remembering 2010

I've never been a goal setter, a resolution maker, a long-term planner. My approach is a bit better than day-to-day, but not by much. So instead of looking ahead to 2010, I'm going to look back at 2010 and see if there's anything to be learned.

And, because I'm so totally a glass half empty person, a negative event is the first one that comes to mind. 2010 will stick in my head as the year we lost our sweet old Amazon parrot Sadie.

She was somewhere between 45 and 50 when she died, and we had her for 14 of those years. She was wild-caught, and we bought her from a bird store when her previous owner gave her up because his girlfriend didn't like her. Unreal.

She was a wonderful old bird and we miss her terribly.

On a positive note, 2010 was the year Photoshop made sense. I'd tried to figure it out years ago, but just didn't have the right frame of mind or something because it was incredibly frustrating. This time, I installed it, started playing around and googling websites with tutorials, and I'm on my way to being able to create things I'm happy with. Yay. 

2010 was also the year I discovered collage, altered books, and ATCs. My craft room went fairly quickly from a place of yarn skeins, ball winder, and knitting needles to a place of glue sticks and old books and piles of magazines and paint pots and scissors and paper. 

I've always been a bit of a pack rat and mixed media collaging hasn't helped at all. Darn near anything is fair game to get glued to something, so my room is full of little drawers filled with seed pods and old safety pins and odd old bits of metal. Not to mention the beads, buttons and lace left over from my CQ days.

At first I really struggled with what to put on the paper. Just cutting out random things was too unorganized for me, I needed something to go by, at least a vague road map on what to do, so I went to Flickr and searched collage.

Up came over 100,000 images of wonderful works of art that ranged from ultra modern to goofy to vintage and everything in between. As I looked thru them, ideas began to come and the longer I do this, the easier it is to sit down and be creative. It's like my imagination had to get warmed up or something.

Also, google is invaluable. Just sayin'.

I can't really even remember much more of 2010. And I'm not choosing a word or making any lofty resolutions. I just want to get thru 2011 intact emotionally and financially, and not have my health degrade any further. If I can get those things to happen, I'll call it a success.