practicing :: a beginning

i went to a restorative yoga class today. my very first one. the physiotherapist cleared me last friday to begin yoga, which i've not really tried before, but which feels like the right thing to build up my weakened core muscles. he told me to take it easy in the beginning, hence the restorative class. it was super low key, lots of stretching and breathing and holding positions for what at times seemed interminable stretches of time. i discovered that my muscles are super stiff and quite sore after half a year of back pain and living in fear of new back pain. i had an inkling of that fact last week when i got a massage and it made me feel downright ill (nauseated and light-headed) for about four hours afterwards. it was better tonight with the yoga class. holding the various poses gave my muscles time to pass through the stiffness and pain and open up, softening and somehow filling with light, even tho' the room was dark and warm and quiet. or maybe because it was. it felt centering to be there, to be beginning a practice, to be taking the first step on what i hope is a new path.

the instructor talked about the full moon and how in it the sun has exposed the shadow side of moon. she said that our practice this evening, in sync with the full moon, could very well expose our own shadows, clearing them out, shedding light upon them.

lying there in the dark, stretching my stiff, too-long-unused muscles, breathing, listening to the music and the gentle guidance of the instructor, colors flitted across my closed eyelids...deep dark purples, peaches, rich glowing green, rosy pink and warm amber. i hated to open my eyes when it was all over, so soothing were my own personal northern lights. and i realized afterwards that yesterday i had painted something a bit like what i saw.

on wednesday, my new practice will continue with chandra hot yoga.

colors of christmas

1. wee mushroom ornament, 2. [keep it simple] christmas, 3. vintage christmas, 4. My Vintage Ornaments Rock!!

merry christmas, one and all! wishing you all a colorful christmas.

color palettes

as you well know, i'm all about color. partly because nikon rocks the color. and partly because that's just me. i surround myself with color in the world i inhabit. and i see it everywhere i go. so i was quite delighted when i spotted the big huge labs color palette generator today when i was making mosaics. i used several of my photos to generate color palettes. and to see whether i'm becoming attracted to colors other than blue, turquoise and green. and it seems that i am...

it's interesting that with a little different angle on the same yarn, a different palette came through:

it seems that i'm moving in the direction of purple. i wonder if the rest of the world will be too or if it's just me.

i also used a couple of my flickr favorites to generate a color palette:

 beatnik bazaar's beautiful crocheted blanket

soja's bright quilt

what's the current color palette of your world?

* * *

due to popular demand from saturday's bird post, i'm making birds. $35 for 5. just email me with your color choice. if you only want a couple, they're $8 apiece. i've got lots of great anna maria horner fabrics in pretty much any color you'd like, plus lots of other good stuff, just email me and we can talk colors.

spring colors

i love the flickr toys at big huge labs. i like to occasionally make a mosaic of my favorites, just to see the trends, because as you go along, you don't necessarily realize that there is a kind of harmony to the photos you're favoriting (is that a verb now too?). usually, my mosaics are heavy on the turquoise/teals and there is a little of that in this one, but i was surprised to see more brightness and more variety to the palette at the moment. it must be spring--i'm clearly attracted to orange, yellow, light blue and green. they must be the colors of right now. they're just so cheerful and lively. for the photo credits on all of these, go here. it's also interesting to make these mosaics of your own sets, because you can definitely see trends there as well--here's that teal/turquoise thing i was talking about:

i spotted another trend in my faves and among my own pictures. it seems i have a thing with sticks and stones at the moment. who am i kidding, i've always had this:

you can see that many of these belong to the lovely margie of resurrection fern and speaking of stones, you should go check out her latest stone diary post, because it features the stones i sent her! she's doing such inspiring work combining nature and craft. and i just read her profile and realized she's a family physician as well! i wonder how she finds the time for everything!?! people amaze me sometimes.

and on that note, i'll get to work so that i can earn my time to play.

no place like home

waiting for me when i got home yesterday were my beautiful wobblies from atelierBB. i was ordering a wedding present for my sister-in-law and couldn't resist a little something for us as well. i ordered these sweet little orange, yellow and red dessert plates.

and the green was a little surprise that brigitte included. how awesome is that? thank you brigitte!! and if you haven't yet checked out her work, do it here.

also waiting for me were the latest additions to my fast-growing collection of resurrection fern crocheted stones and merfish. the teal merfish was so lovely "swimming" in its packaging that i hated to take it out:

but take it out i did and it posed for several pictures with its old friends:

and how exquisite is the "missing pieces" covered stone? it's even prettier in person than i had imagined.

i you haven't visited margie's blog to see what she's working on next, you really must. it's a most inspiring place.  here's my entire collection of her beautiful stones:

and just now, the mailman brought me this beautiful little felted bowl that i ordered from artemis artemis in new zealand (on etsy of course). it's my very favorite colors and the perfect size to keep my rings in (even the big one):

also waiting for me was a wonderful REAL letter from my aunt mary. she wrote four pages, sending birthday greetings and telling me how she's getting along after my uncle jim died last fall. she's surrounded by her children, grandchildren and soon to be 18 great-grandchildren, all of whom live in south dakota except one of the grandchildren and his two(?) kids, so although it's hard to lose her best friend of nearly 70 years, she's getting along well. she sent along a really neat picture from 1946 of my dad and his brothers and the first of many nieces that they eventually had (i have 29 cousins!). that's dad on the left (he was the youngest of 9):

i love so much about this picture. the car behind them. the fact that they're all dressed up. that the baby is crying and clearly wanting to be handed back to her mama. such a lovely thing to get in the mail.

and speaking of  mailboxes, i'd better go work on those 50-follower prezzies i've promised and do a bit of work work since i'm now gainfully employed. happy weekend everyone.

the object(s) of happiness

i'm not sure why i've spent so much time of late thinking about happiness, but the fact is, i have. maybe it's my incessant reading of the curmudgeonly paul theroux (it depends on which one you're reading...his more recent stuff (dark star safari and ghost train) is less curmudgeonly). i'm now reading his happy isles of oceania and he's back to being a curmudgeon. and it has a lot to do with his level of personal happiness and it seems his long-crumbling marriage is in the final stages of crumbling in happy isles.

happiness is affected by so many factors. those people around us--the ones closest, but also the random ones we encounter every day. our jobs. our co-workers. our kids. our pets. the food we eat. our homes. things we create. whether we have time to be creative at all. having enough money. whether we have someone to clean for us. staying in a fabulous hotel. taking a vacation. what we read. how much t.v. we watch. movies we see. do these things make us happy or do we seek out all of these things because we're already happy? it's the chicken and the egg, really, which comes first?

living in this grey, dreary climate, i've found that my camera can contribute greatly to my happiness. there was plenty of sunshine the past two days and i took a lot of pictures. so, today, i can look at this jumble of glass beads in full sunshine and remember how wonderful that sunshine was:

and having the picture can help me through the dreariness. i've written before about the capacity of color to make me happy. and i can see that the things i was drawn to photograph in the sunshine of the past two days were colorful. something about the rays of the sun on bright colors is so cheerful. of course, it helps that this home is filled with bright colors, so there must be something to knowing on an intuitive level that they contribute to my happiness.

maybe all of the gloom and doom that fills the newspapers every day is what has me consciously thinking about happiness and what makes me happy. or maybe it was just the cupcake i had for breakfast...

favorite reads of 2008

a new year, a new box of beautiful pencils. since i decided to draw my purchases in 2009, ala kate of obsessive consumption, i felt i needed good tools with which to do it, so i got these lovely pastel pencils. they are beautiful, vibrant colors, but have a tendency to smear, so i may go back to my favorite stædtler triplus fineliners. but in the meantime, i am enjoying just looking at them in their pristine loveliness and they were pretty cool for drawing the embroidery thread skeins, so they do have their purpose.

i got a bit of alone time today. i warmed up the atelier and have had a couple of hours to myself out here (ya gotta love WiFi), listening to alanis, painting a bookshelf, looking through books, checking out my latest dozens kit, taking pictures of my pretty pencils. painting is so therapeutic, somehow in the methodic repetition of the strokes, my mind clears and find that i'm feeling peaceful and content again.

i'd also like to think that it's because we really got the colors right out here...the peaceful, yet creatively stimulating, warm teals, the old sideboard, being surrounded by all of my best creative supplies. but maybe it's also because i did get the tree taken down and that's not weighing on my mind anymore. the kids cleaned the bathroom sinks and swept, so that's not bugging me anymore either. whatever it is, i'm feeling much better.

* * *

now that i'm feeling in less of a deep blue funk, i think my head is clear enough to make the list of the best books i read in 2008. early in the year, i tried to keep a list of all the books i'd read. i did an installment of it in february and one in april and then, sadly, i didn't keep up the list. i did, however, keep reading. and reading. and reading. and i'm not sure i could accurately reconstruct because a lot of books were shelved in this house since april i might not remember all of those i read.

i discovered several new authors in 2008--haruki murakami and paul theroux and norwegian author eric fosnes hansen. i realize murakami and theroux aren't really "new" authors, but they were new to me and i went a bit nuts reading them, especially murakami. i think i only have two of his books left that i haven't read. they're on my shelf, being saved for a special occasion because i'm a little afraid of being in a situation where there's no new murakami left for me to read.

but here we go, my favorites reads of all those books i read in 2008 (not in any particular order other than the order in which they came to mind):

1. nigella lawson, nigella christmas. my new speciality--the julelog cake--came from this one, along with much of the other food i made in this house from thanksgiving through new year's eve. it's beautifully photographed, the recipes are easy, there are lots of pomegranates, and nigella writes like a dream. i want to lick her words off the actual page.
2. nigel slater, real food. most of the food i made in the first half of 2008 came from this cookbook. the coq au riesling sustained us through our kitchenless summer, because it worked a treat slow-cooked all day over the old rusty wood-burning stove in the yard.
3. jamie oliver, ministry of food. on those days when you're not inspired to cook anything, you can open this book and find something fast, easy, healthy and wonderful. jamie oliver has done marvelous things to make people all over the world into cooks, even when they thought they weren't. 
4. paul theroux, ghost train to the eastern star. this was his update of the trip he took 30 years before and which launched his career as a travel writer with his great railway bazaar. what won me over is that he may dislike singapore even more than i do, but he wrote so eloquently about it. but most marvelous of all is his mode of traveling for the sake of the journey and the experience. i hope i will be a better traveler on my next trip now that i've read him. and the best moment of the book is when he's in tokyo, hanging out with murakami!
5. paul theroux, dark star safari. i'm reading this right now and although i'm not finished, i'm putting it on the list (i began it in 2008). i am in love with africa thanks to this book. it makes me want to go back to egypt with a new attitude and i simply cannot wait to see what he says about cape town, which is one of my favorite places in the world.  i just ordered a couple more paul theroux travel books on amazon because i can't stand the thought of being without when i'm done with this one.
6. erik fosnes hansen, tales of protection. i discovered this norwegian author in an oslo bookstore on one of my frequent trips to oslo in 2008. especially the first tale in this book of three interwoven stories is haunting and will make you look at bees in an entirely new light. the underlying theme explores coincidences and whether there really are any. 
7. haruki murakami, wind-up bird chronicle. this is the murakami that started it all for me. i hadn't been so drawn in by an author since dostoevsky. and it left me in the same fractured mental state, seeing japanese everywhere and generally having murakami moments. the only thing i didn't do was manage to spend time down a well, but i probably would have had i come across one.
8. haruki murakami, hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. this was my other favorite of the murakami i read this year, although this isn't to say that i didn't like norwegian wood, kafka on the shore, after dark and all the rest. there's just something about these guys who live in overlapping realities that i find so appealing. reading him puts me a heightened state of mind that is what i imagine cocaine is like. that's it, murakami is like cocaine to me. 
9. elizabeth gilbert, eat, pray, love. i know, it's one of those women's magazine must-read books, but this book was just what i needed at the beginning of 2008. to read of another woman's journey back to happiness after my bad break-up with my job, was just what i needed. and gilbert is funny and smart, if a little navel-gazing, but what do you expect in such a book?
10. robert scoble and shel isreal, naked conversations. the book is a couple of years old and that's a lifetime in the days of web 2.0, but it holds up well and offers tons of great ideas and advice for blogging in a business context. it made me realize that what i'd really love to do is find a way to blog for a living. i'm still pondering how to go about that one.

there are many other books i read and i might do a second installment of this list sometime later this week. i'd love to know the great books you read in 2008.

the color of my world

with all of the painting and arranging and decorating that's gone on around here over the past year, i find myself thinking about colors and the effect they seem to have on me. it's clear, looking around our home, that color is very important to me, but why is that? when i'm surrounded by bright and vibrant colors, i feel brighter and more vibrant myself. tho' because of the industry i'm in, my clothes tend towards blacks and greys, tho' i often have a jewel-toned shirt under my grey suit and almost always some funky tights of some sort, usually in a bright color. so perhaps it's in reaction to having to wear drab colors at work that my home is very colorful--turquoise walls and darker turquoise ceiling in the atelier, goldeny-orange walls in the kitchen and my beloved red smeg refrigerator--all speak of a deep need in me to immerse myself in color.

i was resistant to husband's desire to paint the new dining room white, but have to admit that i like it, because of the way it sets off the colorful book jackets which line the walls. the neutral, warm coffee cream walls of our bedroom are counterbalanced by a rich turquoise velvety bedspread and the colorful heather moore patchwork.

but how does color make you feel? can it lift your spirits or dampen them? it seems to me that it can. if the colors are warm, do they warm you? or cool you if they are cool? are you inspired differently by different color palettes? check out these pictures..one of which i "warmed up" in lightroom and one which i "cooled down."

is there a difference in how you feel when you look at them? for me, looking at the top one, i can very nearly feel the glow of warm candlelight (even tho' it's really only a preset lightroom filter) and i feel inspired to make something snuggly and warm from the fabrics.  the bottom one gives me a feeling of crispness and makes me want to make something a bit harder-edged, with crisp, ironed corners. both are actually inspiring, but in wholly different ways. that's interesting, isn't it?

i can't help but think about color during this dark, dreary, grey time of year when the sun, while probably shining up there somewhere above the clouds, never really breaks through. perhaps it's that weather and the darkness of the northern winter that draws me to fill our home with vibrant, vital colors. we are surely shaped by our environment all the time, but i don't think we're always particularly mindful of it. maybe next time i feel a case of SAD coming on, i'll wear something bright and sassy and see if that helps.

stash expansion

isn't it lovely?

i had to move the unwound skeins of posh yarn over to their own basket. thereby making my stash now fill two baskets. else has gone on an extended weekend vacation, so i haven't yet had the knitting lessons from her, so i continue to be, for all intents and purposes, unable to knit. from what i've been reading on the knitting blogs, this stash is so small it cannot rightfully be referred to as a stash. and yet, i shall restrain from buying any more when it goes on sale this evening (in 2 hours, but i'm not counting). the basket they are in is one i bought from a lovely old russian lady when i went on a volga cruise eleven years ago. i love that. both that i still have the basket and that it has been put to such a lovely use.

pretty yarn

fairground (lucia)

mister (emily)

twirl (lei)

salsa (helena)

this week's acquisitions from posh yarn. now i just need to learn to knit properly....because i wanna make socks. and olives.

color obsession

i took these pictures last night of my new pastels. why didn't i buy the BIG, deluxe package? i guess i thought i'd see how it went with them before i invested too much. and it went well last night when i started my art journal!! so soon i will be worthy of a big set. with even MORE gorgeous colors to use! the best part is smooshing them around on the paper with your fingers. actually feeling the art as you're creating it. there's something very cool about that.

creativity happening

i know. i'm obsessed with whether or not i'm creating something at the moment. but it's because it's of concern to me. after three very dry years of not creating anything crafty (i created plenty of work stuff), i am feeling a deep and abiding need to create something--painting, writing, knitting, felting, even cooking, whatever it is...so forgive me if i'm obsessed.

at last, i feel i have acquired enough of the necessary supplies...pretty papers (i know, i'm obsessed with those as well), embellishments (including, but not limited to ribbons, brads, little eyelet thingies, felt, flowers, rub-ons, alphabets and stickers), stamping supplies, paints, canvases, brushes, gesso (that's cool stuff!!), pastels, chalks (i have yet to acquire those, but i've had them in my hand several times)....you get the picture.

i have sought inspiration. (the internet is HUGE, by the way, and totally chock full of inspiration). i have a good idea of what i like (authenticity) and what i don't (sentimentality and bits that are too straight and squarey). i have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at things and not enough time MAKING things.

but now, i have begun. i have an old (but nearly brand new) moleskine journal that i began to use two years ago at a meeting in singapore. i took notes in about 4-5 pages and then abandoned it. not sure why. i have gessoed over the first two pages...it feels cathartic to blot out those notes. they weren't relevant anymore anyway...and then i used some of my new pastels. i mixed a gorgeous blue-green over the gesso, which made an almost canvas-like pattern, thanks to the brush i used with the gesso. my fingers got stained blue-green, from smooshing the pastels around, which i love, because in my synesthetic moments, it's always blue-greens i see. and purples (but i digress..and will elaborate further in another post). i don't know yet what i'll write in it, but what feels good is to cover those old, now meaningless words. to watch the ink blur underneath the gesso and to blot it out with the pastels. very cathartic.

gorgeous colors!

i'm obsessed with color of late. especially if it's shades of green and blue. and textures. i can't get enough textures. i just ordered 3 skeins of this lovely from posh yarn! what a fab shop (http://www.poshyarn.co.uk/) !!! hand-dyed yarns in jewel tones. what more could a girl's heart desire? (it's called sophia 4-ply kingfisher)

the color in my life

after going over to the dark side over the past year and wearing black and grey all the time, i find that whenever i wander past any store that has a colorful display, i am totally drawn to it.

today, it was a lovely little yarn shop on klosterstræde in copenhagen--bette design. i took this picture of the gorgeous yarn on display there. and the woman who runs the shop was lovely. friendly, kind, ok that we were just beginners. so encouraging and positive and full of good advice.

i bought a gorgeous ball of rainbow yarn that i'm going to turn into scarf as my first project. she had one in the window and advised that it would make a great first project and it would give me confidence to move to the more difficult "swiss cheese" scarf draped on the mannequin next to it. also in rainbow yarn, but only in the blue and green hues. i think it will be wonderful, working with such gorgeous materials--the softness of the yarn and the richness of the colors. i can't wait to see it begin to take shape on my #5 knitting needles! monica, can you cast on for me!!! now, now, NOW!!!