Celebrate Your Beautiful, Creative Self!

The "Summer Begins" giveaway is officially on!  


To enter, visit my contest page or click the banner to the left.  


Good luck! 

I love the summer growth & renewal theme - yes, because it signifies an beloved seasonal benchmark - but also because of the symbolic value of summer's re-emergence.

As artists and crafters, we often experience a kind of internal "opening up" and "blossoming" through the practice our art... a metamorphosis not unlike the unfolding of peonies' petals and ripe red buds stretching to the sun.

To me, this is one of the most amazing aspects of creation: that in the process of crafting something new, the artist undergoes a fantastical transformation herself.

To celebrate the flourishing nature of creative play and the luscious warmth of the growing season, we are sharing our creative endeavors with you!

As an entrant, I hope that you will be inspired by our summer theme.  Consider your own flowering experience: the people, places and actions that have inspired your own growth.  And don't forget to appreciate how beautiful you've become along the way!

Spring Joy

Don't you just love spring?

I adore the scents of fresh foliage, the sweet sounds of songbirds, and the lusciously vivid colours of springtime flowers.

To share these wonders with you, here are some photos of my favorite new neighborhood blooms.

I only wish that they were scratch and sniff!   :)

Love Makes It Cute

First off, let me tell you that I have a wonderful husband.  Yes, yes, I know that you're husband (wife/partner/other) is wonderful, too.  But mine is really wonderful.

This is a man who brings me breakfast in bed for no reason other than he was up before me.  Who, while I was in university and constantly running 20 mins behind, always had my lunch, books, a steaming travel mug of Caf Lib and a kiss waiting for me at the door.  Who built me a custom composting station and rain water basin for a previous birthday and is refinishing a vintage bicycle for my coming birthday (*swoon* all worth more than gold in my book).  He even agreed to let me gut our storage room and declare it my "Studio" ...on the condition that he could finally put a punching bag in our living room - well, okay..!  And of course - you were expecting this one - he puts up with me and all of my shenanigans.

I'm still in the never-ending process of organizing my studio space.  For a work table, I mounted an old door onto a wooden shelving unit that we'd cut in half (actually, these shelves used to constitute "the pantry" - which is another amusing title due to the cozy nature of our one-bedroom suite).  Since the shelves made the work space pretty high and I wasn't willing to sacrifice an inch of crafty storage space, we sought out an appropriately tall chair at a local thrift shop.  All excited, I brought the chair home, grandly placed it before the table and ...Voila!  It was perfect!  Just the right height for me to work comfortably for hours on crafty projects.

Only later did I realize one important defect:  my feet couldn't reach the sewing machine pedals!

So I asked my wonderful husband - his name is Kye, btw - if he could please make a stool for my sewing machine and serger pedals.  He likes to do handy things, which is a handy thing for me.  My special request was that it have a wooden bar along the top back edge to prevent me from kicking off the pedals (or whatever... I have a knack for such silliness.).

So while I was busy doing something else, he used some scrap wood to construct a special little stool just for me.  Then he came and got me and showed me my surprise.

Here it is!
(in front of a fabric stash)

How adorable is this stool?!

Okay, so this little baby will never sit in a museum or be sold for hundreds of dollars.

It will not suite everybody's artistic or decorative preferences.

But I love it.

And I think it's wonderful.  And sweet.  And cute.

Love Makes It Cute.   :)

In Adoration of Scented Spring Showers

It's one of those wonderful, fresh coastal days in May.  The air is pregnant with mist and scents of spring.  A warm, soft drizzle welcomes your face to the outdoors; you lean in and inhale the sweet, earthy aroma of azaleas, lilacs and cedar.

A friend of mine once told me that her late middle-eastern husband had been awed by our moisture.  He'd gaze out the window and describe rain as sacred silver threads delivered from heaven.

Similarly, I see our coastal showers as Earth-bound blessings that nourish our soils and souls.  When I see rain, I can't help but envision masses of sweet spring buds and overflows of beautiful emerald lusciousness.  To me, the rains and the bountiful coastal foliage are inseparable.  I am thoroughly enthralled by them both!