non-obligatory blogging

. I meant to do this before now but take a look at my daughter Nicole's recent art project. A couple months ago she was asked to participate in an upcoming Habitat for Humanity fund raising project. I think the event is scheduled for late October or early November but they will be auctioning off bird houses that have been created by Durango area artists. The quote above the birds is from the song Volare (volare means 'to fly' in Italian, just in case you didn't already know that) and says, "No wonder my happy heart sings, your love has given me wings." I helped a tiny bit (with the image transfers) but I think she did a great job and just had to let everyone get a glimpse of her creativity.

This is the coolest thing. Maybe I'm slow but I just discovered Wordle . You paste in some text and then it generates a "word cloud". You can change fonts and colors and redo the design over and over 'til you get something you like. It will make words (that are repeated more than others in the text) bigger than others so you can force it to emphasize some words more than others. So cool. And they say you can use the "clouds" that you create in any way you want to -- you can even make money with them by printing on t-shirts or using in designs you sell in different ways. Here's another one using the text from my blog post about my dog Duke a few weeks ago.

. Jimmy (my cutie husband) told me Sunday (after the book-making ladies left) that he wished he had joined us Sunday in making little books. He had to take today off of work to take care of some business stuff and so this afternoon he had me show him how to make little books. His is the one on the left with the spider and the one on the right is one I did for my granddaughter, Haevyn, who saw the ones we did Sunday and said, "I want a little book too Llama." She has a new, pinkish-red Betta fish so that's why the Betta on the cover of the pink one. Didn't Jimmy do a great job on his? He was so meticulous about the way he went about putting it together, even adding a 'half-hitch' knot when he was tying the signatures of the pages together so they'd stay together better!