While Jim enjoyed playing with color and sketching faces that had surreal elements (as he often does!), I worked on the first “sketch” of a 1:12 model of my old dictionary.

My new friend, Nancy Enge​ does the most wonderful miniatures – and has inspired me to go in that direction for my “holy-crap-that’s-a-scary-mountain” life goal. (A topic for another post.)

For the dictionary “Sketch”: It took me a little while to figure out the math involved but after I figured it out, I measured and cut what I needed. Since I just wanted to get a “quick and dirty” model, I took a snapshot of the cover and spine, placed it in InDesign and sized it down to what I needed & printed it out. It looked SO CUTE!

What I learned from this “sketch”: I need to NOT use card stock for the spine! I realized afterwards that I shouldn’t have used it. My dictionary didn’t have a hard spine. It was force-of-habit for me to create a spine. (I make mini-books – just haven’t done it “to scale” with a real book before.)

For the final, I’ll either recreate the text or take a better shot of the cover. It would be awesome to have gold leaf paint for both the text on the cover and for the page edges, but that intimidates the heck out of me. I’ll post when I have more on this.

My creativity has been “commercially” focused for so long, it feels a little scary but exciting to share some of the things I dig into that are from my heart and aren’t just “creativity for hire”.

It has been a dream of mine to do art installations – I’ve got a notebook that I continue to add ideas to. They seem “impossible” for me to get to do them but as both my mom and dad have separately told me, if I shoot for the stars and just make it to the moon, I’m doing well.

Miniatures

Although my good friend Leanne and my husband Jim both told me to consider creating these installations in small scale, I hadn’t given it too much thought because I have these grand ideas and always seem to want to jump in the deep end and create something complex and intense for my first project. (This is a bad idea.)

Ask my Mom what kind of quilt I wanted to make for my first quilt… tumbling blocks! Beautiful, but wow – fussy! Not surprisingly, that project never got finished. Unfortunately, I’ve done this often. Plan big, then jump onto something else because it was more than I could do for a first project.

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I’ve always loved miniatures but until I met a new friend, Nancy – a designer and miniaturist who does very realistic miniatures, I truly had no idea how realistic and amazing miniature items could be.

Sooo… with this part of my life journey I am looking to wade in slowly. This will involve patience and planning, but with everything I’ve learned – right up until this very moment – nothing is wasted – even those crazy times I jump in the deep end. Each experience I have builds off the next and each are stepping stones to the next experience I will have – and I’ll look to document it here.

As always, my friends and family have helped me along my path. I’m so grateful to have brilliant and amazing friends and family. I hope we can continue to learn and grow together.