One Final Goal

Packages to Mail
Originally uploaded by m.Lee

Little (or not so little) blee has officially made it into September without being born and I am pretty certain that I am going to have to be induced on Monday. I'm just not feeling it happening before then. The process starts Sunday and lasts all day and most of the night but the induction itself starts on Monday.

I'm behind on mailing orders. Even though every person that has ordered from me recently has given me permission and even sometimes encouraged me to take my sweet time I just can't do it! This is unfortunately an old photograph and not the current orders that need to be shipped. But my one goal for the day is to get these items packed and shipped by evening. Even if it means doing it in stages and resting in between. Buyers have been beyond wonderful in giving me time but I just think it would be so much better for everybody if I could get these out before I get induced and today is the final day. That way I don't have them hanging out in the back of my mind when I have my baby to care for.

Adjust that. I wrote that last paragraph last night before bed when I wasn't feeling great but I wasn't feeling awful either. This morning I woke up with a horrible leg cramp along with my entire body being in pain. The best thing to do for leg cramps is to get up right away and stand and walk it off if needed. Except there is no such thing as me getting up quickly, especially first thing in the morning. After tossing and turning screaming in agony Jon woke up and hoisted me up and I forced myself to walk. I'm still hurting. My goal from last night is still my goal, but I have to consider my health. I hate this so much. There is also the little extra of getting light headed and having difficulty breathing randomly throughout the day. And if I go into labor then all goals are off other than getting this baby out!

Maybe I can get Jon to do the packing for me while I give orders from the comfort of my glider chair?

A week ago we were spending our final day with our beloved cat Burrito and preparing to say goodbye and now we are in the final preparations for this new life. It is an odd mix of expectation, sadness and still some disbelief about both the cat being gone and that we are actually about to become parents. What a week it has been. What an August!

Getting Centered - Priorities

The Quickening
Originally uploaded by m.Lee

Happy Monday party people! Well, many of you are probably not really party people, but probably moreso than I am.

On Saturday morning we had our birth class, nothing like natural childbirth (hah) though we did learn some simple breathing techniques that were putting me to sleep during the class. We were the "yes drug us please" class. Sorry but I have too much anxiety already to deal with natural childbirth when I don't have to. The class went really well and I feel very reassured about the process now and even better about our decision to use a NP midwife at the Bringham. The labor and delivery rooms are set up to look like bedrooms with two beds and a crib. We watched a video of a birth and it was like nothing I have ever seen before. So much better than your standard hospital room!

I have to say I got a little bitter because every other woman there seems to be having a problem free pregnancy and during the 7 hour class I was looking at all their ankles and the only one that swelled (just from not being elevated) was mine. And no I do not eat a lot of salty foods. I don't each much at all anymore really. One meal and a few snacks here and there and I am good.

Despite the foot issues and other sorenesses I am feeling quite good. I have such a strong motivation to get things in order that I often am able to just push through the pain and get what needs to be done done! This piece from last Sunday really means a lot to me. I relate to it, I would say it is one of my most personal and powerful pieces to date. I am very proud of it.

Proud of the batch in general. After the panic of nearly losing another piece I took a couple of hours to totally reorganize how I store my work. I'm actually still not completely finished as I would like to have every piece signed ahead of time and I still have some unsigned pieces. But it is tons better. I just wish I had gotten a second refill pack of archival sleeve pages for the presentation case I ordered from Blick. I'm hoping the store may carry the refills, but they probably don't because they don't carry the case. Shipping from them isn't cheap so I would have to wait until I felt that I needed something else and I don't know when that will be. Sure I sell my work at a good pace but I also make a lot too, especially before getting pregnant. Back then it was fairly normal for me to create 30 original pieces in a day or two once every week or two. It is no wonder that I have art coming out of my ears.

I got the bulk of my shipping done finally on Sunday and that lowered my stress level a lot. Still waiting on an echeck to clear and an address correction. But other than that I am good. I spent too much of Sunday making up stickers. 228 stickers to be exact and it was maddening. Jon tried to help me out as best he could and did a good job but when he discovered that one of the rounds had a drop of water on it was ruined and that I needed to print out more to replace it I kinda lost it. We got it done but I had to raise the prices of my stickers because there is a lot more effort to making them than I every imagined and I just can't be having them priced so low that I get so many orders in a week. I can't be carving blocks for the hanga project I want to try if I am busy making stickers. I hang up my cape and resign from being Sticker Girl. Feel free to order them if you wish because I think at the higher prices I am less likely to get so overwhelmed. If I really didn't want to sell them I would have unlisted them, I just want a more fair price for my labor. And they are a lot harder to make than you might think! Apparently the price increase is not too steep since a set sold just last night. I think I am going to wait before putting anymore back up until I have this one made.

Now I can put my focus back on carving that block for hanga. Before blee comes my goal is to have at least one more big printing session. Maybe it will be a hanga experiment or maybe it won't be. Not sure if I can use my oily blocks for the waterbased method.

The Past Two Days

Art Cards from July 15th
Originally uploaded by m.Lee

Good morning everybody. I am currently abstaining from my morning pot of coffee or tea because I have ideas of crawling back into bed after I post this. I am fairly awake right now and have been for about an hour, but I am very tempting. And since Jon is staying home today he is still in bed and that makes me want to crawl back in even more!

So here are the ACEOs that wore me out making this past Sunday. So far I only have three of them listed, but I have too much new work (a good position to be in for sure) and have to pick and choose. I even have a few more older ones that I haven't gotten around to listing yet. I am overflowing! And I have around twenty-five full sized pieces completed!

The total for Sunday's mad eight hour printing session stands at;
25 - full sized pieces
9 - ACEOs
2 - failures
2 - unfinished or hmmmm pieces
3 - oddly sized but cool not sure what to do with them pieces

After all this I was dead physically and mentally. I crawled into the comfy chair I just added to my studio complete with much needed ottoman and didn't move for hours. The only time I moved was when Jon unfortunately left the water running and was out of the house. And let me tell you hobbling across the hall to the bathroom was all kinds of pain! It was nice to sit but the entire time I felt guilty because I still needed to pack up orders. Unlike last July sales have been quite good for me and I have been having a hard time keeping up.

But yesterday I was able to get them packed up and they are all on their way now. I did it in stages. First I gathered up everything and put them in their plastic sleeves or other packaging depending on the item. Then I cut up the cardboard I sandwich the prints between. Taped it all together and since I was sitting down and didn't want to move I covered them all with some of my newfound stamps. An added bonus of the stamps is I find it helps me identify what orders are what. Then I napped for two hours. Woke up and started weighing items and shipping labels. By the time I was done Jon was home and able to take everything to the Post Office for me.

I also changed my shipping policies from shipping within 48 hours (just not possible for me right now) to shipping every Tuesday and Friday. Unless I go into labor on one of those days! I think it is a fair policy that even people that aren't pregnant have.

Today I am feeling the itch to print again. But I am going to do my best to hold off because I am likely to take it too far and hurt myself. Instead I should photograph mirrors and carve. I made a bit of an exciting purchase off the Dick Blick site and need a new block or two for it. Other than some small art card blocks these new blocks may be the last blocks I carve for quite awhile. This makes me sad.

Good Tuesday to everybody. Tonight I share a lovely dinner at my favorite restaurant with Sweetestpea Jen! I just realized that I forgot to remind her to bring back our copy of season one of The Wire to return and knowing how hectic her life is she probably won't remember. And it is too late now. I'm sure she has already left for work. And you should all Netflix it!

Walking Dead

too many weeks
Originally uploaded by m.Lee

After pushing myself to the extreme yesterday I am pretty much dead to the world today. I thought that if I got a good nights sleep I would wake up revived and I did feel revived a bit. For about fifteen minutes. I am a little less sore but I am still tired and spaced out completely. I packed up some of the many orders that need to go out and that finished me off for awhile. I didn't even finish. I can't even explain just how fuzzy my brain feels right now. I've had a cup of coffee. I'm ready for a nap. Hopefully if I can actually sleep I will revive myself just enough to finish up what needs to be done. I don't really have a choice. As I was writing this entry I just got another order through Etsy. While it is great that sales are so good but I am having such a hard time keeping up. And then I feel guilty and stressed and panic. I may have to put up some sort of disclaimer that I might be shipping a little slower than normal for awhile. I will be removing the custom pendants from my shop today because the thought of having somebody order one right now terrifies me. I might bring them back for Christmas.

I have so much new art to show and I don't have the energy to scan and upload it right now. Sad.


zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Must not procrastinate

Ginkgo Art Mirror
Originally uploaded by m.Lee

Things I need to do today!

1) finish packing up orders.
2) pick out the reserved stickers for a customer and list them on Etsy for her.
3) clear off work desk
4) do some carving. I have one block started and one idea in my head that I would like to get to.
5) do laundry
6) figure out what to do for dinner that won't make me ill
7) ship orders
8) clean up whatever mess I make carving so my studio stays pretty

What I want to do
1) stare off empty headed into space
2) nap
3) take a cold shower
4) soak feet
5) keep feet up (hard to carve or print with feet up!)
6) receive foot and back rubs

Ugh! Sooooo tired. No brainpower or energy left in this sore and broken body

Tea Addiction

Honest Tea [2]
Originally uploaded by Fenchurch!

I'm a huge fan of tea. One might even call me a tea junkie. Loose leaf and unsweetened tea hot or iced that I brew at home. But this summer I discovered the first bottled tea that isn't sickly sweet and have gone and gotten myself addicted. Honest Tea Peach Oo-la-long is like Peach Snapple without all the nasty high fructose corn syrup and with a real tea taste. It is just lovely. Plus it has Opus from Bloom Country on it! We were in the area of a grocery store that carries it so I popped by to pick up my Opus tea and the case that is covered with the Honest Tea branding was completely empty of any Honest Tea. It had some new brand in it with a cartoon granny labeled sweet tea instead. Sweet tea is evil. Had nearly three times the calories of good old Opus tea. So we went on a hunt for Opus and found him stocked that the Whole Foods in Alston/ Brighton. I bought every single bottle they had in stock. I'm still going to stick to drinking my home brewed unsweetened lychee tea most of the time but this is a nice treat.

I must clean my studio once I finish typing this entry. Yesterday at the library while I was photocoping images for the Gocco I met this nice Latino lady that appears to be some sort of an art agent. And she is very interested in checking out my work. I really can't say much because her accent was so thick I only understood about 50% of what she said to me. I nodded a lot. She seemed very excited to run into somebody that does woodcuts and that made her talk even faster and that did not help. I bet the whole time she was wondering why a nice Latino girl like myself would have a problem understanding her. I live in a Latino area and I have slightly dark skin with dark hair and eyes so people just assume that I am Latino. I'm not and I don't speak a lick of Spanish either.

The goccoing did not go well. I did everything with the photocopy by the book. I gave it some time to dry then I used a hairdryer on it for a few minutes. Used the blue filter and a backing card behind the image. I used the riso bulbs not the flash bulbs from Kmart. It burned, but the burn was just terrible. Only outlines of the image here and there got burned. Realizing that I have tried pretty much every method that is supposed to produce a master and failed I knew it just had to be bad screens. I called the company and they are sending me a new batch of screens and bulbs Priority Mail at no charge. So I am not done yet! I'm just on break for a few days.

Time to tidy up!
And I have nearly twenty packages to mail today. Thankfully many of them are in groups so it won't be quite so bad.