a much-needed mini vacation...

our 8th anniversary (!) was this week, and my whole family is in town from all parts of the western hemisphere, so they watched the kiddo while my love and i took off for catalina island alone! (and bought this cute wooden horse for joey - at a thrift store for a dollar, haha - i think i want to use it as one of those travel-icon-things, like the gnome in Amelie - take it with us on all our travels, and document our adventures - and its!)

our sweet little victorianesque pink hotel :)

we have lots more photos from the trip, but we haven't gotten to sort through them yet, so i thought i'd at least share the couple i had on my iphone! :)

my favorite part of these little jaunts (ok, this is only our second time ;) is the boat ride... wind whipping my hair (and dress) in all directions, salty ocean spray, so much sparkling blue... here's the sharks we bought at the candy store on the island (i know - they really look like they're swimming out there, right? ;) - in addition to some awesome childhood-memory-inducing jawbreakers :)

art for joey's room!

i had some inspiration a while back to make more playful art. i had brainstormed about toys i loved as a kid, and wanted to turn those into little artworks... so i did! as i created them, i noticed that the color schemes went perfectly with Joey's room! perfect! art about my childhood in my one-year-old's room - feels like i'm passing something on... plus, this bear that i drew actually does sit on joey's shelf (his name is peter... except for a couple months in grade school, when i decided i wanted "him" to be a female bear - then it was petrina ;), so it all works!
i'm not really sure what this toy was exactly... i think it was a little plastic coin bank. but it stands out in my memory as a "favorite", so i drew it :)
a tiny double-decker bus that i rediscovered recently and had included as some of my decor in my art room - knew i needed to include it with this project, as i have very fond feelings associated with it (along with the mailbox) from my childhood bedroom that i lived in (with 3 younger sisters!) until age 8.
peter: isn't he so friendly? he used to have a knit nightcap and sweater when i was a kid, but those got lost somewhere along the way to 2011...
you can see it best in these last couple of pictures, but i wanted to make sure i said that what i drew this bear on was an actual first-grade composition i wrote ABOUT peter. i wished afterwards that i'd made copies first. i think i still have the rough draft somewhere, complete with Mrs. Birlew's red markings... but i think it makes the piece even more authentic-feeling, using actual personal ephemera. and the porous composition paper took to the beeswax nicely in this encaustic piece! the other two pieces were drawn on a theology book page and a children's book page, respectively, before being adhered with the beeswax to the boxes.

can you see my name there? "Jamie Miller" (well, that USED to be my name, before i attached myself to this wonderful guy with whom i will be celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary next week!) - a little difficult to read because the pencil from the back of the page shows through once the paper has been saturated with the beeswax - i love seeing how beeswax/encaustic medium transforms a given piece of paper (or fabric, or plant, or... my experiments have taken many forms ;).

new blog: transformed by design

oh! i forgot to tell you! i started posting on my other blog! and it's (dun dun dun)

transformedbydesign.blogspot.com

after i chose the name, i couldn't sleep for two hours because of second guessing it. it seems too boring or stuffy to me, like it'd be a section header in a master's thesis or something. i wanted to make it something more fun and fresh and colorful... but, alas, once you choose it, you're stuck with it! and it really does encompass a lot of what i want that blog to be about: the process of transformation, and it being "by design" meaning 1)on purpose, and 2)created to be this way by God's design... and ALSO, the fact that i plan to include lots of little things i've altered (transformed): clothes, accessories, etc. AND that i PERSONALLY have been transformed already by the design process - by discovering my creativity, and the ways that i personally and uniquely reflect God to the world! so, although it's a little stuffy (and the fact that i realized afterwards also, that there's a fashion blog called "alteredbydesign" already, which is very similar), i'm sticking with it/stuck with it :) so check it out if you haven't already! tomorrow's post will be a food one...see you there...!



p.s. can you tell i've been obsessed with instagram lately? along with the rest of the iphone world, i guess :)

renegade!

it is so very therapeutic for me to go places like this. i come away bursting with inspiration, but most of all, i feel like i'm not alone - there are other people out there like me! and there's proof! :)

i am absolutely in love with this shop - everything about it. here's a couple shots of what she had displayed (and how she displayed it, i love almost as much as the jewelry itself!)...

and in other news...

i'm starting a new blog! this one is not going away (oh, no it's not!) - just a new one with a different focus. this one will remain my art and poetry and life and thoughts blog. my new one is specifically about becoming healthy. about the transformation i foresee taking place as i embark on a new journey (starting soon, details to come!) toward wholeness, body and soul. beginning the journey toward eating healthy, enjoying exercising my body, and - get this - fashion! (what?? i'm a fashion blogger??? how did THIS happen? i never thought i'd see the day!) it all just came to me as an idea at once, to sort of document the process of transformation via "fashion". i have only recently begun to be interested in developing a sense of personal fashion and beauty (i have a hard time even calling it "fashion" - more just "an expression of me in what i wear" :) but over time i have become more and more interested in letting my own creations become a part of what i put on, personalizing my wardrobe, changing and growing over time. and i have really been in a process of transformation that God has been taking me through, in relation to my having "a beauty to unveil", and i think this is part of it. so, expect great things!

beauty. creativity. delicious. colorful. me.

my goal is to post every day on one or the other of these two blogs (but we all know how that can go with a toddler in tow, so it's at least something to shoot for!), so if you haven't heard from me for a while over here, check the other one! i'll tell you the address in the next post, once i have something posted on my new blog!

ps. i'm sorry to those of you whose lives this complicates, as you have this blog set as your homepage, and now will never know when to be jumping between them (this includes a very large readership of my sister and April - i'm sorry ;) - just think of it as "spicing things up a bit" ;)