Haz Mat Would be Proud

Yesterday was marbling day. My family cringes a little when I announce plans to marble for several reasons:

1) No food will be served. In fact, there will be no access to food for the entire day.

2) Mom's mood on marble days is uncharacteristically volatile, depending on the mood of the Paint Muse.

3) The rakes & combs make an ooky scraping noise on the bottom of the tray that make some members of the family feel like fingernails on a chalkboard.

4) It's a mess.

I try to plan my days so as to minimize everyone else's discomfort. Like on Mondays and Fridays when everyone else is at school or work. But there's no place for me to go!

I am still pretty stressed when I marble, because I'm really not that good at it yet. I LOVE working with the colors, and it's so great when I get a really nice sheet off the size. But there are inevitably quite a few sheets that don't turn out as desired. I always have a picture in my mind of what I'm going for. It's amazing how often it doesn't translate in paint. Hopefully I'll get better at it as I have more experience.

Even with my herculean efforts at protecting my kitchen from paint splatters, I end up with the scrubby pad getting it off the tops of the cabinets. Love slinging that paint HIGH!!

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Book Police

Meet my conscience. He is the first one to greet me when I come home from a book hunt to check out my acquisitions and approve each one for my use. Some he rescues from my "murderous clutches" to take up permanent residence on his bookshelf. (He has quite a nice vintage book collection, himself.) The one he's holding is actually a first edition Tolstoy. Unfortunately, in a moment of irrevocable decisiveness, my sister in Dallas dissected this one in Texas before sending it my way. Even though it's just a shell, my son was so offended by its destruction that he would not allow it to be made into a journal. The corpse sits appropriately alongside his Edgar Allen Poe collection.

For the record, I have great respect for the old books I recycle into journals. I feel that I provide a dignified end to their usefulness in life. Each of them has inevitably been discarded by a previous owner to end up on the shelves of a thrift store or antique mall. I bring them home, carefully deconstruct them, fashion beautiful marbled paper to coordinate with their covers and give them new life as a journal that someone will trust with their reflections and memories. Surely they will end up as a personal treasure to their new owner, and perhaps even for those that come after them. My sisters and I love thumbing through my mother's old journals. It's like hearing her voice again after many years of missing her.

So it's not murder. It's Extreme Makeover Book Edition.

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