Poemcrazy - Toni's Homework

I sat outside on our patio last night, flipping thru magazines to find little images to punch out for this project. Relaxing, cool breeze that finally made me a little shivery (well, I started out with just a tank top on, ended up in my gorgeous gray sweatshirt from Cam). While I was at work, I had already printed off labels made from the word list I shared with you in a previous blog entry. Outdoors, I punched almost 60 images, plunking them into a brown lunch bag. Then I mosied on indoors, where I punched 30 or so slide-mount shapes with my new slide mount punch, using as many of my larger scrap pieces of paper as I could. The slide mount pieces went into a smaller bag, & Zoe helped me mix those up by sticking the entire front end of her body into the bag. I should've known, it's maroon, it has raffia/cord-like handles, it was just a miniature version of her Pottery Barn Penthouse Bag. Maybe she thought I was making her a walk-in closet?

So here's how it worked: First I put my favorite Lila Downs' CD into the CD player. Then I sat down in my studio chair, removed Zoe's head from the maroon slide mount bag, & scooted her furry heinie onto the floor. Then I reached into the slide mount bag & pulled out a slide mount [no peeking]. Then I reached into the punched-out image bag & pulled out a punched-out image [no peeking]. {Here it seems important to remind you that I LIKE SURPRISES, so when I said [no peeking], you can freely trust me that I didn't peek.} I glued down the punched-out image, then the slide mount image over that. Then I randomly selected a label & stuck'er down. This process went on for all 24 images you see below. What happens next is I can cut these apart and mix 'em up, create strings of words and/or images, just toy with them to tease out ideas from my noggin'. I've already got quite a few good ones going on. But I confess, one of them stopped me cold, had me turning my head sideways like puzzled pooches do, made me call Zoe into my lap and ask her for her thoughts. I'll be writing about that in my next blog entry.

Below is the suggested activity for this chapter from Poemcrazy, which I modified to do the above. You'll obviously have to click on it in order to be able to see it, let alone read it! This is an excerpt from Chapter 4, 'The Answer Squash', which I'm sharing because it's just so doggone fun!