Happy Whatever You Celebrate

even if that's just Tuesday.

Merry Christmas et. al.!

J’s home for the next week¹, so my creative endeavors are mostly on-hold. We don’t do a lot of the traditional Christmas Hoopla or anything — I’ve got a tree with like three ornaments² and instead of some huge ham or whatever, I’m making a from-scratch chicken pot pie thing that feels warm, if not particularly festive, per se.

The one place we kind of splash out is with presents. I got J a PS5 and a new kindle to replace the one someone stole on a plane, and a GIANT bean bag chair³, ostensibly for sitting in whilst gaming, but which also has the unique quality of being so comfortable that, if you happen to be in the same room with it, it’s like an instant nap made of fabric and beans.

And Porkchop’s head is definitely going to explode with Teh Glee™. There are SEVEN packages with toys and treats inside, and his favorite thing is destroying cardboard boxes, so he’ll be channelling his inner Porkchop The Destroyer tomorrow night.

Can’t wait. :)

Other than that, I’ve finished the two cards for this volume.

AMOEBA. Essentially means to remain amorphous when faced with external influence. Just blob yourself around whatever problems come up and there’s less resistance. Also self-sufficiency and/or dividing yourself into appropriately independent parts.

Eris’ Apple of Discord. The silver and gold apple that Eris gave to some other folks to make the whole situation go sideways and eventually resulted in the Trojan War. It represents the need to either a) be wary of things that look like gifts but have a weird aura that feels like trouble, or b) take the bull by the horns and whip that guy sideways, because a little shaking up is needed. Be an agent of chaos.

That’s pretty much it. The basic bits of the first two cards, subject to change as I get a better idea of how this will work, visually.

And I finished tarting up the backsides, too.

This is one of those things that started out simple and ended up being a six hour distraction one day, while ostensibly teaching myself how to use the “mirror” function in Procreate. Some of it’s just doodling, some of it is from the ornaments on the backs of Victorian cabinet cards, because why not?

All that’s left is the Magpie Book, and I finished that cover and gathered a bunch of materials, so I’ll probably do that post-Christmas when I’ve got more spoons.

The word from the encyclopedia was agriculture, so I went a little ham with the farm thing. There are a lot of cows in this book so far. A lot. That’s the cover on the left and some of the stacks on the right, waiting to be turned into pages or tags or pockets or just clipped right onto the side to give folks extra collage stuff to play with.

Hope you’re all having a great holiday!

And if not, that you’re sitting on top of a very large pile of cookies right now, preparing your system for sugar shock. Tis the reason for the season, after all.

What’s Santa bringing you? Anything good?

1. The longest he’s been home in six-ish months, and while I’m thrilled, I’m also immediately missing silence which is not a thing in his world. :D

2. one star a friend sent, and two beer-related that came as gifts with purchase. Charlie Brown would even be disappointed in us, I think.

3. I wasn’t aware just HOW giant until we took it out of the package. I mean, the listing said 5’ diameter, but my brain didn’t imagine that in context, and now, the ENTIRE LIVING ROOM is a bean bag chair. Ollie is THRILLED.