artsCOOL2024 ++ big ol' harvest moon

Hey all-

Here’s a little video of the art show we did at the end of artscool this summer. Getting back into the swing of things here as winter slowly rolls in. I’m at the art studio almost every day for at least an hour setting up shelves and cleaning and organizing and getting everything ready for making. I am currently upholstering some scrap sheets of packaging foam to use as sound reinforcement in the band room. Maybe I’ll give y’all a video tour once it’s all set up. :)

Other projects I have going are:

• designing a MEGAZINE..using scribus, which is an open source desktop publishing software. Mostly poking around and getting used to the interface and what the software is capable of. There was an update recently, and it made the interface feel smoother and easier to understand. Either that, or just stepping away from it for a while after a bunch of fiddling made coming back to it feel more fluid. It’s going pretty fast now so it’s fun again.

• building a website in the warm white blank slate of the indieweb. Crashing through rudimentary html and css courses getting my bearings back from ye olde neopets days.

• returning to the enormous mandala crochet blanket I started last christmas now that it’s getting cozy-cold

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It’s weird to not have a big garden this year, but it’s given me lots of time to catch up with deep organizational tasks. Last night I opened the last package I had that my mother sent me. The last box with her handwritten address and the shape of our names. I had a lot of them. She sent a lot of packages. My cousin sat with me while I peeled off the paper and cut open the box. It was full of CDs. Mostly The Grateful Dead. I had asked her to send me her favorite CDs once a long time ago. I guess she did, and I just missed it. The postage was marked 2018. She sent a lot of packages, and they were always difficult to open, even before she died. They were mostly strange kitsch from Amazon that she couldn’t afford and I didn’t want, and she would get so upset with me when I didn’t call her as soon as the tracking said it had been delivered and thank her, and even more upset when she called me to tell me I was ungrateful for whatever I didn’t know she’d sent me yet and I asked her not to buy me things. I was sending her money every month through the last few years to pay for her life insurance and to get her through the end of the month with cigarettes and groceries. I knew she wanted to get me things, and I wanted to figure out how to comfortably oblige, so I tried asking her to pick things out for me so I could buy them—things I did need, like new sheets, or some watercolor paper. I guess it didn’t work like that though. That felt like unjust labor to her. Sometimes the packages she sent were really thoughtful gifts. Actually, every package I hadn’t opened has turned out to be something like that. I guess I wasn’t in a space to receive them. Or just tired and overwhelmed by the constant din of her. The last words I said to her were “Don’t worry, there is time.”

How profoundly wrong I was.

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I hope you are all having a sweet harvest and nesting season. There’s a full moon tomorrow in Pisces. And a partial lunar eclipse. Full moons are a great time for release. It would be a good day to have a good cry. We all probably need it. :) Whatever that means for you, I hope your evening is wholesome and healing. Keep on making cool shit. The world needs more cool, present, real shit. Alchemize this collective grief and make. some. art.

See y’all on the other side of the portal.

~amelia