Quinn McDonald's Blog, page 91

The Fragrance of Books

Very seldom do I talk about my passion for perfume. It’s hard to explain how fragrance can alter a mood, created a unified thread through the day, bring back memories in a powerful way, but perfume does all that and more.

Image: Luckyscent

I have a collection whose size both delights and embarrasses me. The scents I buy are ones I like–that may sound odd, but many perfumistas buy fragrances that “challenge” them or that you can’t wear anyplace but in the studio. Me? I buy fragrances that I like, whether store brands or niche fragrances. But I have to like them top note to bottom.

Noses (perfume designers) are artists. They work with ephemeral and shifting materials that blend and shift over time. Scent is four dimensional, in addition to top, mid- and bottom notes, there is an element of time that makes them glow or fade.

Gutenberg bibles in the Yale Rare Book Library. There are no windows in the library to prevent the breakdown of paper and parchment. Light comes in through marble slabs cut so thin they admit light, but no UV rays.

Paper Passion is a perfume that evokes the smell of books. Yep, paper books. I’ve stuck my nose onto paper and inhaled deeply from the time mimeographs were fresh out of the machine to the time I stood in the Yale Rare Book Library breathing the smell of brittle and fragile history and art.

Paper Passion comes packaged in a hollowed out book. The idea of a book fragrance in a book doesn’t strike me as being clever, although the design has gotten a lot of print. Personally, I would have wrapped it a cover made of incredible handmade paper. But no one called me to ask.

Paper Passion is a collaboration of Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld, Göttingen book designer and publisher Gerhard Steidl,  perfume nose Geza Schön, and Wallpaper* magazine.

Luckyscent, the internet store for hard-to find niche perfumes, lists the notes as: “osmanthus, copaiba balsam, amber accord, air accord, paper accord, musk accord.”

This may be the first fragrance I purchase, not to wear, but just to sniff for memories. It’s been accused of smelling like glue, old books, and appropriately, paper. Can’t go wrong.  Even if I don’t want to smell like a book, I would love to smell a book whenever I want.

Paper Passion is available from Luckyscent and Aedes in 1.7 oz. bottles for $98.00 Luckyscent has samples available.

–-Quinn McDonald is a writer who has bottles stashed in the linen closet and her dresser. She can time travel on the scent of a perfume.

Filed under: In My Life, Reviews Tagged: book smell, paper smell, perfume, scent of writing

Ups, Downs, but Never Still

One of my clients was sad. “Something has gone wrong every day this week,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be this way. Life is not supposed to be this hard.”

I asked what she thought life was supposed to be like.

“Smoother.  More effortless. It shouldn’t be so hard. I should be happy.”

Some boats come in faster than others. Photo from Kifu.blogspot

Interesting to think about. My thoughts always go back to immigrants–people who left everything that was familiar to them and traveled (not without danger) to a country that was new and different and probably frightening. Because they wanted something better and were willing to risk. They hoped for a better life, but never expected happiness as a requisite life in their new home.

When my parents were young, they worked hard, studied hard, and created a life that created respect and work they loved. But a few years after they were married, their world fell apart. A war wiped out their house, took their possessions, took the lives of relatives and friends. They arrived in America with a few wooden crates with what was left of their lives and started over.

In my entire childhood, I cannot remember hearing my parents complain about having to work hard or wishing they were back in Europe. My father believed that you built your own happiness, that the effort you put into being happy determined how happy you were.

Martha Beck, the life coach and author, has a wonderful quote about how we view life:

As long as we are breathing, the conditions of our lives will always be in flux, our ships still sailing in, the things we already own potentially dissolving (or disappearing). To accept that fact without anxiety is

to enjoy the process of living. Anything less, and we are simply suffering until we die.

–from  Enjoyment in the waiting

I’m not much for suffering. I think we are here to enjoy life. How much we enjoy it, and how we feel about our life, depends largely on how we look at ourselves and our experiences.

Bad things will happen. We will lose those we love when we are not ready. We will make choices we regret. But for all that, we can still enjoy our lives, balancing the joy with sorrow, for neither one can exist without the other.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach. Not every day is a bowl of cherries and ice cream, but very few days are cactus spines, either.

Filed under: Coaching, Creativity, Opinion Tagged: Coaching, happiness, life

Typing Fingers, Thought-Out Brain

Ink and graphite on watercolor journal page. © Quinn McDonald, 2012.

After getting up at 5 a.m. this morning, I did three coaching sessions, then spent the rest of the afternoon writing seven articles (about 5,000 words in total) for three different clients.

That many words (5,000) is about the length of a book chapter. I did not write a single word in the book today. I’m not sorry about that.

Writing for clients serves a very important purpose in my life: it helps me pay my mortgage and my health insurance, which is now more expensive than my mortgage.

But it made me think of the quote by Henry David Thoreau:

“The price of anything is the amount of your life you exchange for it.”   Indeed.

--Quinn McDonald is a writer. She’s working on a book and about six other projects. So far, her head has not popped off and rolled on the floor, but she’s got a roll of duct tape on her desk, just in case.

Filed under: Journal Pages, The Writing Life Tagged: creativity coaching, how we spend our life, writing

Eat Your Beets (in a cake!)

When Patti Digh mentioned the beet cake, my eyebrows went up , but my heart skipped a beat. Earthy beets, dark chocolate–yes, it could work. And having just finished Patti’s book Life is a Verb (I read What I Wish For You first)–either one make great gifts, but read them both–I would have tried boiled socks if she recommended it.

We both love beets, so I asked Cooking Man if he’d give it a try. It wasn’t a hard sell. The recipe calls for a lot of beets, so a big pot went on the stove, and the smell of cooking beets leaked through the air-conditioned house. It was odd, smelling beets in summer. But we all suffer gladly for art and cooking experiments.

The batter was as red as could be expected from five-beet puree.

Once the thick batter was in the pan, Cooking Man dropped the pan sharply on the counter to get the air bubbles to rise to the top.

And now it was ready for the oven. The beets add the majority of the bulk in the cake, which reduces the sugar and flour.

The kitchen smelled great while we waited for the cake to finish cooking. This time the smell was chocolate–and that’s a good smell any time of year. We knew it wouldn’t rise much. Those are beets in there.

Once out of the oven, it looked dense, smelled great, and the chocolate won the color battle. The fabulous beet stencil from the original recipe was beyond my pay grade, so I settled for a celebratory candle and my trademark wavy line.

Homemade paper stencil is on the cake, complete with my signature wavy line.

Powder sugar covered the entire stencil to make a clear image.

I removed the stencil pieces with tweezers to keep from spilling any sugar in the negative space. There were a few tiny crumbs of sugar. I picked them off with a damp watercolor brush.

Nothing left to do but whip the cream. We like it flavored with a bit of vanilla, but unsweetened. The cake is flavorful, not overly sweet, rich in earthy-chocolate flavor. Cooking Man said he could get a hint of beet, but I couldn’t taste the beets. The texture is smooth, with a great mouth feel. Cooking Man thought that next time, it might be fun to split the cake and add a center layer of banana cream. I suggested a topping of creme anglaise, a vanilla-rich sauce. We can dream, can’t we?

Early in the beet-puree process, Cooking Man asked if I’d like to lick the blender–a treat for me with almost anything except beet puree. But wait! There is always room for art, so I took the leftovers and soaked different substrates in beet mash.

Top to bottom is a cotton/poly blend of fabric–it took on a bit of color, but almost all of it rinsed out. Next is a piece of canvas that took the color well. Below that is a strip of Arches Text Wove (now called Velin). The fabric and paper were dried, and then the beet mash rinsed off. Before all the color came off, I heat set the pieces by ironing them. Beet color is fugitive, and without a mordant to hold the color, it won’t last. Over time, it will fade, but I find the reddish brown an acceptable color.  The bottom strip is a very fragile paper that dissolved when I rinsed out the beets. To preserve this piece, I put the paper on a piece of parchment (still visible underneath all the papers) and sprayed it with a squirt bottle. It rinsed off some of the beet paste.

The next step will be to cover the paper in clear tar gel to preserve the color and paper.

Satisfying all the way around. Nothing is better than a cake and some new art papers, all in one afternoon.

--Quinn McDonald loves to cook, but leaves complicated recipes (or those that require upper body strength) to Cooking Man. She’s writing a book about the Inner Critic (and the Inner Hero.)

Filed under: Food & Recipes, Raw Art Journaling Tagged: beet cake, beets and chocolate cake, dying paper with beets

Celebrating a Reached Goal

Yesterday, I talked about the importance of recognizing you’ve reached a goal and celebrating it. Wisely, some of you asked good questions about how you know you’ve reached a goal and what does celebrating look like?

Some thoughts:

1. To reach a goal you have to set a goal. To set a goal you have to write it down. To write it down you have to know exactly what you want the goal to be. Then break it into do-able steps. “Be a better daughter” is not a reachable goal because it is not well defined. What’s “better”? What are the guidelines for “better”?  Who sets those guidelines? Who decides if you are “better” than before?

Instead, you might choose “Phone my mom twice a week.” If, however, your mother hates talking on the phone, then it doesn’t meet the goal. Be specific. The more specific the better.

2. Use enough steps so each step toward the goal is something you can do in a set time period–half an hour, a day, within a week. Then put the time period after the step. It doesn’t matter if your goal has 87 steps. What matters is that you understand what each one means and that you can do them.

3. Have a reasonable idea you can reach the goal. Goals can be a stretch. But if it is an impossibility, you’ll lose the desire to reach it. That’s why it’s good to break the goal into steps. For example, if my goal were to be an Olympic Figure Skater in a year, I’d never make it. I don’t ice skate, never have. As an adult over 50, I’d have to take many hours of lessons, which my schedule doesn’t allow. Those two reasons are enough, and there are plenty more. I could however, set a goal to learn to ice skate well enough to make it around the skating rink without falling down.

4. Re-evaluate your goals over time. Make sure you are on track, evaluate why you want to reach that goal and see if it is still a reasonable goal you want. One of the valuable pieces of information you get from pursuing a goal is why you chose it and if it makes sense. Another piece of information is knowing when to abandon a goal.

5. Celebrate along the way. Once you have completed a certain number of steps, and you are closing in on your goal, and you really want to reach that goal, celebrate. A celebration can be private–imagining what reaching your goal will be like. Write it in your journal. Write down the steps you have completed and what you have learned or gained. In other words, praise yourself for your strengths. Do it in writing in your journal. Read it over when you feel your resolve dissolving. Read it out loud. Into your camera and then watch yourself. If you have a close friend ask him or her to read a congratulatory letter you wrote to yourself out loud. Buy yourself a congratulations card and mail it to yourself.

Make yourself a crown. You can make this one with the directions on this blog:
http://tinyurl.com/9twz8ds

6. Celebrate in ways that match your goal and your idea of fun. Sure you can throw a party or buy a new wardrobe or take a trip to Europe. But only if it doesn’t run you into debt and make you feel bad about your decision making abilities. One person’s celebration is another person’s boredom. Set aside time to buy and read a magazine, go to the movies, meet a friend for coffee or wine. You can visit a museum or arboretum, aquarium or water park. You can go to a play, take a class in something you’ve always wanted to try, walk a labyrinth or shoot up the other group in a paint-gun battle. Choose something that fits in your budget and that sounds fun. If you get energy from other people, involve them. Particularly if you have been discussing it with them. Having people celebrate with you is both fun and stimulating.

7. Don’t rush on to the next goal until the one you met is celebrated. Rushing ahead diminishes your work and effort. Smile at yourself. Wear a paper crown you made yourself around the house. Play “We are the Champions of the World” and dance. Only after the celebration feels complete should you sit down and write what you have learned about yourself, what strength has evolved. And then you can choose another goal.

-–Quinn McDonald has several small and large goals on her list. Ice skating is not among them.

Filed under: Coaching, Creativity Tagged: celebrating goals, goal setting, life coachng

The Dream Come True

We are raised on dreams coming true. On happily ever after. Cinderella’s glass slipper fit her, not her step-sisters. Jack escapes from the giant with the goose that laid the golden egg. All problems neatly tied up and solved.

Your dreams are yours to create. Image: available as wallpaper from http://abstract.desktopnexus.com/wall...

We know it takes a pure heart and determination to make those dreams come true, but the stories of childhood end there. The guy gets the girl. They live happily ever after. It’s a little vague how that happens, exactly.

Making your dream come true can be scary. This is your dream, which is somehow supposed to stay in the future, and now you are holding it.  Part of you doesn’t believe you could (or should) have it.

Your negative self talk told you often enough how out of reach it was. You might have chased that dream because it was good exercise, but deep inside you may not have thought you’d catch it. And now you did.

At this very point–the point of reaching your dream or goal, you’ll want to jump back, to the point right before you had it.  After all, if you hold the dream, you suddenly become responsible for it. You will have to be content with it. You will have to live happily ever after. If you could actually achieve it, was  the dream good or big enough?

The biggest burden of reaching a goal is that the same you that struggled for it suddenly has it.   Along the way you might have become older, wiser, thinner, but it is still you.

Getting that dream doesn’t come with a limo and posse for most of us. It comes with responsibility of admitting that we worked hard and got what we wanted.  Time to  acknowledge it. Even when your friends whisper behind your back, “So what? What’s the big deal?”  Some friends will snort, others will be envious. A few people will be mad at you. None of this should stop you from admitting you reached your goal. None of this should make you belittle yourself.

The important part is knowing what you did to get here, knowing that you could have stopped to avoid having the responsibility and pretended to change the goal. It’s a brave thing to reach your goal. Unlike running a marathon, once you cross the finish line with a goal, you realize you can’t click a stop watch and compare your goal reaching with others and see who won. You did. You got it. You have succeeded.

Before you feel dipped in fear, acknowledge your growth. Be proud of yourself. And take some time to celebrate. Celebrations remind us that we have strength and courage and determination. Celebrations honor those traits without saying that we don’t need anything else. Once you reach a goal, no one can take the accomplishment away from you. Honor yourself. Be proud. You’ve earned it!

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach who has a tendency to pretend that none of her goals were big accomplishments. She chooses the next one too soon.  She’s working on it.

Filed under: Coaching Tagged: creativity coach quinn mcdonald, creativity coaching, reaching a goal

Magazine Review: Featuring

The first issue of Featuring: magazine.

Thanks for hanging around while I spent a week running around the Valley in over 110-degree heat teaching business communication workshops. I appreciate your patience so much. Now, onto a new magazine I just received.

* * *

Featuring is a new magazine for art journaling and mixed media enthusiasts. It’s produced in Holland with an international contributor cast. Featuring uses an A4 size, (11.7 inches tall  x 8.3 inches wide),  which is taller and thinner than a sheet of copier paper. The layout is clean and crisp, a two-column design that makes the most of artwork.

The articles are written in a fresh-blogger style with details that reminded me of how different Europe is than America.  You never have the idea that you are being rushed through the story, and there are enough wonderful images to be satisfying and tempting to join in whatever is being discussed.

There are articles about Andrea Joseph who creates amazingly detailed drawing with a ballpoint pen and an article on Rosie Rowe‘s combination of photography, digital art and haiku.

There are beautiful images and the story of an art collaboration that started on a bus–the collaboration between Seth Apter and Jill Zaheer. Poetry, collage, altered books–the magazine gives the story enough space to develop and the artwork enough space to show detail.

Lea Goode-Harris has a great illustrated article on labyrinths that highlights the wonderful quote, “you lose yourself in a maze, and find yourself in a labyrinth.”  She wants you to love them as much as she does and even gives a labyrinth locator so you can find one close to where you are.

There’s an article on an unusual kind of scrapbooking (accent on “scrap”), ATCs, how to create a store on Etsy, and sleep/dream journaling.

The article that caught my attention was about the Butterfly Project created by Houston’s Holocaust Museum. The museum is asking artists, crafters, children and anyone who wants to join in to remember the 1,500,000 children who died in Germany’s Holocaust. The project was named after the powerful poem called The Butterfly by Pavel Friedman who died in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. The idea is to create a butterfly and send it to the museum by June of 2013. You can participate, too, the rules are easy.

Featuring magazine costs €8.50 (About $10.50) I splurged and spent a chunk on shipping to get the magazine without having to wait until Fall.

Full disclosure: I purchased the magazine because I wanted to. I did not use images from the magazine because I didn’t ask for permission to do so.  You can see more at Featuring’s website.

Filed under: Reviews Tagged: art journaling, butterfly project, Featuring magazine

I’ll Be Back on August 18, 2012

For the next five days I am running business training programs every day, all day. While working every day is something business people do regularly, this is an interesting challenge for me because it is four different locations, for four different companies (and starting/ending times) with four different prep and administrative requirements, and a maze of pick-ups and deliveries of materials.

It’s peach season. Enjoy the taste of fresh peaches this week!

Of course I’m very happy that I’m busy. Every trainer wants to be called and scheduled. But something had to give, and that was the two hours a day it takes to plan, write, and edit a blog post.

So I’ll be back on August 18, 2012 (this Saturday) with a new post. I will have two more book giveaways coming up (both brand-new felting books) and other goodies.

Meanwhile, feel free to check out my new fall classes, or past posts on

How to write articles that are reader-focused

Journaling tips for days you don’t know what to say

How to make acrylic gel skins for your art journal

The amazing story of Carl Jung’s Red Book (with a link to photographs of the book)

and I’ll see you back here on this coming Saturday!

–Quinn

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under: In My Life Tagged: carl jung, out of office, random posts

In Praise of PraIse

The evaluation form I ask participants to fill out at the end of classes is my chance to find out if I’ve met the expectations of the class. Over the years I’ve been running training programs, a lot of interesting information has come my way. I’ve changed classes, added suggested topics, and, occasionally, wondered what would possess someone to write a comment on the eval  form.

Adults learn differently from kids. Adults need to hear information more often, in different ways, in order to remember it longer. The word “educate” comes from the Latin “educare’ and it means ‘to pull out of,’ not ‘to stuff into.” Most people in the training sessions learn a lot from sharing information with people who work in similar business environments. Maybe even more than from me.

From me, they need to hear a practical application, examples that resonate with their experience, and reinforcement. If I tell a participant they are “wrong” or their writing “isn’t up to standards” in a training class, they won’t hear anything else I say.

My classes are short–one or two days. I can’t teach someone how to write in that time, or how to do presentations. But I can give them tools to use that will make them a better writer or presenter over time. And one way I do it is to find something to praise in every piece the participant reads or demonstrates in a presentation. By praising them for something they are doing well, it is more likely they will continue to do it.

That alone will make them a better writer or presenter, and that’s my goal. I’m not a magician, just a trainer.

I think there is not enough praise in business.  The reasoning is simple: Praise someone and they may ask for more money, maybe a raise. Wouldn’t want that. So keep them unsteady, unpraised and worried about job security. And that may work in this shaky economy, but it doesn’t breed loyalty. Or best efforts. It breeds resentment. And when the economy picks up, so will the people who felt belittled and demotivated. They will pick up and move on.

To be fair,  every now and then I get a comment on the evaluation form that baffles me. “You should be harsher in your criticism” said one. A few months later I got the more enigmatic,”You did not criticize other people’s work strongly enough.” I’m still not sure if they thought other’s work needed to be critiqued or if I had said something they interpreted as harsh. A few weeks ago I found this on an evaluation, “This isn’t a New Age training center, I expect some criticism that stings so I can improve.” What was that person’s childhood like? Is s/he a manager? Do they sting their co-workers with their remarks?

I’ll take being marked down for encouraging kindness and giving praise. I’d be honored.

-–Quinn McDonald believes that if you praise what you want to get more of, you will get more of it.

Image: Stuffthatsrelevant.wordpress.com

Filed under: In My Life, Opinion Tagged: business praise, giving praise, life coaching, praise

Asking for Help

“We don’t take charity.”

“Accepting help is a weakness.”

“No thanks, I can do it on my own.”

It’s so hard to ask for help. It’s almost impossible to accept money, food, solutions, or unexpected gifts from people we know. Worse still from people we barely know. We don’t want to be weak. We don’t want to take things we feel we should be able to provide on our own. It makes us feel helpless and low.

Sometimes, we need to take another perspective on asking for help. When we ask for help, we are giving another person the chance to be generous. To give from the heart. To help another person. Even if that’s us.

It is an act of generosity to others to need help and ask for it.

It is an act of humility to give help without making the other person feel diminished.

It is a tremendous act of courage to accept help graciously and let another person feel useful and helpful. Because you have been on the other side and know that “give” and “take” are both different sides of the same situation.

–-Quinn McDonald hates taking, but knows without a taker, givers would not complete the circle of grace.

Filed under: Creativity, In My Life Tagged: accepting charity, charity, giving help, help