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...
