and on another note, ikea hacks

and to sort of smooth over my earlier ranty post, i thought i'd share something bright and cheery. i had some fun embellishing some ikea pillow covers for the big girls for christmas and now i can share them, since they've been given. i added felt circles to these simple linen covers for k's couch at her new apartment. the pillows have colorful printed circles on them already, which i just covered with the felt, sewing a simple line down the middle, so they have a bit of dimension to them.

and i added thick black felt details - mustaches and an m for mathilde to these cute rainbow covers. i didn't get as much handmade done this year as i wanted (do i ever?), due to paralysis induced by waiting to hear about my new job (i got it, you know, so the paralysis is over), but i did manage a little bit and that makes me happy. there's always next year.

* * *

creative amazon reviewers strike again.

this time, hilariously reviewing a book called how to avoid huge ships.

the best one is from the point of view of a rock,
it's by jamie and is about the 5th one down.

when one thing becomes another

husband and i went for a walk in the woods on sunday. our real purpose on such a walk is what we like to call forestry. because we always spend some time liberating small beech trees to bring home for our hedges. we're thinning them out, helping the forest, you know, forestry. husband is making a labyrinth in front of our house (we hate being like the neighbors, you see) and it requires quite a lot of beech hedge. we don't mind waiting for it to grow up, so we bring home really small saplings from our forest walks. you can see the beech trees above, they're the ones with the brown leaves that don't fall off 'til the new ones push them off in spring. the ones you can see in the photo are larger than the ones we take, those are like only a foot high.

anyway, on our walk, i kept stopping to take photos of things like seriously tiny mushrooms:

i am amazed at how there are always mushrooms of some kind growing in this forest, no matter what the weather or when you go. year round, there are mushrooms or fungi of some sort. i only know of edible ones in the autumn, but there are probably some you can eat year-round. it's just that you don't want to mess around with that if you don't really know them well. 

we got to talking about inspiration, which, as you well know, is on my mind of late. i said i felt driven to take pictures of mushrooms for some reason that i didn't yet understand, but that i felt it would come to me eventually. and i wondered aloud if there was some way to fast track that process, because right now, it seems like it's taking an awfully long time from inspiration to product, so to speak.  

just as an example, two years ago, when peter, my father-in-law died, we got these ceramic "odin's eyeballs" that had belonged to him. odin is the head god in nordic mythology.  part of the story, which i need to do a bit more looking into, is that odin dropped his eyeball into a well, in order to gain the gift of knowledge. i don't remember the exact reason that peter had these eyeballs (there were several sets, we got one of them), but it also had to do with seeing clearly after the breakup of his long marriage in the late 90s. in any case, they have held a strange fascination for me since they came into our home. they reside on the window sill in our addition and i am drawn to them often. one snowy day, i took them out and took some pictures of them and we used them for our snowman's eyes.

combined with the memory of my friend michellea's fantastic i-eye collage and heavily influenced by this photo from flickr (and who wouldn't be inspired by sandra juto?), i have been feeling that i need to do something with eyes. and somehow, all of this input clicked into place on friday and i came up with this pillow, which will be the first item i list in my etsy shop later this week, together with two more i'm working on that are of the same theme.

but it took me a really long time to get to this point (especially if you take into account that the first inspiration came clear back in 1990). if i really want to have an etsy shop and be part of a local artist's group and contribute something to eyebuzz's first 'zine, i'm going to need to fast track this inspiration a bit. (i'm trying to find my way here and any advice is appreciated, by the way.) 

yesterday, in an attempt to get on this creative fast track, i gave myself a little exercise. i saw this beautiful embroidery by the ever inspiring margaret ooman of resurrection fern on flickr :

and i gave myself the assignment of making one like it from all of the scraps that were laying on the table after a weekend's worth of creativity. what i thought was that i would imitate it, that i would make a nest and a bird and eggs. that it would, of course, reflect my scraps, so it wouldn't be an exact copy, but that i would somehow end with something similar. well, something interesting happened along the way. i began by making the nest, but when it was finished, i saw something else. i saw a bowl. and among my scraps, i spotted a red felt circle, which demanded to be trimmed into apples. and in the end, this is what i created (#24):

i can hear the echo of margie's lovely nest, but i did end up making something my own. which i guess is what inspiration is about. and i did manage to fast-track the process--since i saw the nest on flickr on friday and made this already on sunday. so perhaps there's hope if you just push yourself a bit. if not, there's surely a ton of things i've been pondering in the back of my mind from the inspiration gleaned years ago, if i can just coax it out. 

i promise to stop harping on about creativity very soon. i'll start my new job and get out of the house and be with people and the navel gazing will surely taper off.  thanks for bearing with me in the meantime!

#20 and #21 and the biorhythm begins to shift

#20 - an ikea jack, wherein i took a cheap silk ikea pillow cushion and embroidered felt flowers onto it.

#21 - wherein we (being sabin and myself) constructed paper robots and hung them on the ceiling:

and then, to amuse myself, i printed in A4 a picture taken on the beach at the north sea back in january and pretended to take my merfish to the beach to meet the rock i picked up near the great pyramid in 2000. i think they liked each other quite a bit.

and then i doodled a few things in my inspiration book, read an interesting article about sustainable cities,  chatted on the phone to the most creative, funniest person i know,

played around a bit with embroidery thread and tactile felt in my favorite colors:

and then inspiration struck. and not only did it strike, i acted on it:

the biorhythm must be coming into alignment between the intellectual and the physical so that my thoughts can now have accompanying actions. phew. either that or it's because the sun is shining and there's a whiff of spring in the air. whatever it is, i'm not fighting it.