acraftylife.com

After 3 years of working with a virtual call center taking sales and service calls for a variety of infomercials and road service plans, I burned out and need a new challenge and definately, a lot less phone work.  So, off I went to my favorite work at home (wah) forums and found some interesting possibilities.

The most promising are the freelance writing brokers.  There are a lot of them and each wants a writing sample, so that is taking a lot of time and energy.  So, what do I do, come here and write a blog post about it, lol.  Glutton for punishment!!

Here are the wah contracting companies I found today:

http://www.demandstudios.com Writing, Filmmaking and Copy Editing

http://www.textbroker.com/ Writing

https://www.livework.com/ A splinter company of LiveOps.  Pay for different work projects.

http://www.acddirect.com/ A call center focused on pledge capture, but expanding.

Here are the forums where I found them:

http://www.workplacelikehome.com

http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/bb

http://www.virtualvocations.com/forum/i/index.php This one is a membership site, but a lot of info is available without joining.

More resources can be found above on the WAH Resources page button.  Please excuse that they are not all clickable, something happened in the transition from my other blog Makin it Work at Home

Part of my search for a different 2nd half led me to stories of women who have reinvented their lives at More Magazine.   One such story really touched my heart and should be shared.  Please read about Pam Cope and her how she came to be rescuing children through her  Touch A Life Foundation

Another agency that does similar work probably on an even larger scale is the International Justice Mission Please check them out too and see if maybe you can provide help in whatever way you feel is right for you.  Thanks.

The juicing is going well and is the mainstay of my breakfast.  Confession – that’s after a mug of coffee, but one thing at a time.  Today I thought I’d have a raw lunch as well and instead of juicing, figured that throwing everything into my blender would yield a thicker smoothie like meal and it did.  See:

Greeeeen smoothie

The black specs are grape skin particles and the green specs are spinach and mustard greens (not so great).   It is so thick, I would be better off eating this with a spoon.   It isn’t bad, but not brilliant either and might take some getting used to.  The taste is fine, I like that green taste, but the consistency is chewy. Now I know why raw foodists advocate power blenders for smooth not chewy mixes, rather your average household model.  Sigh!  Something else to add to my wish list.

So far, so good.

As a middle age woman struggling with weight – all those in the same boat, hey out there , I am contemplating the rather radical idea of incorporating a lot more raw food into my eating plan. Plan, I have a plan? LOL, okay, so maybe I don’t currently have an eating plan, apart from eat what I want when I want, but that can change. I guess radical is not really the best description either because raw comes before cooked.

I have owned a juicer for about, um, wow! 19 years and love to make green veggie and fruit drinks. Said juicer has several drawbacks as you might expect from an almost antique appliance. It does nothing with the peels and pulp and spits out various parts as it pleases from the loading chute, which makes for a lot of clean up. The end product, however, is pretty good.

I need to do some research into a better model that utilizes the pulp and doesn’t decorate my kitchen in multi-colored splatter. I’ll post my results and some options here when I have them.

Juicing is just part of a raw foodists regime, I now know; the rest involves much more research and creativity. The benefits are understandably immense in health recovery, future illness prevention and weight loss and some even say the weight loss is painless. Hmmm, we’ll see about that. Raw foodists apparently call weight loss, releasing weight and I like that because it does seem that until we choose to take action to release it, we do in effect hold onto it. The psychology of that is someone else’s area to investigate.

Well, more on this subject as the story unfolds. For now, I’m only juicing for breakfast and adding raw almonds as a snack, instead of who knows what.

I have to give credit to my daughter for renewing this interest and making me hunt down the delinquent juicer. She recently adopted a vegetarian way of eating and in finding recipe variety for her, I have encountered a whole potential other way of eating.

On a crafty note, I am elbow deep in creating a more elaborate than normal card for dd which involves no paper or card stock.

I recently watched the 2002 movie, “The Magdalene Sisters” and it has been haunting me and infuriating me ever since. Have you seen it?

Here’s the description from Netflix: Quote…This unflinching drama charts several years in the young lives of four “fallen women” who were rejected by their families and abandoned to the mercy of the Catholic Church in 1960s Ireland. While women’s liberation sweeps the globe, these women are stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite servitude in The Magdalene Laundries, so that they may atone for their “sins.” End quote.

In my ignorance, I had no idea that girls, probably less than a decade older than me, were being effectively jailed and abused, rather than cared for, by the Catholic church after they supposedly “fell from grace”. This order existed for decades, with the last asylum (their word) closing in 1996!!!!

This was happening in the 60’s, not in Victorian times, despite the dark era feel of the movie. What a power the moral hypocrisy of the Catholic institution was then. I suppose it still is for many even now.

In the reviews, many stated their feelings regarding this movie about real events and it seemed that several who were raised, as I was, in that church, had a particularly strong reaction to it. It certainly resurfaced many memories of my grade school years as a day student in a Catholic boarding school as several of the characters reminded me of nuns and discipline I encountered there. It seemed they were determined to take their unhappiness out on us and I suspect that shaped my previously overly quiet, watchful personality for years. The less you were noticed the better and as a girl who had recently lost her mom, I mastered that skill easily.

If one didn’t know that the treatment those nuns and priests metered out was about as far from Christian love as one could imagine, you could become very distant and bitter to God. The Catholic church, despite their claims, is an entity created by man, not a picture of a church as God wants it. Read Acts in your Bible and see how God really planned it. If you don’t have a Bible, go here and read it online: www.blueletterbible.com

Ok, this wasn’t intended to be a religious rant, but hey, that’s what you’ll get here every so often from this opinionated middle-aged woman who tries to be both a Christian and a feminist. I acknowledge that’s often a contradiciton in terms, but the right one wins out most.

Art and animals.  Please help this mixed media artist who runs a shelter in TN to win desperately needed money to help these adorable dogs.  Her blog has info on how to vote and how to help in other ways.  It’s just a vote, so go do.

http://aplacetobark.blogspot.com/2009/08/please-help-place-to-bark-win-check-for.html

Most of our animals were adopted or they adopted us, so we have a great affinity for no-kill shelters.  Milo, our oldest furbaby thanks you for adopting shelter animals and spaying and neutering your pets.

To make those UTEE tiles I melted clear in the melting pot and poured it over some rubber stamp sheets, removed when still warm and trimmed some down with scissors.  Some I left just as they solidified.  Then, when cool, I embellished some with PearlEx powders or a transparent acrylics and then poured more UTEE over the color, one in a set of three.   That makes for a two-sided shine and tiles that can be used in many ways, from mosaics to pendants.  So many ideas and I want to make then all NOW, lol.

My DD and I went to check out a college a few hours away and while she was hanging out with friends who are doing a summer program there and getting an insiders view of the campus, I went shopping…alone.   Oh the joy!

I had two intended targets: books and crafts, but being as it wasn’t a huge city we were in, I had limited choices.  I did in fact manage though, lol.

I found a book by Laurie Mika called Mixed Media Mosaics which I had wanted for a long time.  Totally up my alley in the way of crafts as it combines several techniques: mosaics, polymer clay and embellishment.  Of course, I figured that if poly clay tiles work, then UTEE tiles would work too, so I made a few.

The other great find of the day, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was a Chain Maille Kit I bought for DD to try.  I have been attempting to bring her over to the crafting dark side for years and while she shows a mild interest, nothing has captured her attention till now.  She sat up making a Byzantine chain bracelet until it was done and looked around wanting more.  We’ll handle that on our next back to school shopping trip.  Living in the boonies requires restraint, no spur of the moment retail therapy for us. Sigh!

Without enough jump rings to finish another maille project, she dug in my jewelry making stash for inspiration and found things to make 2 necklaces, also accomplished that same evening and with great looking results.  Can we say addicted?  LOL.  Mom wins!

I should have named this blog Dealing with Craft ADD because seriously, nothing has yet to hold my attention for more than one project and that’s no way to become skilled.  Sigh.

So, we are still working on DD’s dorm room rug, but a re-invented version. Turns out the huge ball of yarn we bought had an ugly interior.  Must have been an odd dye lot because it morphed into this yucky green, goldy yellow maroon mix half way thru the unravelling and was declared unsuitable.  Now, we are using a beautiful icy mix of pastel purple, green, blue and pink.  Sort of shiny Easter colors mixed with white.  Naturally, Mom is thinking…oh, that’s gonna show dorm floor grunge quickly…how will she (I) wash it?

Oh yeah, Friendly Plastic…love it.  Do you remember Friendly Plastic from the 80’s?  Was it the 80’s?  I adore the shiny, vibrant colors and have been following a new blog on the subject, http://friendlyplastic.blogspot.com Go look at the amazing eye candy they have there, while I get my first funny attempts photographed.

Between glass, beads and textiles, fiber crafts seem to be winning my attention lately. I guess that’s going back to my roots, as I learned to knit when I was 5 and was sewing my own clothes as a teenager.

My daughter and I have started a project for her dorm room to cover up the horrible, cold vinyl floor.  Her residential high school used to be a hospital 100 years ago and while future students will benefit from the new campus that is in the planning and fund raising stages, for now, they make do.

The project is a latch hooked rug, about 5 ft. x 6 ft., so kinda big for a craft neither of us have done in years.   She chose warm, soft caramel and maroon chunky acrylic yarn and we are cutting our own 2 1/2″ strips to hook.   I’m winding the yarn around a slim spatula that has a convenient slit in the middle which fits scissors perfectly, to cut multiple strips at once.   We split the backing in half so we could each work on it at the same time without getting in each other’s way.  Here’s a photo:

Dorm Room Rug

That’s Charlie, a stray who found us last November in the engine compartment of our truck after we had driven 10 highway miles.  We heard his tiny scared little mews when we got out of the truck and I was so afraid that he was injured, but apart from being understandably terrified, he was fine.  He now lives a safe, pampered, inside life and I bang on the hoods of our vehicles before we start them up in winter.

This project, borne out of the necessity to not spend $300 on “the perfect rug” she found has sparked an interest in traditional rug hooking, the kind where you pull wool loops up through linen, rug warp or monk’s cloth with a simple hook (not a latch) to create a painterly images.  Most of the artists doing this work lean toward the primitive style that originated on the eastern seaboard, but there are some doing more comtemporary work and this is the direction in which I would go.

The last month has been hectic and unpredictable. My step-mom went home to be with the Lord, which is a good thing as she was 90 years old and had been in considerable uncontrolled pain for several years, but still it of course, leaves a void in life.

School ended and that meant dorm move-out for my high schooler and subsequent activities related to school events. All of this occurs several hours drive away so each thing takes up at least a day.

Add in a wedding and assorted family dramas and then, there’s work and catch up, sigh. Crafting has taken a back seat, just like my new blog.

So, here I am, wondering exactly what was my focus, purpose and plan? Oh yeah, to figure out how to make a living out of what I love to do and detail it for those who have the same desire.

I’ll start with describing the crafts that I’m playing with to make this happen. Yes, that was crafts, the plural, because I’ve already mentioned I enjoy, like many others, a craft a.d.d syndrome.

The interest and skill (that may be subjective) list at this point:
Beading of course, as that’s my mainstay craft
Glass Fusing
Mosaics
Punchneedle…what? I know, that’s what I said. It is pretty much unknown outside fiber circles.
Encaustic Painting
Lampwork
Polymer Clay
Resin
Felting
Rug Hooking
Latch Rug Hoooking – an old one that most of you did as a child, but which is experiencing a come-back in a newer, cooler design form.

In figuring out this crafty life stuff, I’ve researched and read and analyzed to the point of inaction. Analysis paralysis is not unusual for me in the least and I suspect I may have missed my natural calling – some form of research compilation – to pass on to someone else to actually do something with, of course. Continue reading New Thinking

I have a certain picture in my head of what a crafty life might entail and certainly, things I would like it to be.  How to achieve it though, is is a bit of a mystery, sort of like a maze, I guess.  I can see part of the path, but then it turns and gets fuzzy.  Have you created a life you would call crafty? Tell me about it and how you got there.

Continue reading What Is a Crafty Life and How Do I Make One?