Tuesday Doodles adhered to Book!

After teaching and preaching the wonders of a sketchbook to teens this summer, I found myself practicing what I preach these past few days. Sketchbooks for holding ideas and images together is great and it's even greater when you get to make the book from scratch...sewing, gluing and filling. The whole thing.
You may have guessed I have accumulated many Tuesday doodles over the past few months... and I've thought, what better place to keep them than in a personal book I bound by hand myself?!?! Why did this concept only occur to me now?

Consolidating my imagery into a single book is also timely because I have been trying to purge things in my home that I no longer use. The One-Year-Rule is the best and has served me well: If you haven't found a use for something in the past year, get rid of it and trust it will come back to you when you need it. The Artist/Hoarder instinct goes haywire when you do this. One particularly persistent pile of clutter I had to face was a bag of sticks. Wooden sticks, people! I don't need them! If I had a front yard, I'm afraid mine would be the one with the old toilet overgrown with weeds and the rusty lawnmower. But anyway, almost everything in my workspace is being glued into my book...

My South side Experience

In an unexpected turn of events, I found myself not in Michigan this weekend as planned, but instead on the South side of Chicago. My friend recently moved to the neighborhood of Bridgeport and I thought I'd take advantage of a free day to explore the neighborhood streets with her. There are a lot of quirks to this traditionally blue-collar area. It is highly saturated with Italians, Chinese, Lithuanians, and cops. Lots of cops. One quirk I found particularly fascinating was the abundance of knick knacks and dolls decorating storefront windows . Yes, dolls.

If you place dolls in your windows, I'd like to learn why. My friend explains: "I think they're kind of like the lawn ornaments of Bridgeport restaurants." They are everywhere.
In another unexpected turn, I found out my suburbanite sister was going to be not just in the city that day, but in Bridgeport as well. She did indeed grow up on the North side but then married a Sox fan. She is forgiven.
My friend and I walked over to her tailgaiting party outside U.S. Cellular Field-home of the White Sox. It was the annual Elvis Day at the ballpark and we watched a few Elvis impersonators parachute into the field. This is particularly strange since I was with my brother on the previous Sunday at Wrigley Field watching planes from the Air and Water Show fly over the field. The South side and the North side. So alike and so different. On the South side, they have way more dolls and way more Elvises. And then there were fireworks and well, things just get craaaazy!
And that my friends, is just what happens when you visit the South side.

Painting Thursdays?

I haven't supplied a doodling Tuesday this week but here's a painting on a Thursday. This is a painting I started yesterday in the kitchen. With the palette resting on the counter and sink area, I started a painting of the stove, whistling tea kettle and all.
Let this be a public service announcement: it's usually not a good idea to mix toxic oil colors in the place that you prepare food. Eek! There are whole organizations dedicated to these issues: like the ACMI (Art and Creative Materials Institute) http://www.acminet.org/

Guess who makes my contact lenses!?!

I wish I could have posted a sign on a lamp post in Chinatown last week. It would have read:

"Lost:
Hard Contact Lens
Slight bluish Tint
Last seen in my eye at the corner of 23rd St. and Wentworth Ave.
Age: 18 months"

I wear lenses that last up to 2 years. I sleep with them in and take them out only to clean every few weeks. They are awesome and give me nearly perfect vision.
Life just isn't the same without those little curved lenses in my eyes.

BUT!, It turns out there are inmates in Dixon, Illinois who are busy carving away at eyewear, including the rigid gas permeable lens sitting atop my misshapen (but now delightfully corrected) cornea.

"We're more than license plates!" should be the motto of Illinois Correctional Industries. Browse their website and take note of the amazing array of products they make such as

Women's Cotton Panties

orHotdog Buns
But anyway, back to my contacts...
I am utterly amazed by contact lens technology all the time. I was looking at the website for the company that makes my lenses Menicon Z(and now apparently contracts with the IDOC.) They offer a product that my eye doctor never mentioned to me before and sounds fascinating. It's a lens that you only wear at night and it re-shapes your eye so that "you see perfectly all the day long without any visual correction." It's like braces for your eyes where you wear a retainer at night! HA! I imagine it being problematic if your cornea slowly loses its shape as the day wears on and things gut fuzzier and fuzzier. But still!

It also turns out it's hard to photograph contact lenses, especially when they're in your eye. Here are a few more of my attempts:


I can see! It's a miracle!

More doodles around Chicago

Love the aloof park-goers!