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Well, it showed itself to me this week...and I really love it! I had no preconceived notion of what this was going to be when I began...it led me right up to the end. I so love it when that happens! (Still a new feeling for me, so I tend to be amazed for quite some time after the fact...bear with me!)
Obviously still working with that same theme of houses and home and self, only here it is becoming much more dimensional. The nest was the first thing I created...building up the layers little by little, twisting and turning the paper and ribbon and such to create depth. The hard part was waiting on each layer to dry so that I wasn't literally taking it off with the next. Oh, and the sticks are real. I found them in my yard, painted them and glued them on. The little charms are just some odds and ends I had in some of those treasure bins hanging around the studio. You know, the stuff you have to save but you have no idea why...until you do.
So anyway, I sat the thing up in a corner of the studio and stared at just the nest on the canvas while I was working on the fatbook pages the past few days. I finally cut out the pictures and just propped them up there to live with them for a while. Today they finally became a permanant part of the piece. And the house just got built up around them. I really don't know where this stuff is coming from lately. But these pieces are just getting more and more personal. I think maybe, finally, through this art, I am excavating myself. And that is a good thing. For those that don't know, I am one of three children. I am the oldest, but the one that still, after all this time, hadn't figured "it" out yet. I have done a little bit of everything, even some "artsy" things, and always managed to make it. But I have never dared call myself an artist. Not out loud. How could I be that? I had bills to pay, responsibilities, etc., etc. When the real question I should have been asking was, "How could I not?" It is so much easier to just lean into myself and create than all those years of denying ever were. It is now official. I am not "an artsy person", I am an Artist. I create. That is what I do. There.
I said it out loud.
Finally.
This is a stack of them after having the details added to the houses, and the edges slightly darkened with raw umber for a little depth.
I cannot believe how many variation on this saying Eric and I volleyed around before he actually threw out this one, and I knew this was it! Because this is exactly what Artfest was for me. Seeking myself. The true me. The me that I have always been but that had somehow gotten buried beneath all of the should-dos and have-tos and not-creating days of life. That is the girl I was seeking when I traveled to that unknown place and found my people...my tribe...and I knew I was home. In so many ways. I was home within myself in that place, and in the people who embraced me there, and all of that made it just a little bit easier to embrace myself and my talents and all that I am. And to stop apologizing for it. So, thank you 
This is a close-up of the blooming fennel heads. They also drop seeds...check out the next photo....
But in conjunction with all of the paper debris you see above and working for the first time with some of the shells my parents recently brought back to me from Florida below..... 
I have created this. 
I have also created this background....no idea at all what this will morph into.
The first cucumber, yeah!
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