A week behind

My mom is retiring from teaching 8th grade English this year. The last several weeks my sister, brother, my mom’s coworker and I have put in a lot of time working on a surprise video for her retirement. Last night was the school district’s retirement program where they honor all the retiring teachers and our video was shown. It was great and the video had an excellent reaction from the crowd; some awes, some laughs and apparently even a few tears as we were told later. I’m excited for my Mom. I definitely inherited her love of making and creating and now in her retirement she will have a wealth of time to get at all those projects she’s had to put on the back burner. Both of my parents were DIY before DIY was DIY.

At any rate, all of this is to explain, or give excuse to the fact that I’m a week behind in my mailart365 project. I know you probably don’t care, but it is weighing very heavily on my conscience. I realize that all it takes is a week to fall behind, which then turns to two weeks, and next thing I know it spirals out of control until I feel so overwhelmed that I throw the towel in on the whole project. I’m just worried that this summer is going to be one of those where every single weekend is spoken for weeks in advance and I have no free time. I don’t want that to happen, so this is my plea. Please Life, stop throwing things at me. I’m only one person with precious time and I already work a full time job. Please, and thank you!

So, now onto another round of little mailart books. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE these books. I’ve already received thanks for a few of the books I sent out and I’m thrilled.

To read more about the concept behind the books, see this post. The above picture is the collection’s front, sealed and ready to be dropped in the mail. Below are the books open and without mailing addresses, to protect the recipients from ruined surprises.

The grass area is pencil and watercolor and the binding has fabric over it.

The background image is a picture I took of a framed yoyo set I made in all white fabric. The “OK” is chalkboard paint with white pastel and spray fixed. Which reminds me, yesterday I had another piece complete and I went to spray fix it and accidentally grabbed the adhesive spray. The piece was ruined, so I had to scrap it and start over. Yeah, I’m the genius who keeps her spray fixative (2 cans) next to her spray adhesive (2 cans). It’s a surprise this hasn’t happened sooner.

This background image was a camera phone picture I took of our lawn before the first mow this season. The grass drawings over it are done in gesso, pencil and watercolor and the green plaid is fabric.

the zigzag pattern bit is the only paper that I designed on this book. The rest is just little scraps from my paper hoard.

More chalkboard paint with fixative. The zebra is from the packaging of our copy paper at work.

I was going for a quilt like pattern on this piece.

Vintage map, gesso, collage and pencil.

And once again, all the pieces have been matte varnished to protect them against wear and tear through the mail.