Red Thread Circles

 Happy #WIP Wednesday 💙 - what creativity is brewing at your house? I'm excited for our Many Muses Festival  and Women Woven Together show on Friday, Match 26 in honor of Women. My painting Sisterhood of the Red Thread is  one of the 50 paintings juried into in the show! I painted Sisterhood the year before entering CoW, honoring our web of connection between women around the globe!  Sisterhood of the Red Thread - 2014 You can get your ticket here - If you are a Musea Member, or have a piece in the show, you have a complimentary ticket!  Monthly Musea membership at the Basic level is just $10- and includes many benefits, including discounted and free classes and events with Shiloh and the Intentional Creativity community!  *partial Scholarships are available for Musea membership - ask Sarah !  I'm getting my space and brushes ready for painting our Mythic Legend of AWAKENING with Color of Woman graduates Olivia Marie Oso and Uma Joy, which will begin this weekend! Olivia and

Do you love the little packages that tea or chocolate sometimes come in?  Those cute little cardboard containers with flaps and interesting closures?  As a graphic designer, our circle leader Angie Delaplain loves the design choices that go into creating beautiful packaging, and has a container (or so) full of packages to repurpose! She enjoys decorating them, and filling with little affirmation cards, trinkets, perhaps chocolate and a twist of Red Thread. For our first March circle, Angie shared ideas for altering some of our own container collections!  Fair Trade Madagascar chocolate folder After our red thread circle, we brought out our containers and opened them to lay flat, then applied a layer of gesso on the outer surface - A hairdryer speeds up the process!  A container you enjoy can be used as a template for creating duplicate containers.  Next we painted the surface using acrylic paint and Mod Podge, then adesign that fit our intention. (I add glitter to mine, for sparkle wi

The invitation to our circle read, "Does this happen at your house? You have a great idea, jot copious notes...then, months later, discover them tucked away in one of your many files or journals! If they're not visible, they often just drop off the radar! "Viola - make pockets to hold sets of cards with those ideas, and string them up on a line!" This was a great springboard for our Circle! SiStars attended from the UK, Australia, and even India (4:30 AM!) as well as USA! And what fun to see ideas cross pollinate as we inspired each other! You'll find my first board and earlier post about these boards  here . I pulled out the demo canvas from a Medicine Basket Paint With Pals party (16×20") to use for my backing. I used garden twine for my lines, and taped the knotted ends to the stretcherbars. Several pockets are repurposed envelopes (Christmas cards!) and others from cardstock and a scrap of fingerpaint. Paint with Pals - Medicine Basket Old supplies from

Often times when we are creating, and blithely engaged in our dialogue with the Muse, the critic sneaks up on us!  Ack ! The critic is likely to appear, wearing her current favorite hat!  "I'm not artistic" - the Tyranny of Talent!  Comparison Queen -  your painting looks better! "I just  don't like  my painting!"  And on ... She's too pale, now she's too dark, ... Circle Altar When the critic appears in a class, I often thank the student, and mention that they are likely speaking for others in the group as well. It's long been her job to keep us safe for a long time, and may get uncomfortable when we try something new/different.  I give some options, she can count rocks in the parking lot, or shall we set her up with a drink by the pool? She can hold the map and help navigate, but we won't let her drive!  As we listen to her, we may identify her voice - who along the way is she parroting?  What if there was nothing we could get wrong? It

What do you do when your nosey, noisy Critic pipes up and tells you why you can't ___? You know the things she likes to taunt us with -  " I can't do that!"  "I'm not creative, ____ is the creative One!" "I'm too ___ (old, out of shape, uncoordinated, not educated...) "I never learned...."   "I never have enough time!"    "I'd love to do my art, but I don't want to end up a starving artist" .. .   "I can't afford__" Shh!!      One of my favorite ways of quieting her voice, shifting her rhetoric and countering the Old Stories is crafting  Soul Compass Cards  to point the way. Many of us have written affirmations! Douglas Bloch,  author of 'Words that Heal ' suggests going a bit deeper - writing an affirmation, then processing "what comes up ;" and asking ourselves,  "who told you that?" "Do you believe it's true?"   ... With Story cards, we identify the

Last April, after the start of our  Artist in Residence time , Shiloh Sophia and her own business coach Amy Ahlers offered a creativity based business class called Dancing Entrepreneur. While most gals were from our creative community, several other creatives joined us. Posts which really caught my eye were of  Karen Dawn 's Visual Planning system , and I joined her Beta Test group on crafting similar systems of our own! I love Karen's creative approach to planning! (Her  blog  includes some of these teachings! She also introduced me to Neurographica!) Vision Plan Board My visual planner is on a foam board left over from a vision board class, and holds my Medicine Basket, one of the Dancing Entrepreneur action cards, a couple of Neuro-Noodles plus - pockets. Who doesn't love these little pockets? The clothesline is a ribbon, and I simply taped the ends to the back of the board using painter's tape! You can use nails or eye hooks to tack the lines directly on a wall - so