Well my pretties, no review today due to a bad bad migraine. Here’s what I’ve got on my bedside table though, if you want to snoop around:
(click on the pic to order)

(fictionalized account of the first First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln)

(more historical fiction about a can-do Boston gal during the WWI, clevery written by the author of The Bee Season)

(sent to me by Ragamuffin Diva…I haven’t finished it yet, but I like how the main character re-writes the lives of the saints…sort of like my saints and sinners collection!)

Hope one of these tickles your fancy. In the meantime…maybe someone should make a “no headache juju” shrine for me!

The Crafty Chica Collection: Beautiful Ideas for Crafts, Home Decorations and Shrines from the Queen of Latina Style
Kathy Cano Murilla

This week’s suggestion is the ever-useable The Crafty Chica Collection. This is a fun and fabulous ode to all things red, yellow, and glittery. I met Kathy at BlogHer 07, where she was on the arts and crafts panel. Her effervesant personality lit up the room as she encouraged us to go beyond the pink-and-chocolate-brown color combo trend and play with the colors of Latin heat. The general feel behind everything that Kathy creates is “have fun” and “use what you love.”

In the The Crafty Chica Collection, I especially like her idea for outdoor candle lanterns using tins from imported stewed tomatoes and Guatamala wedding beads. (I wear the set I found at a garage sale with some outfit almost every week – I’d have to hunt up more to make patio lights!) The crafty Chica Collection, or Kathy’s new book Crafty Chica’s Art de la Soul will give you lots of visual ideas for our next Creativity Challenge – matchbox shrines! You can find lots of free project ideas at Kathy’s super helpful website.

Hmm….I think I need to go buy the Mexican Folk Art Coloring Book and some glitter….

The War of Art
Steven Pressfield

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
-p. 39

Living the artist life is hard. No one gives you a business card and a plaque on the door to help you feel official. There’s not a regularly salary. It comes with no overtime pay.

While we artists may turn up our noses at bourgeois needs like a pay raise and a corner office, the reality is that in our culture these things convey value. They tell us and others that we are legitimate–that we have a license to practice art, that someone has given us permission. In short, cash and clout confirm that we have cajones.

Without these cultural permission givers, artists often find themselves adrift and never progress professionally. Steven Pressfield would like us all to please, knock it off.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles takes the rose colored lenses off our romantic notion of what it means to be a writer/painter/poet/etc and gets us all prepped for battle. What are we fighting? Resistance, mostly –our most prevalent foe. In this pithy book, Pressfield teaches us how to move beyond being amateurs. More than any other book, The War of Art taught me to become a professional artist.

Go ahead, get your marching orders.

All of Magpie Girl’s reviews and recommendations are now available in one convenient spot. Click!

Unfinished projects that lurk in my studio….

-Write authors bio for my literary agent. (Man, that sounds good!)

-Finish prayer beads cards for recent sales

-Finish assembling four month old Prayer Flags for Monkfish Abbey
(sew flags, print iron ons, iron on, hand sew to rope, hang)

-Finish last remaining Vintage Faith Rosetta
(buy one bead, string)

-Create Spring/Summer Zine (very bawdy! A front-and-back double feature of female saints and sinners)

-Knit Rebecca’s (new version)bunny for Lindsey. (From Last-Minute Knitted Gifts)

-Assemble Rebecca’s bun bun for a coworker.

-Finish Myra’s orange bun bun for baby boy Waddell. (BTW, this pattern is from Knit Wit: 30 Easy and Hip Projects (Hands-Free Step-By-Step Guides), which is a pretty good beginner’s book.)

-Turn collaged pages into a journal to sell on Lulu.

-Post list of religious books for sale.

-Finish number two of Miz’s purple-and-chartreuse roller girl legwarmers from Stitch ‘n Bitch Nation

-Knit ‘Manda’s WasteKNot speed racer legwarmers (my own design!)

-Knit a couple pair of kid’s WasteKNot leg warmers for buy magpie.

-Re-read collection of kid’s stories Paul and Rebecca published for me on Lulu and see it they’re ready to sell.

-Make personal slogan bracelets out of vintage type letters
(buy glue, file)

-Write up tons of referrals for the magpie suggests page, and consolidate the ones I’ve posted on the general blog like these.

-Custom embroider two women’s jean jackets with designs from this cool site. (I already finished one for Eden with mondoMadonna on the back.)

-Make prayer flag kits
(sew flags, write directions, assemble w/iron ons and rope)

Re-posted from my site the parenting advice-o-pedia, Minti.

So this morning I was going to write some advice down about dealing with the morning get-to-school rush, when my own cleverly orchestrated morning came crashing to a complete stop. Cate wanted to wear a dress that was slit up to her waist (the slit had torn to immodest proportions.) When I said she had to pick something else, it turned into a full blown tempter tantrum complete with “I wish you were not my mother!!!” and “I wish I’d never been born.” This was followed by her older sister waking up and immediately crying because, “There is no peace in this house and I need a peaceful morning to get centered!!!”

Needless to say, my girls are emotional.

Because I’m the proud mother of a couple of psychic-sponges, I’ve amassed a lovely collection of picture books that help children deal with emotions. In fact, I quoted from the first one to help Cate when I dropped her off at school. “Today was a hard day. Tomorrow will be better.”

Hope these books make your today, and your tomorrows, better! Read the rest of this entry »

I swear to God, if this headache doesn’t go away soon I’m going to conduct a turn of the century lobotomy and put a hole in my head with the battery operated power drill Paul got at Costco last weekend. Either that, or do an end-run around the addiction thing and join some 12 step group just before imbibing truck loads of controlled substances.

Gin and tonics also work, as long as you never EVER stop drinking them.

Do you have any idea how much is SUCKS to write the really boring “marketing analysis” part of a book proposal when you are on day 13 of a migraine that is rapidly escalating to dark-room-and-ice-pack-stage?

Okay, enough bitching, time for an inspiring quote:

“To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision…”
Isn’t that great? It goes on…

“…one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally. Categorical statements become meaningless. The saddest stories are shot through with humor. You come to tolerate people, ideas, and circumstances wholly at odds with your dreams and desires.”
- Nancy Mairs, Carnal Acts: Essays

One problem, I don’t think I can hold many more ambivalences in my head. At least, not without the help of that controlled substance….

Aqualung: Strange and Beautiful
Dreamy, melodic…makes you want to be melancholically in love with someone so intense you forget to eat anything other than artisan bread and strawberries.

The Dante Club: A Novel
Okay, so I had to to take notes on the back page of my paperback in order to keep track of the broad cast of characters , but now I’m so into it I can hardly put down this sophisticated literary mystery.

The Piggle I’ve started this and torn in out so many times I’ve probably knit three of these puppies. A knitting pal just told me how to string a “lifeline” thread through each set of lace repeats so that if I make a mistake I only have to unravel a few lines. Phew! Catie better wear this hat every day for a year!

My migraine is back (hello darkness my old friend) and it’s hard to wax poetic about the miraculous wonder of being an embodied soul. But I did want to check in about our habitude for March.

I’ve taken Jen B.’s advice and adopted a mantra for the month. Every time I eat or drink I say to myself “I love my body as I love a child.” It came to me after I realized I would never treat my children’s bodies the way I treat my own. I don’t always remember to say it, but I often do, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how often I am making good choices without even thinking about it. Sometimes at the end of the day I go over my food and movement for the day and recite my mantra over each memory. I’m learning a lot…I have a lot to learn.

Inspired by the book Intuitive Eating, I’ve also thrown away all my dieting stuff and given up dieting for good. My Weight Watcher’s point counters are tossed and my scale is deprived of batteries and lying in the back of my closet. I’m eating what I want when I want it, as along as I’m hungry. The first two weeks I worried about gaining more, but so far all my clothes fit the same and my favorite pair of jeans fear maybe feels a little looser.The hardest part is determining whether I’m hungry physically, or just emotionally, but I don’t think I’m falling off the wagon too often.

I’m still writing my morning letters to my body about three days a week. It’s been surprising to me how sympathetic I feel towards my body when I treat her (me) as a person and not as a mysterious, manipulative entity to be battled.

Mostly pleasingly, I’ve noticed a distinct decrease in the amount of negative self talk I do about my body. I have this huge mirror in our bathroom which makes seeing my body (me) as a whole every morning unavoidable. Sometimes, I even smile.

What’s your mantra this month?

Take a look at this picture. Okay, ignored the permmed mullet for a minute and notice the size 5 body. This is me at about thirteen. I thought I was fat.

For as long as I can remember my body has been my enemy. It was what got me molested. (I can remember trying to wear shirts that buttoned to the neck to that the person who molested me wouldn’t be tempted by my developing breasts.) It was what made me attractive (or not) to boys. (I started dieting when I was 13 because I thought I should stay a size 3. Tiffany Frank figured out how many sit ups we’d have to do to burn off one of the chocolate caramel bars we were selling as a school fundraisers, and we’d eat them at break then all do sit ups in the empty classrooms.) It was what made me a hip, powerful woman — or not. (Hip, powerful girls played sports – girly old fashioned girls sucked at sports and were doomed to a life involving home ec.) I shoved it into pencil thin jeans, laying on the bed to zip them up; filled it with chocolate chip cookie dough binges when I was sad; and forced it to keep achieving and achieving by fueling it with diet coke through riduclous extracurricular activities and late night study sessions.

As I grew older, I became more sophisticated about how I talked about body image, and diet, and the insipid consumer culture that said happiness was a size 0 and plus size was a size 9. Still, my body was foreign to me – at best silent, and at worst a conspirator for my own unhappiness.

When my first child was stillborn, and my second delivery required an unplanned c-section and resulted in a child who lost weight and wouldn’t nurse, I became convinced – my body was out to get me. The separation between mind/spirit and body that had started as a necessity to survive the abuse had morphed into a permanent division that ruled a very large part of my world. The diagnosis of migraines as a chronic condition just confirmed my early assessment. The evidence was undeniable, my body was conspiring against me.

I am rarely happy with my body and I am appalled at how much time and creative mental energy I spend on this issue. Food is always on my mind. My weight is a near constant disappointment. I feel guilty all the time. I never go through a single day where I don’t feel bad about something I’ve eaten, some exercise I’ve not done or not done enough of, some item of clothing that I can’t wear. For instance, every day on my way to work I walk by this adorable boutique and think, “I can’t wear a single item in there.” They stop at size 9. It’s not a shop for petites or anything, it’s just a regular Seattle boutique. (I’m a size 12.) Or here’s another, today I lifted weights and walked on the treadmill, but I’m going about my day with this thought hovering over my head like a cartoon dialogue balloon: “Maybe I should have done yoga instead.” It’s mentally exhausting and embarrassingly ridiculous.

Last week, in yet another show about dieting, I heard Oprah say that she had wasted a large part of her 30’s worrying about food and weight. I’m thirty-seven. Only three years to go before I am undoubtedly, irrevocably ‘grown up.’ Will I still be carrying the neuroses of a thirteen year old? Will I still automatically convert calories into sit ups? Will I still waste precious minutes feeling guilty? Will my body remain my enemy?

I am so tired of being stuck in Jr. High.

A year or two after I was diagnosed with chronic daily migraines (status migranosis) a new friend, Christine Painter, recommended that I read Voice Lessons by Nancy Mairs and What Her Body Thought from Susan Griffith. Mairs taught me that I do not have a body. She writes, “I have a body. I am a body.” Griffith reminded me that “My story is immersed in my body.” (p. 7) This is not a gnostic exercise I cannot separate my “self” from my physical being. I am my body. If I hate my body, I hate myself. If I love my body, I love myself.

I am nearly 40 years old and I still do not understand this. “I am a body”. It’s is a thought that echoes with truth and memory. It shimmers like a mirage just out of reach. I’d like to get there. I’d like to understand. I’d like to bring my body back to myself. I’d like to be my body, and to love my bodyself as I love my motherself and my creativeself and my womanself.

That’s the habitude for the month, I think. Love your body. How shall we proceed?

Update: to find out how this experiement went, follow along by reading posts about body love in the Habitudes category!

Good Morning Body,

Rachelle

I’m not sure what all this is, but I think it might be a clue to next month’s habitude.

And so may this:

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

I’ll let you know….