It occurred to me that this might be a fun thing to do. To put up an album of my hair over the years. Some of the wackiest styles never had photos taken simply because it was before digital, before cameras on phones, we simply didn’t always have a camera available. And in the punk days especially we were too wasted to remember a camera. Tis true. There has been pink and purple and red and orange, short, long, straight, curly, but only at birth and now have I done mohawk or bald.

This montage of photos of me and my experiments with hair is simply my way of bringing fun to a very difficult phase of my life. This is about a journey, one that I am trying to find humor and joy in.

I am not interested in discussing whether or not I am beautiful or the state of my self esteem. Please don’t comment in that way if you can help it.  Cracks about my 80’s glasses are welcome.  I am not bucking for compliments and I’m not interested if you think that my being incredibly sad over my lack of ANY HAIR ON MY ENTIRE BODY is about poor self esteem.  That happened to me 2 weeks ago and I’m still in a fighting mood over it. My journey is beautiful and that is that.

Please enjoy the journey of Cyn’s hair. I’m still trying to find my first ever baby photo where I had a very distinct mohawk.  Mohawks rule…

Thrive is the word of the year.

Have a couple projects going on but I only get a few hours in. Chemo is going well, I have been fortunate, there are side effects but only a grumbly tummy (12 days so far ugh) and fatigue. Definitely fatigue.

Gratitude is my rock, it is what get’s me through the days and nights. My mom, Mr.  Furnace, friends, and physical recovery from the surgery. I have never been so glad to be alive or wanted so much to be living.

New pretties

Tree colors are settling (had to rip out twice before happy)

I start chemo Wednesday. Yay and yet ugh.

The design process doesn’t happen over night.  Sometimes it can take weeks especially if it’s an important piece or I’m distracted.  Or in this case, both.  It starts in my head and I tend to day dream over several late night or early morning drowsy times to get a firm idea of basic overall design; fabrics, threads, rough outline of design.

Once that is fairly complete, I start with a rough draft on paper and once I’m making progress, I start transferring to fabric. I’m impatient by nature and love to get started on the fabric (or wood) as soon as I can.  This can sometimes bite me but most of the time the process prevails.

You can see in the following images that I use a blue temporary ink pen (water soluble) to do the second draft of the design. Once I’m pleased over all I go over it with black pen.  In the first image you can see a little spiral that got missed by the black pen which I have now filled in.  The black over the blue illustrates that the final design morphed again, just little tweaks, mostly to make sure there is spacing where needed or to refine a curve.  Once I’m happy and have all the black ink in place, I spray the entire piece with lavender water.  The lavender isn’t needed for the process but it was collected organically and I use it as part of the initial purification.

The last quadrant remained to be drawn last night when I took the photo.  It is now complete. It took me two weeks to hear Blackberry calling me.

• Pomegranate for blood, passions, fire, creativity, traveling back and forth between the upper world and under world, female
• Oak for strength, longevity, and fertility, as above so below, male
• Vetch/wild peas for the sweetness of pink and fragrance, prolific growth of healthy cells, basic food and proteins, because I dont like to eat peas and I dont really want chemotherapy but it will save me
• Blackberry for tenacity, juicy summer goodness (future), thorns with beauty, darned hard to get rid of me too, long productive life.

The rune Raido sits at the base of the trunk for journey, communication, union, and reunion:

“Self healing, self change, and union. As the obstructions give way, all remorse arising from trying to make things happen disappears, when what is above and what is below are united and of one mind…

Stand apart from even like minded others; the notion of strength in numbers does not apply at such a time, for this part of the journey, the soul’s journey, cannot be shared”

Book of Runes, Ralph Blum

This is an organic process though so until the piece is complete I never know exactly how it will look until that moment when no more stitches or strokes are needed.  I can’t wait to see how this develops!  The threads will be in my fingers this week!