How to Explain to a Child What is on your Face

     Over thanksgiving break I went to a rock store in Chicago with my dad and spent hours looking at the hundreds of different rocks in the store. We slowly walked around holding the rocks when we could and gluing our face to the glass when we couldn't. My dad got a gift card to the store a few years before and we had never managed to get back to the store to spend it all. There was an exhibit downstairs showing a bunch of petrified ancient creatures and dinosaur bones. Parents often come to the store with their children because it's educational and interesting for people of any age. My dad and I slowly walked around making sure to look at every organism so that we could speculate on the distance of time and wonder how it was possible that after millions of years some species didn't seem to ever change.
     When we finally got around to looking at all the fossils we were about to go up the stairs. I tried to walk towards the stairs but a little girl was blocking my way. "peanut butter jelly time!" the little girl sang while looking up at me with her toothless grin. I smiled at her, remembering how important it was to feel acknowledged by adults when I was little. She looked up at me. "Why have you got all those red spots on your face?" she asked. I smiled and shrugged comically, trying to seem unfazed. I looked up at my dad and I could see how shocked he looked. I quickly moved around the little girl and went up the flight of steps. I held down tears as I realized how hurt I felt at the little girl's simple question.
     It is the worst feeling in the world to be asked about your acne. Every day you look in the mirror is a day where you try to convince yourself that it is going away. Every time you look in the mirror you try to ignore it. You find reasons to believe that you're actually gorgeous and people are just too afraid to approach you because of your beauty. That's the real reason. Right? When a child asks you why your blemishes exist everything comes crashing down. You realize that everyone who said your skin was getting better was lying because they wanted to make you feel better. A child never lies, especially not a stranger. They haven't learned the social cues of ignoring people's faults.
     I wish though that I could have been brave enough to guide the little girl towards the stairs so that we could talk about the situation I am in. It could have been a perfect opportunity to teach her about what makes a person really beautiful. I wish I could have said that each spot that appeared on my face was an occasion to prove to the world that I am more that what is presented by my exterior. I wish that I could have told her that the spots were out of my control and they just appear on some people's faces like me when they are my age. I wish I could have told her that the spots on my face prove to me that I have true friends who aren't just there because they think I'm pretty but because they actually care about my and value my thought and intelligence. I could have told her that the acne on my face helps me realize the value of the health in the rest of my body and that if my only problem in life is my acne then my life must be pretty good.
     These things are so simple. Children are just curious. They see things in their world and they ask because they haven't yet learned that asking is bad. I could have been brave and taught her something special. I could have made it so that when she reached puberty and got a few blemishes she wasn't afraid of them or disgusted by them but strong because she knew that they would teach her a lot. Instead I just shrugged and held back my tears and let her continue to wonder. She might have even asked someone else. Hopefully that person will be braver than me.

Kirtan Meditation

     Today I completed my goal of forty days of meditation. Before these forty days I hadn't done much meditation. I began this daily meditation when I went to the Arts of Improvisation, music for people program. One of the teachers had an elective of Kirtan meditation. I absolutely loved it. It gave me so much energy. Not just physical energy but life energy. I rediscovered my joie de vivre. I sat there in the middle of the room, surrounded by wonderful people all singing the same mantra and I thought "wow, this is exactly the kind of thing that I want to fill my life with". It was a wonderful feeling. I hadn't felt like that about anything in too long.
     So I began to meditate daily. For the forty days I did the First Sutra Mantra. It is a meditation created to connect the finite to the infinite. I always told people that it also helped build compassion because it means that we are all connected and we are all the same. The Mantra was:

Humee Hum Tumee Tum Wahe Guru

I am thine, in mine myself Wahe Guru

(http://www.3ho.org/summer-solstice/program/theme/)

      The thing that I loved about this form of meditation was that the mantra was sung. I know myself well so, if I was only supposed to think a mantra I would either get completely off track, I would fall asleep or both. Every part of my body was also engaged. One hand was pointed to the sky and the other rested on my heart. My hands had a job so I was less likely to fidget. I also had to focus my eyes or my intention on the space between my eyebrows, my third eye. This takes focus too so it was another way to prevent my mind from wandering.

     As I progressed through the forty days my mind did different things. In the first week, I had an incredibly difficult time focusing on anything. My thoughts were very scattered. Then I would get really really bored and I would wonder when the meditation would be over. I would also worry that maybe I hadn't set my alarm and i had been meditating for half an hour. Right after that feeling of boredom was when I really felt like it was worth it. Everything got really quiet. I couldn't hear any noise in my house. I started to appreciate the short silences between phrases. I felt like I had supersonic hearing. It was a beautiful feeling and the alarm seemed to come too early.

     As I continued meditating every day it became a little bit easier to go to that silent place. I always had to go through that phase of lots of thought and then intense boredom but I would always get there. I taught my friend Griffin how to meditate. She said that she would get really dizzy when she did it and she would always be worried about losing herself for some reason. I experienced the dizziness a few times but I don't think it was ever to the extent that she felt. 

     I did however have a few weird experiences. The weird experiences weren't the purpose of the meditation but it's still fun to mention them. When I was in my bedroom at home for two days in a row I felt an incredibly strong presence in my room. So strong that I had to open my eyes and stop meditating because I felt really vulnerable. I ended up just ignoring it but it was very odd. When I went back to school there was one day when I was meditating in my room facing a sofa with my roommate and I heard someone come in the room and plop onto a sofa to come and listen to us meditate. I also thought my other roommate was there sitting at her desk. I was really happy that people had come to listen and I was excited to open my eyes when I was done so I could explain what the meditation was and ask if they wanted to join the next day. When I opened my eyes It was only my roommate and I in the room. It was very odd. I was completely convinced that someone was sitting in the sofa in front of me. I don't know what those things mean but I just wanted to share them.

    When I went to College I was a bit worried about what people would think of me just singing a strange song to myself. I did it anyway. A way to cope with that fear was to teach other people how to do it. A week before I went I texted my roommate letting her know that I was doing this. She was incredibly open and wonderful. She was also eager to try it with me. Meditating at school and meditating at home are completely different experiences. On my first day back, I explained to my friends that I was doing this meditation and they said, "lets do it right here right now". Right here, right now was outside the dorm, in the grass, where people moving in were walking by. I was very hesitant but I ended up doing it. It was pretty difficult to concentrate. I kept just listening to other people's voices and visualizing where the people moving in were standing in relation to me. I couldn't get to my perfect place of silence. I thought it was fine though. The meditation stopped being about me and more about my friends. I enjoyed it so I wanted to share it. If that came at the price of my own meditation that was perfectly okay. My friend Julia after the meditation said that she didn't know her mind could possibly be that still. That was important to her. The next day I did it with my room mate who also really enjoyed it. We started doing it together every day for a few days. We would go outside in our pajamas and sit on a hill facing a busy street and meditate. I learned how to drown out the sound of the passing cars and focus on my meditation.

     These last few days I have been doing my meditation alone. My friends lost interest a bit which I understand. I was surprised I could do it for this long. I also think that I needed to get back to that place where meditation was good for me. Yesterday (well I guess it was two days ago now since it's 12:30) I went to the nearby forest and stayed in solitude for three and a half hours. After being surrounded by people all the time I really needed it. In that time I meditated without a timer and without a worry. I was  happy. I opened my eyes and right in front of me there was a beautiful bird standing on a floating branch on the pond drying her wings. It was perfect. Even though it wasn't the last day of the meditation it felt like a goodbye ceremony to this meditation.

     I am so glad that I decided to do these forty days of meditation. It was a wonderful experience and it was a perfect introduction to meditation for me. Whenever I do it I feel more connected to the world and less lonely, even if I do it by myself. I am so thankful for being taught the meditation and I am going to try and experiment with other meditations. I know that this meditation is part of a series of meditations that we have to do every year so I think I am going to do this again next year. I am excited to begin!

A Conversation While Waiting for the Bus

     Yesterday while my sister and I were waiting for the bus, a man carrying a large pack of paper towels, a plastic bag and a sparkly pink purse meant for his daughter walked up to us. He asked us how long we had been waiting for the bus and my sister told him that the bus would be there in 15 minutes. The man seemed disappointed and annoyed at how slow the bus was but then quickly got over it. He then began the conversation. "I'm not trying to start a conversation but the Indian parade was yesterday but I missed it so I went to the pakistani parade". Having both been taught not to talk to strangers Heidi and I just said "cool" and then continued to ignore him. He kept talking "I love talking to different people from different cultures and learning about things, I have rich friends and middle class friends and poor..." he paused. "My daughter showed me this documentary on Mumbai, India and the people there are living terribly. We think that we have poor people here but over there it's really bad. It made me tear up to see them and Im not usually one to tear up but to see them like that really touched my heart". I interjected and said "yeah, seeing things like that really makes you realize how lucky you are". When I said it I don't think I really meant it. It was just the thing that I said whenever anyone talked about other people's poverty. This man accepted it and said "I wake up every morning and am thankful for everything I have". I could tell he really meant it. The fact that he was so thankful for the things he had made me think. Here was a man who was living in far worse circumstances than I was and he was still able to wake up EVERY morning and thank the world for letting him existing in it. I, who had everything I could ever possibly need, had the gaul to question whether I deserved to live in the world instead of being thankful that I do. This man had fewer resources but he was living a fuller life than I was. He then proceeded to talk about the fact that we wanted travel the earth and "feel the earth". He said that when he was little he was always asking questions.
     At one point in the conversation he started talking about his writing. He said that when he was young he messed around with gangs and guns and drank a lot and did drugs and the thing that got him out of that world was writing. He said that if it hadn't been for the poetry he wrote he could have ended up in jail. I had a very interesting feeling when he said that. Part of me froze and started panicking because this man was a former gang member and he could pull out a gun at any second and shoot us because he could be crazy. My mind was going at a mile a minute. But then the other side of my mind just kept think that this was amazing because this man who had a completely different background and life than me still had the same kind of ideas that I had about wanting to learn and explore the world. As we continued our conversation on the but it just became more and more clear that we really weren't that different. He talked about how he felt about religion. H said he wasn't any specific religion and that he only went to church once in his life but he realized that his religion was in his heart. He visited Buddhist temples and mosques and all of the different services that he could experience and he would just take what he liked and add it to what he believed. I am pretty sure that I explained this exact description to my friends of what my religion was.
     As he got up to get off the bus and said, " Maybe you'll see me again, it was nice talking to you". For the rest of the bus ride and on the walk home I was so excited by the conversation with this man. I feel as though lately especially things had been happening to me to make it clear that I should be here and I have a purpose. The things we talked about were exactly thing things I had been questioning and worrying about and coming across all summer. It was an incredibly eye opening experience. I am glad the bus took so long to get to our stop.

The wall project

I have a new project! I have begun a mural in my bedroom. It was completely spur of the moment yesterday. I was browsing pinterest and I thought that it would be fun to have one of my walls painted. I just got up, grabbed some paint and went at it. It's turning out surprisingly well! I didn't even tell my parents. I lured my mom upstairs and she gasped when she saw it but then she said she liked it. My dad then came upstairs after my mom told him that I had something very important to show him and he said that it was really nice! I felt so proud especially since they had no idea what they were in the dark about the whole project. Now I want to share my progress with you!

The start

The wall i will fill

I finally finished my video yesterday!

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. If you like it I would be honored if you shared it. There are more projects to do this summer so don't worry. Ill keep posting on this blog!

     Music is hard and also I have a job. So last week I was trying to invent the base of a song and as I was absentmindedly bouncing a tennis ball on the ground outside, I began to hum. I liked what I was humming so I quickly grabbed my phone and recorded what I had just hummed. I liked my humming a lot and I decided to use it as the music for my video. I planned on adding more instruments to it when I got the chance. Then I got a job as a nanny and now I don't have a lot of time to spend on my video. Luckily I get weekends off so I can work on the last bits of my videos then. This should be the part of the project that takes the least time. This is just the finishing touches phase, right?
     Yesterday and today I tried to work with the recording I have. I have tried several instruments but it is much more difficult than I thought it would be. My piano's pitch doesn't match the pitch of my recording. I am too inexperienced with the mandolin and the chords I've been trying to use sound terrible. The only thing that has sort of been working is my old clarinet from grade school. I'm glad that I thought of it. I think after I do more recordings of the clarinet I am going to try using the piano again. I have a better grip of the original recording so maybe this time I will be able to figure out effectively use the piano. Wish me luck! I hope I'll be done with this video soon!

My dearest blog, Im sorry I haven't updated you as frequently as I used to. I still love you I just completely forgot that you existed. The probably doesn't really prove my point. Haha. Well anyway, I finished all of my illustrations for the video. I have also condensed all of the clips and started editing the timings on my video. I have added the typography to the video too. All I have left is the music and the narration and then I am done!

All of the completed illustrations

I have been working hard on my project I promise. I have a bit of composer block (writers block for composers!) because I can't seem to decide what I want the music to sound like. I think it's because I have too many options. That probably sounds crazy but because of all of these choices I have I feel like it has to sound fantastic! I think limitations encourage creativity. I have no limitations. I need to find a way to limit myself and relaaaaax. I know that this pressure is only created by myself but I am a scary person! I have a very abstract idea of what I want to create. I need to somehow capture the personality of the story and set a mood. If that isn't ambitious enough, I also want to somehow make people feel inspired as soon as they click on the link for my video. The first note would shoot them strait into joy, or maybe I could slowly bring them into a feeling of intrigue. I want them to smile at my video. Yes, very ambitious. Ive been trying to bombard myself with things that give me that feeling. One of these things is the video below. Im hoping that if I listen to it enough the inspiration will start oozing out of my ears and fingers. I hope it works. Wish me Luck!

But really watch the whole series. I really love it. Im sure you will too.
My favorites are part 2 and 7.

Boy! It has been quite a while since I have updated my blog. Well maybe only a week but that is a lot in internet time. Last weekend was my families most cake filled weekend of the year. My sister's birthday was on sunday which we celebrated on saturday and my dad's 60th birthday was on monday. So we had two birthday cakes to eat. You're probably wondering why I'm telling you these random family cake facts. Its because on top of those two cakes I really wanted to make cupcakes. So I did and they were pretty awesome.

Cupcakes!

The cake I made with the extra cupcake mix and other ingredients.

       These magical cupcakes are lemon blueberry cupcakes filled with lemon curd and topped with cream cheese frosting. They are the fanciest cupcakes I have ever made and I think they are the best tasting too. I got the recipe from this website (http://theregoesthecupcake.com/2011/05/16/lemon-blueberry-cupcakes/) except I made cream cheese frosting instead of mascarpone cheese frosting and I used a different lemon curd recipe because I didn't have any corn starch. I still have a lot left. They are incredibly filling and I don't know what to do!
     I think it is time to talk about my video project and what I've been up to with that. The day before yesterday I painted two more illustrations. I really like them. I think I am getting better at my color choice and my painting speed. Today I spent all day condensing my videos. Condensed more than two hours of film into 6 and a half minutes. Whats even better is my computer didn't completely freak out. That means my system of working with film is working! One thing I did notice is that the first clips are getting lighter in color as they go back and forth between iTunes and iMovie. I don't really know how to fix that since I am moving all the videos at the highest quality I can which is 1080p. Hopefully it wont be too visible when I'm done editing. I think Im just a bit of a perfectionist. I hope you have anice day. I'l update again soon!

The two new illustrations!

I started to paint another one of my drawings but it started to pour buckets and the natural light wasn't strong enough. I will finish it tomorrow hopefully if the weather is nicer.

Art Area as I waited for the sun

 As I waited for the weather to clear I did a really random drawing of a green penguin like bird. I love the quote too.

My Weird Penguin

After many problems with my computer freezing and crashing I have finally finished condensing the four illustrations I have so far. I have a pretty solid method of getting the videos on my computer without it freaking out. It takes a lot more effort but I will not give up! I am more than halfway done this video project and I feel very proud of it so far! I have to finish the rest of my painting and then I can move on to final editing, music and narration. Yay for progress!

The two drawings I forgot to show you guys

     Today I did something that I think I will remember for the rest of my life along with the person who was impacted by this action. I was with my friend Griffin and we decided to go downtown. We were trying to figure out different ways to make friends. We were worried that once college ended we wouldn't know how to make friends without the college setting. After tossing around a few ideas on how to make friends, one of us came up with the idea of writing a note and giving it to a random stranger. I took out the notepad I keep in my purse and started writing a message to a stranger. Griffin wrote something like "the wind rustling in the trees is calling your name". She wanted to give the note to someone and completely confuse them. She liked the idea that the message was spontaneous and random and would leave the person asking "why?" . I wanted to have a connection with the person I handed the message to. I wrote something like this:

Hello,
I thought you had a friendly face so I decided to give you this note. I always thought it was fascinating that you could pass by someone and look at their face and share a sliver of a moment and then go on with your life without thinking of that person again. This note is a method of extending that moment and someday you will look at this note again and remember that tiny sliver of a moment and smile. I think that is beautiful. I hope you have a beautiful day
-Camille

     Griffin and I walked around the magnificent mile trying to find the right people to hand the notes to. After a few blocks griffin bravely thrust her note filled hand towards a tall man with curly gray hair and held it there until he saw it and took the note. She then shoved me towards the crosswalk and walked in the opposite direction of the man. She asked me to look back at the man to see his reaction. I saw that he was reading the note very intensely. He looked incredibly confused because he just kept reading the note over and over again. He never looked back to see where the secret note giver went.
     It took much more time for me. I wasn't nearly as brave as Griffin. Griffin made me walk in the middle of the sidewalk and I looked at every single person that walked past me but I couldn't find the right person. I was looking for someone who seemed to be open minded enough to understand the value of the note and someone who I shared a moment of eye contact with so that the "sliver of a moment" in the note would make sense. Griffin and I walked block after block as I tried to find the right person to give it to. As I passed people I would think, "Oh I should give it to them" but then I would chicken out and keep walking, hoping to find someone who suited my purpose better.
     Finally, after doing what I decided would be my last loop around the block I saw a boy and I decided that HE would be the person I gave the note to. I looked at him really intensely and he looked at me really intensely and then I handed him the note. He took the note as though it was the most fragile thing in the world, as though it was a newborn child. He looked strangely honored, as though he understood its value and how long it took me to find the right person to give it to. I looked at him one last time and quickly walked across the street he just finished crossing. I didn't look back. Griffin grabbed my shoulder telling me not to look back as she peeked over her shoulder to see how he reacted. We turned a corner and griffin peaked peeked over corner of the building to see what he was doing. She said that he stopped walking and he was reading the note, looking over towards where I disappeared. We then walked towards the train and went home.
     This was an incredibly interesting experience. It's fun to imagine what the boy was thinking after I gave him the note. When I told my dad what I did he kept saying "boy! He must be going crazy with curiosity". I just keep wondering if it would cause him to change the way he looked at the world and if anything as simple as a note could change his world. The note wasn't a call to action or anything it was just something to make someone aware of their existence and the fact that every moment in life can mean something. He is probably wondering why I gave him the note and I can't really say I have much of an answer except that he was the first person I walked past that was really aware of me.
      I am still sort of amazed at how he received the note. Griffin and I both noticed how accepting of the notes these two strangers were. As I walked block after block I was always worried that if I handed the note to someone they would automatically reject it because they would assume it was some kind of advertisement. Both people we gave it to accepted the note without question. They didn't even talk. They just took the note. We thought maybe it had to do with the fact that it was a folded piece of notebook paper. Folded notebook paper has something special about it. I don't know. I wonder how I would react if a stranger gave me a random note. This experience really opened my mind to a whole bunch of new ideas. I don't know if I will be brave enough to do it again but I'm glad I was brave enough to do it once.

Today I spent a lot of time (maybe too much) trying to find the perfect font for my video. After many hours and looking at hundreds of different fonts I finally found one called Cute Tattoo. It looks really nice and it fits the style of my video I think. It was too rainy and cloudy to film more water colors but I will soon. I won't have a chance to work on my art until next monday sadly but I can't wait to come back to my window seat table and work! With the rest of the day I am going to tweak my story. I haven't looked at it much since I started writing it in my incredibly dull Environmental Resources class so it probably has to be improved a lot. See you on monday!

My long list of possible fonts

The font I chose! Cute Tattoo. As for the wording? I can't figure out a good title for my story so I don't know if the "once upon a time" will stay. Its hard to think of a title when I don't want to spoil the story for my friends and family.

Update! I am excited to say that my idea is working so far! I have reduced 40 minutes of painting to 2 minutes thanks to the glorious iMovie. People might think it is primitive compared to other editing programs but it does what I need it to do. We are on our way to making this video! Yay!

Editing!

Today I painted two of my illustrations. We are finally on our way! This whole projects is very interesting and the water color stage is the most interesting. I feel a bit rushed when I paint because I'm worried that the clips will be too long to clip down when I finally edit. I hope that my master plan will work. After I finish this update I am going to begin editing those two paintings and I will experiment with the timing. I'm excited and nervous! I hope it works.

The Finished illustrations

My workspace is getting messier!

Another Project! Gardening. Today my dad and I fixed one of the broken planks for my planting bed and I am now ready to go to start planting the Vegetable seeds.

My planting bed

The seeds

I took a break from illustrating today but hopefully tomorrow I will finally start recording the watercoloring of the drawings. Yay projects!

I took a break from working yesterday and went downtown with my sister but today I came back to my table and worked full force. Today I finished transferring all the drawings to tracing paper and I started the final transfer onto water color paper. It took a looong time but I am almost done. I only have two and a half to go before I can FINALLY start recording the water color. It will start soon.

The tracings

the water color pages ready to be painted

my work space is getting messy

what it looks like when I trace my drawings onto water color paper

Have you ever had a memory rush back to you? You stand around thinking about nothing in particular. One of those little nothings floats through your mind and you catch a whiff of a smell that is connected to that idea. Maybe the way the sunlight is hitting the fence in the corner of your eye makes you remember, then you're frozen. The place, the smell, the people the temperature, how tired your body was, the conversation, the emotion. All of a sudden you are back in that very place where that special thing happened or maybe it wasn't even that special. It doesn't matter, you're there. Then you snap back to the real world, still in shock. The only thing you can get yourself to say is "Oh my god, it smells like bug spray".

I have 4 more drawing designs. I only have one left but I am going to keep it a secret because it is the last frame of the video. Soon I will start tracing and transferring the drawings to water color paper so I can start filming finally.

Just a moment ago I was playing the piano and I remembered something. Piano has been an instrument that has followed me throughout my life. When my mother first held me after I was born she looked at my fingers and said, "Camille has the long fingers of a pianist". My mother was an opera singer when we lived in Montreal and sometimes I would sit in the room during one of her rehearsals and watch. I remember seeing the piano keys being pressed down and being fascinated by it. I didn't understand where the bottom half of the key would go whenever the key would be pressed. I would then go up to the piano and press the notes down myself causing a cacophonous sound to erupt from the piano. My next memory of the piano was when I was a little bit older I noticed that there were letters at very top of the keys under the velvet lining that prevented the keys from banging the wood. Once again I was fascinated by the prospect that I couldn't always see them since they were always covered by the velvet. I would spend hours pressing keys playing peekaboo with myself. I don't know why it was so fascinating to me. Those secret letters were a treasure to me. I was reminded of them today when played piano because after all these years they still appear and disappear when my figures dance along the keys. It still feels like a little secret that my piano and I share.

The Letters at the end of the keys. They are all in the wrong place if they were meant to show what the notes are but that doesn't make me love them less.

The pressing down of the keys that fascinated my toddler self.

I have begun designing the illustrations. It's interesting drawing things that I only imagined in my head. The house was especially difficult to draw and to bring to life. In my imagination I only saw parts of the house. I had vague ideas of what it looked like. I knew it was large, I knew there was a clock tower, and I knew it had many floors but putting them all together and still being true to the feeling I get when I think of it was quite difficult. These drawing are very simple and don't have very much detail. They aren't very realistic all the time too, this it because when I do the actual illustrations on video it won't take as much time so the speeding up process will work better. Also, the illustrations won't distract from the story. When I am done with all of the illustrations, I am going to transfer the drawings using tracing paper to water color paper and then I will begin recording. There are a lot more drawings to do before then though. Wish me luck!

First drawing introducing the character

character development

No I won't spoil the story!

house attempt #1

House attempt #2

clock tower

Another one of my projects is illustrating Auto-correct poetry for my friend Julia's blog, Sequined absinthe (sequinedabsinthe.blogspot.com). You should check it out. It's quite interesting to read.

Illustration work space:

The finished illustration:

Today I started my first project of the summer. I am planning on working on it throughout the summer and maybe next year as well. I wrote a simple little children's story and I am going to film myself illustrating it. I am then going to speed up the recording and line it up with my dialogue so that as I am narrating the story, the story is being illustrated before your eyes. Today I built the rig for my camera and I will begin planning the illustrations as well. I am really excited to share the process with you!

My home-made Camera Rig

Hello! My Name is Camille (pronounced Cami) and this is my new blog. I decided to finally start a blog because I thought that it would help encourage me to do the things that I have been planning on doing over the summer. If I have project ideas that I am thinking about, which I always have floating in my head, then having a blog would encourage me to start or continue working on those projects. Summer Vacation is about to start so I am ready to start creating and taking full advantage of my free time. I am hoping to create several videos, fabricate dolls, and maybe write stories. These things might even be combined! I hope you are as excited as I am about this journey. Have a lovely day!

-Camille