Most of the week I've been in extreme pain. And you know what? It SUCKS!!!!! Not being able to sleep, no chance at getting comfortable at all and limping around the house are big time downers. The winter has been brutal pain wise so naturally I've been dreaming of warmer climates where my pain would diminish and I could feel ALIVE again. As happens every winter I ask myself what the heck I'm still living in New England for. There's a lot of reasons but the major one is it's home. Plain and simple. So I go along, trying to make the best of each day and waiting for that warm weather to come. And that's enough of my bitch fest. On to the creative stuff!
Our Cub Scouts Blue and Gold banquet is in another week and our den was given the task of making centerpieces for the tables. We have a whopping budget of $25 to make 25 centerpieces with. Hello, that's only a buck per table! What the heck are we suppose to do with that??? You can't even buy a bud vase and a flower for 25 tables for that money. So, we had to get creative.
The theme this year is 'The Magic of Scouting' and we managed to bag some plastic black top hats for less than the budgeted amount. Throw a can of blue and a can of yellow spray paint in and we've hit the budget mark. But, there's an abundance of dried grasses, grapevine, bittersweet and other plant life outside just waiting to be harvested and that's where the materials for filling the hats comes from. I had some Styrofoam balls that served as a base for the dried material, which we cut in half so they lay flat inside the hats.
I've been on the back porch for two days now playing with our goods trying to come up with something that the boys can help do and that doesn't look like total crap. After playing, arranging and rearranging I came up with something that looked halfway decent. Once it was spray painted half blue and half yellow it looked almost totally decent. They won't win any prizes and they certainly aren't fit for anything more formal that a Cub Scout banquet, but considering our budget and what we had to work with they came out alright.
Friday I spent the day working on some stencils for street art. Its been a while since I went out tagging and I've had the urge lately. But, walking around with stencils and paint or even posters and wheat paste in the cold weather is no fun at all. Art should be fun and street art should be double the fun because there's the risk element involved. After some brainstorming I decided to create stickers instead. Something heavy duty that can withstand the weather. A few test runs with the printer produced so-so results and blew through a ton of ink so I realized that wasn't an option. So it was off to google to see what help I could find and boy, did I find help. I found a company that will turn your art into vinyl stickers for very little money. I'm getting 250 of them to start and will order more if I find I'm going through them fast. Pretty soon the city will be plastered with my art and maybe, just maybe, what I've come up with will inspire someone else or make them stop and think. The design is based on the stenciled journal page I did, but will be in black and white only.
I finished a bunch of journal pages and will get those scanned in and posted later today or tomorrow. I love my journals, love working in them and love the fact that you can work in them absolutely anywhere!
