By Way of Introduction
I'm very excited to be here hosting this week! My name is Kara L.C. Jones and I'm the founder of the 1,000 Faces of Mother Henna project. Thought I'd start off by sharing my blogging story with you, so here goes:
Blogging wasn't something I came to very willingly at first. Having been a website designer since old school days, blogs made no sense to me. I couldn't figure out how people navigated, found archived materials, and definitely did not see how people connected directly with each other. I still had the linear sight of a static website, you know?
Anyway as 2006 ended, I had a crisis of faith whereby I could not shake wondering what in the world my life meant. This was more than goal setting and making resolutions. At first, I thought I'd take a vow of silence for year as a way to demonstrate for peace. But that was so impractical it wasn't even funny really. So in searching for projects about peace, I came upon the Jizos For Peace project down at the Great Vow monastery. It knocked me off my feet to read that they had collected up over 400,000 handmade pieces of art for their visual demonstration of peace. Around the same time, I picked up an issue of Cloth Paper Scissors that featured Violette's art work including some of her whimsical people drawings which I just adore!
And, so, Wa-La! I put it together and decided to make my vow to create 1,000 pieces of art, each incorporating some element of a henna-style design and a face, with the express intention of putting peace and beauty into the world. The 1,000 Faces of Mother Henna project was born! At first I was creating the pieces and just sharing them with my partner and a few friends. People began to react so strongly to some of the work that it became obvious there would be a wider audience if I just floated the pieces out there. We launched a very basic, little website -- which is great, but felt too static from the start. Pretty quickly others were asking for prints or cards or stickers. My good friend Lynndee of Lebeau Creative Design introduced me to Etsy. As I combed the Etsy forums to learn about the Etsyian world, I noticed that many artists also had blogs. I began reading. Stumbling on the link daisy chain from one blog to another. Leaving comments, getting convo messages back in my Etsy account from the artist-bloggers. I was hooked!
Not long after that, I launched my Mother Henna Etsy shop. Sometimes in my item descriptions, I would end up doing very long write ups because I wanted to tell the story of the piece, the background, the process. Often in the telling of these stories, I wanted to include links and highlight things with formatting, but you can't do that in the item editor there. So I took a big deep breath and began zooming around Blogger. I had sort of launched the blog with a few entries, but never had I looked at formatting the template, customizing the page elements, keeping an external account for photos (I use PictureTrail), integrating mini-Etsy, using FeedBurner so people could subscribe to the blog. Wow, wow, wow! This was getting fun :)
As you can guess -- given that I'm here being a guest host this week -- this delve into blogging completely opened up my world. If it was Lynndee who showed me the light at Etsy, then it was definitely my friend Ang at Alter My World who showed me the blogging way. Even though we were on different platforms for blogging, she was showing me how blogs function socially, can act as an online exhibits of art, be homebase for swaps and round robins and become a classroom for learning new techniques. She continues to inspire me every single day!
The blog for 1,000 Faces started slowly, you know, just a few posts a month at first. But as things unfolded with the project, and as I got comfortable with blogging, my entries picked up steam in number and in content. Now, my old school days are long gone, and I am loving every minute of the blogosphere!! I want to thank Melba for giving me the space here this week to share here at justBeConnected. Hope to hear from you, too! And I'll wrap up by sharing a few of the Faces themselves:
More very soon... in the meantime, if you want a Creative Spark, here's a challenge: Make a piece about peace!!! In an effort to create a community around peace and art, we extended the idea of the 1,000 Faces by opening up "A Peace Of..." blog -- and now we invite you to share a piece of your peace with us!
Miracles to you!
k-
There is a poetry exercise from one of Shelley Tucker's books
