Hard to believe we’re so close to the end of the year! To sit down every week and get to record my magically mundane moments this way has been a real privilege. Now I get to look back and enjoy it as a whole.
It hasn’t always been easy though. Sometimes I’ve felt like I could honestly be getting on with other projects or doing some admin or better… housework (one of the downsides of having a studio at home is the constant housework that could be done).
Knowing that the challenge was to actually SHOW UP and KEEP SHOWING UP made it easier to be disciplined. Just sitting down at my desk and swatching colours was sometimes all I could gather the energy to do. But when the motivation was low, swatching and playing with materials always helped me wake up. It’s like the colours were calling!!
Today is one of those days. I’ve been very tired this week and could easily have gone back to bed this morning. I could have used this precious time to wrap our Christmas gifts {this winter I’ve been really good at protecting my studio space from any invasive Christmas-gift-chaos but the flip side of that is that all our unwrapped gifts seem to be placed on our bed, then shifted to the floor, then back to the bed and back to the floor}. I could have cleaned the bathroom and we have family coming soon so we’re talking deep cleaning.
But when it’s all so tempting, I remind myself that all those things can and must wait. I preach to myself that this struggle in itself was part of the challenge. THIS is endurance. My weekly visual journals were always going to demand discipline and of course there would be times like these!!
My weekly visual journals project was a mental exercise.
Week 51 though, pretty good!?
What’s your week been like? What were your highlights? The colours of your week? The sounds? The highs and lows?
For me, a sparkling highlight was the Little Women zoom call with Kayla Stark and the colours and patterns we studied from old quilts from Massachusetts in the 1800’s. There has also been my Christmas hellebores at my front door. And I’ve gotten completely obsessed with a still life I set up on a gingham cloth which had my dark green enamel coffee pot and some clementines I bought at our local shop.
Other highlights of the week:
Ezra’s Christmas concert
watching the 1954 movie White Christmas
the general feeling of winding down for the holidays
eating gingerbread biscuits and fruit cake nearly everyday
making the decision to freeze the rose hips my neighbour kindly gave us. I’ll make syrup another time in January
enjoying the margins I gave myself for the unexpected at this time of year
the wreath I made which is hanging on our front door
setting up a January Plein Air Challenge and looking forward to getting stuck into it!
Hope you’re doing well and enjoying the season.
Talk soon x
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