I had an awful lot of fun in the craft store this weekend. I can't even remember now what my reason for going was, but I ended up buying an armload of miniature cabinets that just really piqued my creative imagination. I bought too many of them, and I shouldn't have, but they were only 99 cents each, and a lot of the ones on the shelf were broken, so my thinking was that if I really loved working with them, I would end up not being able to buy any more, so I should get them while they were available. Especially since they were so inexpensive.

I wasn't able to do anything with them this weekend, because I spent basically the entire weekend doing website work, and the part of the weekend that I wasn't doing that, I was doing laundry, or cooking. Well, except for the time when I was in the craft store, of course . . .

Anyway, my idea is to make little altars, or shrines, I guess, out of them. Paint them, or stain them, or maybe collage them, and fill them with little, interesting stuff. I don't know, I won't know until I start on it, I guess, but I've got a shoebox down in the basement full of collage elements--pictures cut out of magazines, and foreign stamps, and things like that. And seashells. And I have a box of paints, and somewhere there's a box of dollhouse furniture . . .

I'm not sure what I want to do yet, but it's so exciting to get that creative flow going again, and I was sad that I didn't have time to do anything about it. And I probably won't this week, either, but hopefully next weekend I can. I did spend some time last night looking through a couple of issues of Somerset Studio. The thing I have to keep reminding myself of constantly is that art doesn't have to have a "reason." I keep trying to justify it, saying that, well, I could make them for gifts, but that's not necessary--art exists for its own sake.

I guess it's just hard to justify spending time on something that seems so much like play, when there are other things that need to be done, like cleaning the house or doing laundry, or doing work that pays. I was talking to a friend about it last night, and he said that play isn't just a luxury, it's a necessity, particularly for creative types, and I know that's true.

I've been struggling with some mild depression for the past couple of weeks, but the time I spent prowling around the craft store and dreaming of what I might make from these little wooden boxes was almost euphoric. Or obsessive. There's that, too . . .

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