WiseArts

I bought this coloring book at the thrift store on half-off day. Thus, it was only 20 cents! I love cats and cat-related junk of all sorts, so the cute cover illustration of this book caught my eye straight away. The book is a bit yellowed by age and has 2 little scribbles in it, but I still love it. Gotta love that retro style. Here are a few choice pages. My favorite is the mama cat saying, “You naughty kittens! You shall have no pie.” Love the raised paw and that stern cat look on her face. No pie for you!

Click, print and color!

Woot! The new theme has made almost made the transition from my test server to the live server. But, the road to getting it up and running live was not without its bumps.

• I had to do some CSS tweaks… Some things just looked a little different. Same platform, same browser. Somehow, something had changed.
• The Twitter Tools plugin that I use to get the tweets in the sidebar didn’t work. First, I couldn’t connect to Twitter at all using the plugin. To remedy this, I used some ideas I found on message boards that had worked for others. I changed my username to lowercase. No joy. Then I tried changing my password. That allowed to plugin to connect with Twitter, but it still wouldn’t update the sidebar… I tried the manual update buttons. No good.
• The Last.fm Records plugin that I use to put the music in the sidebar wouldn’t even install!! Got some fatal error. After searching around, I discovered that the server needed to be running PHP5 for it to work. Didn’t see any potential problems anywhere, so I enabled PHP5 on the server, and Last.fm is on the sidebar! In addition, it was at this point that the Twitter Tools plugin now started working properly!

Now… (I should have checked this browser before making it live) it seems that Internet Exploder is doing  a few funky things with my CSS. I’m a hardcore Firefox user, and thus, used that as my main testing platform while I designed the theme. The problems in IE do not render the blog unreadable or un-navigable, so I think I’ll get to that tomorrow night.

One plugin/widget that didn’t give me any problems was my Library Thing Widget! Installed and worked great from the get-go! If you don’t know what LibraryThing is, check it out! Basically, it’s a social networking site for people who love books and reading. You import your books into the system, then you can see a wide variety of information about the books, see who else on the network has similar libraries, read and write reviews, get suggestions, buy and sell through partner sites… lots more! I just upgraded to a lifetime account today. With a basic account, you’re constrained to 200 books, but now I’ll start cataloging the rest of my library. I don’t even have to type in every book. On my computer, I use MediaMan to catalogue my library of books and music. This program allows you to use your webcam as a barcode scanner — you scan in the ISBN/ASIN and then the program will automatically look it up on sites like Amazon or Library of Congress and import all the info. Then I can just export my list of ISBNs from MediaMan right into Library Thing! The problem is that I have a lot of old books that don’t have ISBN numbers and won’t be in any databases… I’ll have to type those in manually. I have a lot of books period! Even scanning barcodes takes some time. I won’t have my complete library online for a little while…

Now for something completely different… My husband picked up this cool print for me at Blockbuster, of all places. I saw it last time I went there and thought it was cool, but didn’t buy it. I’m not a huge Doors fan or anything, but something about it kept haunting my thoughts once in a while, so I mentioned it to my husband and then he went and got it for me. It’s called The Spirit Of Jim Morrison. It has a nice paint-y texture and comes with a clean black frame around it.

Wow! I’ve been a serious slacker for a while. In hibernation for the holidays I guess! haha

I had a lovely Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and I’m ready to get back into normal sleeping, eating, and working habits. Also, planning some more serious training on my bike and some craft time. A rubber stamp store not too far away (at which I was actually employed for a while!) has a super fun altered book club! I was a member since its inception, but I had dropped out for a year or so. Anyhoo, I’m planning on getting back into that! Making altered books is such a fun, spontaneous, and unrestricted art/craft. You are nearly unlimited in your choices of subject matter, medium, size… You can paint in a book, rip it up, glue things into it, saw it into shapes, add in pop-ups and containers, collage on a favorite subject, create journal pages, scrapbooks… You give unlimited potiental, new life, to a book that might be considered obsolete, a book that someone has discarded. You can also give new life to all variety of ephemera, junk, even straight-up garbage! Nearly anything can be used as craft materials for altered books.

Here are some spreads I did in the group’s very first round-robin (we each have a book, trade books, and alter a spread or two in each others’ books). These were done maybe about 5-6 years ago… Each book had a theme for the participating artists to focus on. Don’t ask me what these were… can’t remember.

Along with getting back into altered books, I have some plans to do some more beading. Annnnd, I’m updating this blog! I’m nearly done with a new theme. Here’s a peek! The new theme will feature a wintery look (this locks me into making a new one for spring), and it has a more interesting and useful sidebar. Now you can view my latest tweets via Twitter, the last songs I’ve played via Last.fm, and some random books from my library via LibraryThing! (BTW, LibraryThing is super cool!)