I've been planning to do a blog for several weeks now and wanted to do a theme related to the Tarot cards that I am designing.  The process of designing this new theme has left me exhausted.  I was going to do something much more individualized than the template I picked for this blog, but five hours go by and I'm still generating images!  Everytime I decide I am going to do something simple, I end up creating a complicated mess.  So now it's nearly 11pm and all my deep thoughts have slipped away. 

Even though I only feel like being brief, I suppose I should introduce myself in some polite fashion since I made this a public blog and this task has the potential of being anything but brief!  I like to talk.  I like to look.  I am Valentina and my favorite color is the kind of brillant warm red that can be seen in the deepest crimson roses and drops of blood fallen on white sheets of satin.  Okay, that was a bit melodramatic, but had to explain why I chose the "roses are red" theme for my blog. 

I like long stem red roses.  I once collected tons of red rose heads from a florist I used to do Tarot readings for.  That was nearly three years ago.  I told her I needed them for a project where I was going to heat up the petals and make them into rose beads.  My request was timely because she just had a shipment of red roses come in that was supposed to be for a wedding that had been cancelled.  Instead of throwing the roses into the garbage, she gave them to me.  My project started out simple enough but ended up becoming yet another one of my infamous messes.  I followed the instructions on how to make rose beads from Scott Cunningham's book on incense and brews except for one thing -- the only bottle of rose water that could find had gyclerin (forgive the spelling) in it.  I took a chance and poured it in...  The result was not the sticky muddy mess I needed to make to form the beads, I ended up with rubbery sticky petals that nearly congealed into a glob-like gel.  I couldn't make my rose beads with that.  Yet my experiment left my apartment smelling very nice.

I used the rest of the petals to stuff into my pillows and scattered what was left over my house altar.  I gave away a bowl full of petals to my best friend so he could have something to woo his girlfriend with.  A couple days later I got a special phone call from a guy I felt an intense sexual pull to and, well, spent a very special night with him on December 21, 2002. 

So that's my red rose petal story.  Tomorrow night sometime I will hopefully finish my Tarot website and display some of the cards I'm working on.

~V