I’m finally able to show you the page I made for Johoanna for her “Goddess Within” theme. If you’re following the Story of the Traveling Pages blog, you’ll have already seen it. It is machine felted background on a recycled sweater with machine and hand needle felted tree. The leaves are hand stitched and the copper shield is embossed and then hand stitched on. If you’ve been following this blog very long, you’ll know that I use trees often as my inspiration. So I thought that my personal goddess would be a tree goddess.

The shield has the symbolism of the downward facing triangle which stands for goddess as creatrix and the double spiral symbolizes the duality of life in going inwards to self and outwards to the world.

Here’s the back of the page where I included one of my favorite poems “Think Like a Tree by Karen Shragg. If you click on the photo, you should be able to read the poem. I am now working on February’s page for Trillian which has the theme of “Fairy tales”. It’s coming along well and I’ll show a sneak peak soon. However, I am having to redo part of it because I went a bit overboard with my tendency to add 3D to a flat piece. I suddenly remembered that these pages were meant to make a book and I think something sticking up off the book more than 1/2″ might cause a problem with binding etc. So now I have an extra bit of fairytale that looks really good but is too thick. Oh well. I have also been working on a large piece that I am planning on submitting and can’t show photos. It’s coming along but is really turning into a “slow” cloth. I am currently doing machine embroidery of which I did over 2 hours work today and I’m not even a tenth of the way done. Me and my bright ideas!

The other thing I did today was to paint the bottom of my new slippers with a silicone gel so that I can wear them outdoors and so they will last longer. I painted 4 layers – I’m not sure you can really see it in the photo above as this is just the first layer.

This is the stuff I used. It’s clear so that the color of the slippers would show through. I had to special order it through the local hardware store because no one around here carries anything other than black, red or blue. I guess most people don’t want clear handles on their tools. That is what you’re supposed to do with it. But this kind can be ordered with colors and you can make your own. I didn’t get the colors though. I thought clear would look best. I’ll show you another photo once they are dry.

I’ve been really working at keeping up with my goals. I’ll give you an update at the end of the month but I am definitely being more productive. So just need to keep it up for another 4 weeks or so and then supposedly, it will be a habit. We’ll see…