{Step 1} Place sheet of paper on table.

{Step 2} Rip a sheet of tis­sue paper into bits.

{Step 3} Hold bits of tis­sue paper in closed palms, raise palms above paper.

{Step 4} Close eyes. Open palms and release tis­sue papers.

{Step 5} Brush over bits of tis­sue paper on the sheet of paper with dilut­ed PVA glue exact­ly where they land­ed. Do this as quick­ly as pos­si­ble and mechan­i­cal­ly if nec­es­sary to avoid giv­ing in to the urge to “fix” the “com­po­si­tion” of the “pic­ture”.

I once heard a quote, its ori­gin I’ve forgotten:

“The oppo­site of hope­less­ness is not hope; it’s imag­i­na­tion. Imag­in­ing that things can be different.”

I imag­ine the same goes for freedom.

For me, it is main­ly free­dom from fear.

Many peo­ple have asked me, and I’ve also asked myself many times, that whether mak­ing art makes a dif­fer­ence. Just because you can make a pic­ture with tis­sue papers fly­ing freely about does­n’t mean that you can actu­al­ly expe­ri­ence the free­dom that you want in real life, right? Well. I can tell you that I have def­i­nite­ly seen mak­ing art make a dif­fer­ence in peo­ple’s lives, includ­ing my own. I would also say that if we don’t even both­er to imag­ine, to make a ten­ta­tive ges­ture, to take a stance against what­ev­er that took away our free­dom — even just prac­tic­ing on paper, then how on earth do we sup­pose we can expe­ri­ence free­dom in “real life”, what­ev­er real life means?

I’m not upset with any­one, real­ly, oth­er than the inse­cure chat­ters in my head that kept attack­ing my faith and con­fi­dence for the past two weeks. So I guess these are lit­tle steps I take to reas­sure myself. To regain my com­po­sure. To keep going. And it does make a difference.

So, any­ways, on a lighter note, we have been cel­e­brat­ing Marshie win­ning the Instructable Crit­ter Con­test with cream cheese frost­ing on Ritz crack­ers :D I saw this idea on MADE and thought I must try! We have a jar of cream cheese frost­ing in our fridge from when I was try­ing to make cup­cakes sev­er­al months ago, and Mike went out and got Ritz crack­ers after he heard me talk about it (he’s the bestest!). It’s actu­al­ly quite good! Reminds me of the lemon cream bis­cuits I real­ly liked when I was a kid (there are dif­fer­ent fun flavours! Scroll down to the “cream sand­wich bis­cuits” sec­tion!). I love cream cheese frosting…

May your day be filled with peace.