Initially Speaking

Happy Sunday, my peeps!!

I am, as usual, racing to catch up with my places here on the blogness and interwebville, but I had to come by and give you a report about a tiny event at Chez Prism. Yesterday was craft day. Friends came over and we made stuff and ate stuff. And laughed. Isn't it great to have people with you as you craft? To tell you where you've gone wrong? Cool!

For my project, I decided to take my first foray into a Teesha Moore journal. If you haven't taken a class with Teesha, you can find some videos on youtube.com to give you an overview of her process. It's not as easy as she makes it look! But it's fun. One has to give herself space to explore! The studio isn't large enough for guests yet, so I threw everyone into the kitchen.

By the way, here are my pens and pencils and crayons:

You're not going to see that kind of variety on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Here is the table. See those muffins? We'll discuss those later.

Later...

A couple of weeks ago, I made a Krusteaz Crumb Cake from their mix (because once I left the mix out and it didn't work very well). It was very good, but there was too much streusel for my comfort so I left some in the package and set it aside in case I wanted it for something else. I retain everything.

For the craft klaatsch I decided to make muffins. Because, and I don't want you to get all jealous and stuff, I found that I had some Trader Joe's Pumpkin Bread Mix in the cupboard. And if you've never had TJPBM, you might as well pack it in and head off to the Big House (mine's only 1150 sq ft, so I'm staying with the small house).

And I said to myself (because no one else was there, yet), this TJPBM would be marvelous with some chopped pecans and chocolate chips! Well...

...as I was making the TJPBM with CPandCC, I noticed the leftover cinnamon streusel topping from the Krusteaz Crumb Cake Mix (hereafter: KCCM).

At this point, as you can imagine, I was exhausted.

After a lie down, I prepared the TJPBM according to instructions (as opposed to how I usually do it, which is backwards and leaving something out, just to prove to them that I don't have to do what they say), but only poured half the batter into the muffin cups.

YES! I'm a rebel.

Then, I sprinkled some cinnamon struesel (CS) from the KCCM right ONTO the batter in the cups. Then, I mixed up some chopped pecans and some chocolate chips into a delicate froth and sprinkled those in on top of the streusel. You hear me? Then! I poured the rest of the TJPBM into the cups to fill the muffin cups. Get it? The CP and CC and CS are right in the middle of the TJPBM!!!

The mind reels.

Back to the crafting thing. Please.

So, friends arrived, and I introduced to them the option of playing a board game after crafting. You can see, from the panoply of options here, that everyone might need a few hours to contemplate their game selection and question why they came over in the first place.

And here we are, crafting.

Well, I'm not so much crafting as taking up half the available space with my journal project while taking a photo.

Here are the first two pages, as far as I've gotten.

I've done the signatures, the background paint, the collaging, and now I have the pen work and the lettering to do. Then I can go on with regular life.

Three hours later, we each won a game of Yahtzee. And the muffins were fantastic.

Oh. And here's the dog:


Next up: Chris puts the TJPBM with CP, CC, and CS in the DW by accident and has a BMTCU the NM.