I came up with:

The words in the stars say: "I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately. All I have to do is think of me and I have peace of mind". Actually, there were a few other lines in this song I would have liked to have used even more, but I really wanted to include the "Peace of mind", as that is what I am looking for, no more guilt, just some peace of mind, some reassurance that I am doing right by me and my family.

Tam also showed us how to make a background. I wanted to keep it light and cheery, as it was supposed to be a positive page, though for some reason or another at first I wanted to use black and blue LOL. I think my art journal page will be a bit more "dramatic" though, I feel the need for drama LOL. The colours turned out to be a bit of a problem ... we were supposed to use water soluable wax crayons, but since I don't have any (but they're sooo on my wish list right now!!!), I used watercolour paints ... blending them wasn't that easy, and I do think when I see other people's work that wax crayons result in slightly brighter colouring, but still I'm happy with the result

Oh wow, I've talked too much again it seems ... anyway, if you want to learn how to draw those faces, which btw is surprisingly easy, this class is definitely something you should explore!!!

And now the downside to finding my mojo again ... I so want to create right now, but I have so much to do!!!! The kids are going away for the weekend and I have still a lot of organizing to do before they leave ... ah well, good thing I don't need much sleep LOL.

Talk to you later my friends.

Love xxx Peggy