Getting ready for a big day tomorrow

It's been a v. busy day. I've been getting ready for the Front Royal Air Show tomorrow. I found out about it on Sunday at church-in-the-woods & decided to get a booth. Chiro-sister & I are doing seated massage, as well as selling her glass pendants, & my CD's. I got new packaging for Healing Labyrinth Path--the CD covers look AWESOME!!! National Media Services really came thru. I sent final approval for the CD on Wednesday, and I picked the CD's up this afternoon. How cool is that?

In addition to seated massage, Virtual Massage, & beautiful jewelry, I also made some labyrinth crafty things:

Finger labyrinths on steno pads; great to keep by the phone.

Finger labyrinth rocks. Painted with dimensional paint for the labyrinth part.

So I'll be at the airshow on Saturday & will prolly be tweeting. Will post again on Sunday. Here's wishing Blue Skies to everyone. :-)

Google Alert

This is prolly where Brother D says, "Yeah, Hal. And there's this thing called the internet...." But it's new to me, so perhaps you may find it useful, as well. I learned this from Peter Shankman, the HARO Guy. Loyal readers of this blog (hi Mum!) will remember that HARO is a service that sends out reporter queries & other writers, media people, etc. looking for sources to interview for their stories. It's also how I'm quoted in next month's Good Housekeeping. [More on that when the issue comes out.] One of the rules of being in HARO is not to repost any queries on your blog. You can FW a query via email (which is when you get my email "Reporter Query for You,") but no posting. So, apparently someone posted & Peter said, "There's this thing called Google Alert...."

Me: Google Alert? What's that? [googling] COOL!

So here's the deal: whatever topic you're interested in (at least do your name), you put on alert and then you get an email once a day listing all the websites with new postings on said topic. So I put in "labyrinths" and here's an article on teens taping a labyrinth on the floor for their new youth center. COOL! Integrate those brain hemispheres! Then I got a blogpost by a fellow labyrinth enthusiast & artist, Jane Dover. Get this: she paints labyrinths on rocks, too. Way cool!

Hmmm...I wonder if she has her name in Google Alert? Hi Jane!

Finger Labyrinth Rocks

When Mum's Cambiando friends came over for a visit, they came with little Elizabeth, 5-years-old. Just about my favourite age. Down came my curtain to reveal where I store all my art stuff. And by curtain, I mean vintage fabric tacked up with a coupla push pins. I had already shown her some of my labyrinth rocks, so it didn't take too much to entice her into creating her own rocks. We did 2:


I didn't photograph the other side before I applied the dimensional paint, but here's what we did:
Heated rocks up in oven (I already had oven on making a de-licious roasted vegetable medley).
Melted crayons on hot rock, let cool & solidify.
Painted other side of rocks, let dry. (And by "let dry," I mean used hairdryer).
Added sparkle paint. Let dry.
Added sparkle varnish (bigger sparkles, different colours). Let dry.
Added finger labyrinths with glow-in-the-dark dimensional paint. This is tricky & takes a steady hand, so I drew that part for her. She did everything else, tho. This paint takes way longer to dry, even with the hairdryer. We got it set enough to put them in a box so the lines wouldn't get squished.
We could have added jewel embellishments, like on the elephant rock I did, but Elizabeth was happy with her creations. FUN afternoon! :-)

Labyrinth Rocks

I liked the melted-crayon rock activity so much that I played with it on Sunday. I've made finger labyrinths before for journals, etc. But this is my first venture into a more 3-dimensional form. I used sparkley dimensional paint for the labyrinth lines. The heart rock and pink rock, I painted, but the other 3 rocks I did the melted crayon thing. Before I painted it, the pink rock reminded me of an elephant, and I thought of a recent post from Margot, so here's a pink elephant labyrinth. Other than that, I was kinda on a purple kick. The crayon gives it a nice, smooooooth texture and I'll definitely be making more of these!