HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
I hope you’re doing well, wherever you are in this beautiful world of ours. I wish you wonderful days for 2025.
How have your first few days of this year been? What are your highlights?
For my little family and me, this week has been a bit of a blur. It’s normal, we’re out of our normal routine. All days merge a little. I remember it being like this last year too! We’re hibernating most of the time and enjoying it.
January Plein Air Challenge
I get out for a brief walk daily, it helps me feel alive. And this month, along with a lot of you in the club, we’re drawing outdoors!! Getting out with this extra focus to draw/paint for a very short while has already been so fun and purposeful. I’m learning so much about materials and colour and… myself. If you’d like to join, there’s more info in this month’s issue of the club gazette as well as this introductory post. You can tag me on IG so that I can reshare your work and you can see everyone else’s work too. We have people from all over the world join which makes it very rich.
Highlights this week have included:
resting indoors by the fire and enjoying the boys playing with their new toys
fireworks at midnight on NYE
eating up all the Christmas chocolate
starting the Plein Air Challenge in the Time Foragers’ Club
using my handmade sketchbooks for the first time (a small one for January Plein Air Challenge and a larger one for these visual journals)
a beautiful day at Clumber Park with friends
Making my own sketchbooks
With 52 weeks ahead of us in 2025, I was keen to get an environmentally friendly option and decided to make my own. For this, I used Seawhite of Brighton paper (from their stapled Eco sketchbooks) and after reorganising the paper into “folios” (a bookbinding term), I stitched them together to create a larger sketchbook. I used old Scottish tweed as ribbons.
I’ll be sharing a video on the process of bookbinding this coming month to paying subscribers but you can see the end product in this little clip. Thanks Peg and Awl for your YouTube bookbinding tutorial.
Weekly Visual Journals in 2025
If you’re interested in starting a weekly visual journal this year, as part of the paying subscription, I’m offering a 5-week pop-in session series. These are short meets on Zoom, only lasting 30mins but enough to hopefully get us motivated to start a habit this year. We had our first last night and I’ll be posting the replay today in the club archives so it’s not too late to join. Sign up here. Next week, I’m hoping to look into layout a little more, as well as the importance of keeping a play sketchbook separate. So much fun ahead!!
Have a great weekend, it’s the first one of 2025!!
xx
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