Organizing, Eating, and Playing: Life is Good

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altered art, Altered book, art journal, collage, games, gratitude, photograph, Playing, Thanksgiving

Every year we celebrate Game Day the Friday after Thanksgiving. We make a large pot of vegetarian chili and provide soft drinks and beer until things run out. People bring food and games and we never know how many will show up. We had a great turn out this year and had some new people join us as well. We played for hours! There was so much laughter and talking. I can not think of a better followup to my favorite holiday.

Thanksgiving day was SUPER cold but we had warm hearts and full bellies. Yatzee and pie go well together.

I have made great progress in turning our extra bedroom from a storage room into an art room. I use bits of stuff that I find on pages for days that I spent organizing and sorting and making space for making art. I’m so looking forward to having a clean, fresh start in my studio in 2015! I used the cleaning up of getting ready for Game Day to help me get going on the process.

Opening my heart

Tags

altered art, Altered books, art journal, collage, compassion, gratitude, meditation, Thanksgiving, zentangle

I have been listening to Pema Chodrun’s book about compassion and she inspired this Zentagle and multi-page layout. I have been playing with copies of it so you will probably see it again in a new iteration. We are coming up to my favorite week of the year. I love Thanksgiving and we celebrate Game Day the Friday after. We invite friends and family to come and play, eat, and talk all day. My heart is opening up wider and wider. Come on in.

Here is the open heart layout. I also really like how the page with all the circles turned out. This is the third picture book I have used in a row and I’m ready for the texture and blocks of text of a chapter book. How could I resist a book about Thanksgiving for my November gratitude journal?

My yoga teacher was talking about balancing effort and ease in a pose and that really resonated with me. My life is about pacing myself, but if I can look at it as a process of balancing effort and ease it sounds much more graceful.

The long awaited movie premier came at the end of a busy day. I was pretty worn out, but it was worth it! I also had a lovely day yesterday that included me and my mom, Mommy and Me class, lunch at a new (to us) restaurant, and meditation.