I meet with a group of women every Wednesday morning to work on a new medium for all of us — altered books.

We pick up books from the county library’s bookstore that they give away for free, and cut and paint and rip and otherwise change them into other things. I’m working on two different things, to allow one to dry as I pick up the other, one of which is “desecrating” a Precious Moments board book.

I have to admit that I work on this with much glee, altering these little saccharine watercolor figures to my own purposes.

Here are the first three pages. I’m not yet sure where it’s going, and I’m sure I’ve been inspired by Lisa Snellings Clark’s fabulous poppets, and I’m loving it so far.

Page one of “Precious What?”, paper, acrylic paint, fabric, and glue

Page two of “Precious What?”, paper, acrylic paint, sari-remnant ribbon, and glue

Page three of “Precious What?”, acrylic paint, fabric, and glue. Still in progress on this one.

This morning was hilarious, because one of our members recently returned from a trip to visit family in Nebraska, where she was asked what she was working on recently and couldn’t quite bring herself to tell them, “Well, there’s this woman in my group working on desecrating a Precious Moments book, when she’s not ripping apart a math book with an Exacto knife. . .”

Am I getting too much pleasure out of this?

My lovely husband gave me some fancy dual-tipped markers for Christmas, the kind with a paintbrush side and a fine line side. I thought I’d play with them, after having seen a lonely raven sitting framed in a tree outside the bagel place this morning and not having a camera with me.

I’m not all that happy with the way the ground came out, but I love the tree branches and the sky behind them. Upon reflection, I’d make the fork “frame” around the bird a bit bigger.

So running water did its usual trick on me last night before bed and I think I have a handle on what I’m doing for the January Take it Further Challenge.

There’s this place on the road to Santa Fe from Los Alamos, where you’re coming up a hill looking toward the Sangre de Cristos. The mountains are perfectly framed inbetween the hills on either side of the road, and you can’t see where the road goes beyond the top of the hill. I always feel, “I could go anywhere from here.”

Before we went to bed last night we caught the end of a PBS show, P.O.V., about Rafe Esquith, the teacher of “The Hobart Shakespeareans.” He’s amazing and inspiring and changing lives one kid at a time in an inner-city Los Angeles school.

He’s definitely someone worth admiration. But I don’t want to make a portrait of one particular person, because I am not called to tell someone else’s story. So rather than devoting a piece to this one extraordinary teacher, or any number of extraordinary individuals in my life, I decided to look at that place on the road, that place where I feel anything, anywhere is possible, and fill it in with evocations of all the people who make new beginnings possible. Some of the words scribbled into the landscape are teachers, artists, scholars, musicians, mothers, grandfathers, and so on.

I still can’t quite see where to take the image — to a more realized paper version, or fabric collage with embroidery and painting. I do find that the color scheme for the challenge fits just right with the landscape, which surprised me. So, I’m in a fundamentally different place with this than I was yesterday.