January? Blech! aka the January blahs

I am stomping around like a petulant teenager (no disrespect to petulant teenagers intended, naturally). Yesterday and today, my overriding response to almost anything has been "but I don't wanna!" Then today I got talking to someone at work and we realised that lots of people are feeling like that at the moment. I have certainly read that 24 January has been deemed the most depressing day of the year by a British study, so I am putting it down to that.

Progress on my 10-things decluttering:
Perfect example of my blechy state of mind - my camera needs charging. Easy answer - charge it, dear Liza! But the charger is in a box and it is one of two boxes and I don't know which and to find out I would have to look in the boxes, but they are behind some packs of film and I can't move those because there are several and that would be too hard and I don't wanna and you can't make me, so there! I fully expect to get over myself any day now, I am at the stage where I am laughing at my own behaviour, which usually means the end is in sight.

So there are no photos, but I have done 3 sets of 10 things over the past few days.

a) 5 x art supplies that I am not using - a pair of finished dowels, a nice album, a box of wooden hearts and stars, 2 make-your-own scrapbooks - all to be donated to a woman I met on freecycle with crafty children

b) 10 bits of random packaging from the art room, display boxes and packets from embellishments, etc.

c) 10 tiny weird things - bits of wood, bark, film canisters, etc

All of this is quite hard for me, because I always think it is such a shame to get rid of them, they might come in handy and I like to reuse and recycle. But, but, BUT I want to be making art in the art room and if I can't get in there/see the table/find the chair I won't be making any art. And I am really jonesing to make some art!

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Early, dark and wet on a Friday morning.

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It is, as I may have mentioned, early and dark and wet. We have vegetables delivered on Friday morning, early, and the sweet delivery man always apologises (I think he gathers that I am usually asleep when he buzzes). I did the quick thing I had to do early for work and since then I have been snuggled up on the sofa catching up with emails, blogs, flickr and facebook and listening to the rain. I am not good at facebook, I am not sure about facebook, I am not committed to facebook and yet I like having that marker out there for longlosts to find me.

I have a beautiful, black cat by me on the sofa. It is starting to get light out, which actually feels like a disappointment. I think the wet black was more comforting than wet grey. I am planning to make tea and go back to bed with journals and Art&Life and Cloth Paper Scissors. I am looking forward to getting films developed soon. I am hoping that the postman might bring me back issues of Craft magazine today. It is such a lovely magazine in a thick, slightly smaller format than the norm, with matte textured covers that just feel enticing. Lots of reuse and recycle ideas and really gorgeous projects. I am looking forward to getting going on my ATCs for Bee Shay's Artfest ATC book and my pages for the Artfest Fatbook. I am really excited about making charms again, I've had two ideas.

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Clutter and art and art clutter

Clutter from Tuesday is here - weird kitchen clutter. I was helped hugely by a post on zen habits, here. It talks about reducing things to the essential. I have discovered this year that I can be hugely influenced by just reframing how I think about a problem. I was tidying one day and found myself asking "Do I need this?" about an item. Framed like that, I easily answered "no!". Usually I would think "should I keep this?" - that leads to all the "well, it might come in handy" and "well, it was a gift, she might come over sometime..." scenarios. But "do I need it?" cuts through all of that waffle. And yes, if you love it, then you do need it. The zen habits post on the laws of simplicity did the same thing in my head, it all became clear... keep only the essential. Okay, I am applying that rule with a very light touch, but it was enough to convince me that two traditional corkscrews, a picnic corkscrew and a beer opener were probably not essential!
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I have art too at last. I have been fairly behind in posting stuff. This is an unbound journal page for an "outside the book/inside the box" project for journal type work that doesn't seem to fit my everyday journal or my creative journey journal. I was really tired on Monday or Tuesday and headed to bed, but I felt irritable and frustrated. Reading a magazine in bed, I realised it was because I hadn't been creating since I got home, so I got up and grabbed some paint and a handful of magazine pages and other collage papers, whatever caught my eye while I was rummaging. I just started ripping up graph paper and envelopes and applying it, then the landscape got added. The face (smudged out to protect the photographer's copyright, but intact on my original) was a wonderful picture of a certain singer exhausted and satisfied after a performance. I added between layers, stamped and painted my words and transferred the self portrait. Very much just unconscious play. Then I had to laugh, suddenly realising that there was a connection between my words and the singer in the magazine portrait & I added the quote "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." I love the way my unconscious created a page with the very words I needed to hear: I need to make art, nothing else matters, not how it is received, not my inner critic, just the process and the intrinsic growth.

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