FAQ: What’s your medium?
Answer: Whatever is around.
Example: I was lucky enough to receive @harryanddavid pears over the holidays. Each pear was wrapped in gentle green and metallic gold papers. The person who sent said pears had a birthday coming up. Hmmm I said to myself with very little actual thought and took an envelope from the stack I saved from holiday cards, finding the one from the birthday girl herself, and green padding from the pear box to make a canvas.

Theeeeeeeen, I had a cup of tea and wistfully thought about the birthday girl, leaving the tea bag on the tea papers for a couple days to leave a nice stain. Once that was dry, a plain ol ballpoint pen revealed the character hidden in the stain. With a dash of glue stick on the back, that went in the middle of the canvas. I don’t know why, that’s just where it seemed to want to rest.

Layers of tea-as-paint and bits of pear papers fell joyfully in place from there. I found some gold thread sitting next to my sewing needle stash and that seemed appropriate. I let the stitches fall wherever felt right. A few more layers and voilà, birthday art completed with

whatever was around.

Sometimes, I don’t know how to put a response into words or describe how I feel about things in-the-moment. On a certain crisp Fall morning, I sat with words exchanged a few days before. As I hot glued down needles, a beautiful and fragile web formed. I gently dropped in pieces of handmade papers my aunt had given me and blew tiny feathers in, watching to see how they moved through the scene. I laughed at myself when I tried to predict, with hands shaking from caffeine, where a drop of glue or piece of paper would land. Or how far a tiny glue string would stretch. Afterwards, I felt a great comfort and knew what to say. My reply was this process and piece.