Happiness Showed Up Today

It has been awhile since I last did one of the Life Book 2015 classes. Too busy gallivanting around exhibitions and enjoying the big outdoors but I knew from the start that I would enjoy doing Robin-Marie Smith's class this week. She is one of the organizers of The Documented Life Project and I have also done many of her own online classes and they never disappoint. In fact I think her classes are a shining example of online teaching at its best. I should also be honest and say that I'm a bit stuck with my textile work at the moment and this was a great diversionary activity. I still feel like I'm doing something useful, just not what I should be doing. It's when I start to take to dusting that I will know I'm in serious creative trouble!

As this is a class I won't tell you anything about the process apart from the fact that it involved many, many layers. I worked on a 9 x 12" paper and used a flower stamp (from Stampington) as we had to find a stamp to use that started with the first letter of our own name. In my case that's an F and very suitably that meant I could use one of my many flower stamps! You can see it in detail on the bottom picture.

I also used a wide variety of stencils, including many from Stencilgirl, including the one featuring the large flowers. I applied Radiant Gel in green for them. Sadly you can't see the dimension or the shine on the pictures.

Roben-Marie showed us how to make a pocket with a tag to journal on, but I choose to do my journalling directly on the page and I used part of the lyrics from the song Happiness by Beth Nielsen Chapman. I love the lyrics of this song which includes the following words:

"The past is gone and all for naught,

the future cannot be controlled

and the only moment we can hold

is this one going by."

Something else showed up today and it is a British Telecom engineer although I don't think he will contribute anything to my happiness seeing that the first words he spoke were about our distance from the exchange. I have the feeling we are reaching the end of the line in all senses of the words,  and that we will have to seriously consider what to do next. The satellite broadband works well but is limited, It might well be that upgrading that to a higher usage has to be the way to go. BT is apparently completely unwilling to invest in the infrastructure of their many rural lines enough to provide us, country dwellers, a reasonable broadband connection through the phone. I'm not ready to give up the fight just yet though.