A Great Collection of Artwork

This post isn't about journals except in a very broad sense.  Last week I made a catalog through Blurb.com for a group of women artists that I used to belong to back in the 80s when I lived in Indana.  I think you'll enjoy seeing the catalog, which should be visible by clicking on the link above.  (I still have to check and make sure this link works.  If not, I'll use a different one and edit this one.) The catalog and the written entries form a kind of group journal that tells about what these artists have been up to the past 35 years.

Well, I can't get the cut and paste code from Blurb to work here, but this is what you can do:  Go to www.Blurb.com and search for the book by name:  IWCA .  or you can search under my name.  When the book comes up on the Blurb site, click on "Preview" to see all the inside pages.

Mousies

Our cats over the years have all been good mousers, and as a result we've been frequently given unwanted gifts of dead mice on our doorstep.  The dead mice seem to us to be a special kind of gift-- something the cats apparently really want to give us, but something we really don't need or want.  We always call them "mousies." A few weeks ago it occurred to me that the pieces of unwanted advice I am so tempted to give to my adult children are really mousies in the truest sense of the word.  My journal group had decided for this next month to each develop a completely different practice for our journals-- to keep track of something we've not kept track of before.  I immediately thought of a mousies journal.

I carved a small dead mouse stamp out of  pink carving material.  I slammed together a down and dirty little pamphlet book to use as the journal for the next month.  And as often as I can catch myself with a mousie of advice ripe for the giving, I stamp a mousie in the journal and print the advice in tiny letters on the carcass.  If I have managed to catch the mousie before I lay the advice on the person, I hang the mousie up by its tail.  If the advice escapes, however, that mousie runs across the bottom of the page.  It has been interesting to see how often I harbor mousies, and using the journal has definitely reduced the number of mousies that I am laying on various doorsteps.