my book

Have I mentioned that I'm writing a book?  

I want to put my life and my artwork into some kind of meaningful context.

At first I thought that if I  collected the entries from this blog into something poetic, that would be enough. ‘The Best of Judy's Journal’ kind of thing.

However, Judy's Journal is image based, and the photos in it are not of high enough resolution to be printed.  Without the photos, it wouldn't be half as interesting.  

And besides, ‘the best of judy's journal' is not really what I want to do.  

What I really want to do is gather up my life and work into a single document.

For the last dozen years I've been transcribing every word that I've written in over two hundred journals for 45 minutes a day into my laptop.  At the same time I'm organizing them into chronological order.

A couple of weeks ago, I started an edit and focused on those journals I kept during the Thunder Bay and Kenora years (before 1992).  This is the time in my life when I embraced quilt making as my art form.  It also happened to be the busiest years of mothering.   

I'm calling what I’m writing a first draft.  

I know it’s serious because I've been writing this thing during the time I used to spend stitching.  

(The barn photos in this post were taken from the back seat of our car.  Oona, our oldest, was visiting and to celebrate we went for a drive towards and along the southern part of Manitoulin Island.)

And then, 

Last night, I found a huge box of family negatives in the downstairs closet.  

I couldn't tell what the negatives were depicting until I taught myself how to scan them with my phone using an app.  I knew that they were of 'that time' in my life but I hadn't expected them to be so beautiful.  Magical.       

It seemed like the two things came together, my editing of that special time and then these nostalgic images. 

So that's what I'm up to this month.  

Just thought I'd let you know.