Check out this delightful doily wedding dress, shared on www.100layercake.com/blog/

I’d happily wear it every day:

http://www.contemporarywesterndesign.com/fashion-scene/

By Mark McGuinness

This list was shared via “Crafting an MBA” blog… I plan to spend some time perusing it this weekend. Should be fun!

http://lateralaction.com/articles/blogs-creative-entrepreneurs/

The summer show for Buyers Market of American Craft is August 23-25, 2010 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

A year ago, I found this lovely passage…

An elder Cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them,

“A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

“The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

“This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.

The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied,”The one you feed.”

(from http://www.aaanativearts.com/article658.html)

Csikszentmihali describes flow as having the following characteristics:

“1) There are clear goals every step of the way … in flow we always know what needs to be done.

2) There is immediate feedback to one’s actions … in a flow experience we know how well we are doing.

3) There is a balance between challenges and skills … in flow, we feel that our abilities are well matched to the opportunities for action.

4) Action and awareness are merged … in flow, our concentration is focused on what we do.

5) Distractions are excluded from consciousness … Flow is the result of intense concentration on the present,  which reliees us of the usual fears that cause depression and anxiety in everyday life.

6) There is no worry of failure. While in flow, we are too involved to be concerned with failure.

7) Self-consciousness disappears. In flow, we are too involved in what we are doing to care about protecting the ego.

8. The sense of time becomes distorted. Generally in flow we forget time, and hour may pass by in what seem like a few minutes.

9) The activity becomes autotelic. . . . something that is an end in itself.  There is no reason for doing them except to feel the experience they provide. ” (p. 111-113)

May we always be so fortunate to find flow in our lives!

Bayles and Orland help us understand how we get distracted from — or completely quit — making art. Whether art-making, for you,  is painting, sculpting, weaving, sewing, beading, etching, (you get the idea), all of us have experienced the mind games that go along with being creative individuals. We literally talk ourselves out of making our art. It isn’t good enough. The critics (jurors, buyers, public, reviewers, etc.) don’t understand your work. You  can’t make money making art. Because nobody out there gets it. Or you need to make art on the side, while you work full-time at a “real” job. Being an artist isn’t a “real” job.  My needs to be perfect. It isn’t perfect enough. You get the idea.

Great quote:

“In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot — and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty.  And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice” (p. 118).