Maintaining my obsession with these wheels, I made “Karmic Instruction” and am percolating on designs for garden stools. Having torn my pants open installing this piece at the ABG Gala, I’ll have to watch QC on something like a stool. Or offer alterations and repairs.

Yes, it spins soundlessly. Om mani padme ohm.

There are more pix of ‘karmic instruction’ on FB. My goal this week is to pull this blog into the 21st century and keep pix posted here, accept comments, and use this as current calendar of events.

Thanks for reading.

My latest left brain accomplishment while my right brain trips the infinite possibilities for the many projects I’m working on. Nothing like getting out a tape measure and getting the whole thing wrong the first time to remind you who you really are.
The cold rolled, buffed steel fireplace cover hides a 90′s auto gas fire insert – gold trim and all. (How can THAT be considered Alaskan?)

Burning steel not my lungs...

Everyday a new phemon takes center stage; a book, a movement, a style, a person. I inevitably draw into the fray to find some degree of thought provocation or utter irrelevance.

Surely the lowliest state of being is to be irrelevant. But that is relative. Just often enough I hear from someone who followed my original blog and benefited from my outlook or experience. It allows me to put aside my own personal fear of irrelevance and continue to share said outlook and experiences, albeit with the correctional lense of antidepressants, antianxieties, lithium, and synthroid. It has been exactly ONE YEAR since the beginning of my fall to suicidal insanity. I am alive and well though I have stumbled through many troughs – days, weeks, months – of fear and confusion. I can for the first time in one year face fully forward.

There is no rational bridge between my ravages of mental illness and the clarity and creativity of my healthy mind. Rather than attempt a segue I will just persist, here on my beloved home page, the page all-things-Marieke, to share. Thank you for your continued interest and support.

The original dirt is still at http://girlfriendsguidetodepression.blogspot.com/. In fact, there is an infantile manuscript floating. If you are an editor willing to give gritty, tangible feedback you will be praised mightly in the acknowledgements.

I am writing from the kitchen of our new place in South Anchorage.  We flew the Turnagain coop when the house of our dreams on 2.25 acres became available.  That means plenty of space for a shop and one loud metal smith.  In the meantime, the garage accommodates production work by day and two SUVs by night.  I have to be very tidy but darned if it doesn’t make me more efficient.  A place for everything, everything in its place.  And yes, we scrapped the building-the-house-of-our-dreams plan.  Even after it was permitted.  The municipality of anchorage failed to share our time-is-of-the-essence sentimentality and we were not permitted until the 1st of October, 2008.  In Anchorage.  Where it snows by the 10th of October.  Brutal at the time but strangely serendipitous.  Of course.

The updated gallery brings my body of work to date and this space allows me to share the process behind the scenes and a more personal side of the famous persona!

Sam asks me to mush metal for her a lot.  Most recently, the day before the Bridal Fair at which she had a photography booth, as she is an extremely talented photographer (like her father), she brought me a plastic over-the-door type hook and asked if I couldn’t just mush another one, slightly longer, by the next day because she simply couldn’t find a second one suitable for her need to hang gallery canvases at her trade show booth.  Of course, I obliged.  After all, she had just taken a photo of a piece of my art for submission to a magazine.  She can really mush the light…