Surprises

It's been a weekend full of winnings, gifts, honors and surprises.

First, I won a giveaway hosted by the ever-amusing Mr. Dodson on his blog, I still write.  Head over there to see the abundance of mail he sends and receives.  You could even send him something.

My winnings arrived in the mail this weekend - two fabulous blank journals and a cool map card:

That by itself would have completely made my weekend, but it's just the beginning.

Limner sent me a surprise package - this totally awesome little book:

Open it up and it's full of all these different little bits of pages.  Isn't that the sweetest little book ever? 

Limner sends and receives amazing mail and writes all about it on her blog,  Oh, Write Me!

My book came in this envelope, with a little hand draw red bird.  Limner says that the face of the bird came off under her thumb, but the post office lady drew on two eyes and a smile with her ball point pen.

  

I love that story almost as much as I love the little book.  Plus there was chocolate tucked into the little envelope that serves as one of the pages.  Talk about making a good thing even better.  Thank you, thank you, thank you Ms. Cade for this little treasure.  I want to use it for something fun and special.  I'm thinking a little illustrated story would be good.  I'll keep you posted.

So, a pretty good weekend haul, right?

But wait, there's more.

Another surprise awaited me Saturday - Tammy from Daisy Yellow nominated me for the "Versatile Blogger Award".  Tammy is an endless source of good ideas and inspiration.  She organized the "index card a day" project over the summer and committing to that project did WONDERS for me.  I learned so much about myself as an artist over those 90 days and gained a lot of confidence in the process.  PLUS I met some really great artists (in addition to Tammy) in the flickr group,  which leads me to my next and best surprise of all.

One of the artists I was really drawn to in the ICAD project was Lee from "Defining Me".  Lee has such a cool, fun, funky original style and a dry sense of humor that makes me laugh every day.

I got email from Lee Friday saying she was gifting me a class - Julie Prichard's "Art Journaling Super Nova, Pt II".  She had signed up for one of Julie's other workshops and had received the super nova class for free as an early bird bonus.  And since she'd already taken that workshop, she gave it to ME.

I know, right? 

SOOOOOO sweet and thoughtful and generous.  

I'm just blown away.

It's a self-paced, "on demand" class with a dozen or so videos.  I  dove right in and watched 9 of the videos back to back.  Julie's a great teacher and the videos are really entertaining and I'm picking up all kinds of new tips and tricks.  The very first video was about using gloss medium to create "ghost writing" on a painted background.  I immediately had to try it, and I cranked out 6 postcards in a series.  I'm so not done exploring this one technique - more postcards like these will follow. 

So a million thank-yous to my blogging, mail-sending, gift-giving, inspiring and funny internet friends.

I am basking in this bounty.