Adle-Fatique and the Altered Book

Yesterday was another magnificent, wonderful and excellent day spent on the little hot and dusty porch, a.k.a., my new art studio!

My awesome and quite insane (not senile) friend, Lynne, and I spent about ten hours beginning our first altered books.

One more thing I love about Lynne: she will spend ten hours in a hot and dusty porch with three hot dogs at her feet (my two and my daughter's one), eat only disgusting cheap little frozen pizza and drink water which probably has a gnat in it... and she likes it as much as I do. She also loves to dig through boxes looking for stuff. This makes her an excellent artist companion.

Lynne is making a book of her favorite Bible verses and I'm making one of the Proverbs 31 woman.

We both got about four pages sort of finished and I started on a fifth one, but we were starting to get pretty slap happy and unreasonably optimistic about all the great art we could put on these pages when we finally realized we must be suffering from adle-fatigue.

I've always wanted to make an altered book... I've collected books on making altered books... I've collected books to make into altered books... I've collected even someone else's altered book... but oh! How much more wonderful just sitting your hiney in the shiny little chair and working on your own altered book.

Okay. So it could be considered a waste of time.

My sister is always telling me this: DON'T START ANY MORE PROJECTS! (by the way, I started this altered book deal without finishing her birthday present for last year. That was swept aside like so much debris to make room for this new idea!... and her birthday is in a mere 23 days... then I'll be past due TWO birthday presents!)

But starting something new is so HARMONIOUSLY WONDERFUL! It makes my blood move quick and my heart feel happy and my feet want to wiggle and my eye balls pop out a little bit.

And it looks like that's how Lynne was feeling too.

I should have taken a picture of our table we were working on. We were both being so courteous to leave room for the other person. We even shared the same glue bottle for ten hours without serious incident. But then Lynne says: "look... look... this is the space I am working in." It was about a six-inch-square right in front of her chair. I realized I was doing the same thing. We had piled and styled every inch of available space with our pretties and it was just magnificent.

I asked Lynne, "I wonder what people do with their time who are bored and don't make stuff."

She said, "I don't know. I am never bored."

And so I said, "Maybe they clean their houses."

We both thought that was probably right.

Meanwhile, we let the dogs clean up the pizza that hit the floor and we never worried at all about the mess. It gave those bored dogs something to do.

P.S. Perhaps, as I have heard, an altered book is a great place to try something new. Usually, when I try something new I like to throw it away because it is normally a piece of trash. Maybe there is another way.

I have recently discovered that if you resist the temptation to throw something away (of course, with a grand flurry of artistic haughtiness or desperate self-hatred and loathing) that you think is stupid -- burying it in the trash under a banana peel, two rubbery carrots and stray dog doo-doo you find hidden behind the sofa -- sometimes, the next morning, you decide it is sort of b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l!