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An Update & The App Wars

It’s been 4 months since my last blog post and another 2 months between that and the next! Yeesh. I’m a terrible blogger. Well, life in the interim has been good and bad. I spent the fall quite busy with teaching and a last craft faire or two. My students were amazing and I had such fun teaching them. My needle felting and blown ink classes were especially fun this time around. I had the best groups of women in those class who made absolutely beautiful work. I shared some of the needle felted creations that class made on Facebook, which you can find here, and I’ll shortly be adding the blown ink students’ work.

(If you prefer to skip the rest of the update, you can just jump to the images.)

Unfortunately, after my classes ended, winter got underway, and my depression reared its ugly head for about 3 months straight. It was particularly bad timing too since those 3 months were supposed to be my inventory creation months. Instead, I spent November, December, & most of January escaping into books and in a fog that clung to my mind in heavy banks and drifts, obscuring everything in gloom. I couldn’t do anything creative or productive. It was pretty bad. Finally one morning I woke up and the fog was lifting. It took a couple more days, but my mind finally felt clear again and I have been able to start working again.

I was able to convert my rooms into more of a work area, with new tables and shelves, during those months, so now that I can work again I actually have the space to do it in! I also just devised a daily schedule with blocks of time for creating, updating online, business work, etc. I’m also trying to start walking 3 miles two mornings a week. I just got back from my first walk and other than the fact that I got blisters on the balls of my feet and had to walk the last mile with my toes curled on one foot it was great. My dog really enjoyed it too. Hopefully things will get better from here on out, as soon as I google how to prevent blisters!

One pretty amazing thing did happen to me in November just before my metaphorical ship sunk; two of my iPhoneography photographs won places in The App Wars competition! The App Wars is a competition for mobile photography, but the photographs must be taken with either Hipstamatic or Instagram. The judges for the competition chose 100 of the best images submitted in each app’s category, for a total of 200 winning images. I am a Hipstamatic junkie and practically all of my iPhoneography images are taken with it, so I submitted to that category. To my surprise and honor two of my photos were chosen to represent Hipstamatic in the competition. The images were exhibited at a gallery in San Diego and there was discussion of putting a book out this year as well. So exciting! You can check out all 200 winning images at the online gallery, and here are my images:

A Hipstamatic iPhone photograph of the veins of a leaf

Woman drinking glowing red wine from a glass

Also, it’s time to register for my spring classes! My first class is on the 17th of this month, and it’s a new class: The Haiku Spirit: Exploring Nature Through Poetry. I’ll be teaching it at the Jenkins Arboretum in Devon, PA. I’ll be talking about haiku poetry and how it’s so much more than the syllabic form you learn in elementary school. You’ll also be able to write and share your own haiku. For more information about it check out the haiku class page. Check out the events page or any of the class pages for dates and information on my other classes as well!

I’m off to do some writing now, gotta have at least a couple of my haiku to share during class.
Have a splendid day!
– Joules

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