feeding inspiration

you might have noticed i've been feeling rather inspired on the creative front of late. and while i don't know where it's coming from, i am doing all i can to feed it, as i'm desperately afraid it will leave me again. last night, before i went to sleep, i browsed flickr groups i'd long neglected, in search of eye candy and ideas - ideas for sabin's room, which we're redecorating and of course, for more quilts, since i seem to be on a roll with that.

i love to browse flickr on the iPad - as i can easily sit in a comfy chair or in bed and the screen is just a dream. it's pretty much the perfect size for viewing photos and the colors just pop. ok, this isn't an iPad ad, so let's get back to the inspiration. my favorite group for kids' room inspiration is called go to your room and this is what i found there:

inspiration for sabin's room

clouds, garlands, butterflies and hearts, what more could a girl want?  quilts, that's what. and my go-to group for fresh, bright quilt inspiration is fresh modern quilts.

quilty goodness

this practice of feeding inspiration to my brain before i sleep seems to be having a rather magical effect. i've been waking up every day with fully-formed pictures of what i want to do in my head.  i have to keep my iPhone and/or a notebook by the bedside, so i can scribble them down upon awaking, so as not to lose any of the ideas. it seems that my brain takes the images and synthesizes them into something that's my own. and, it gives me an energy buzz that means i can't wait to get out of bed and get stuck in.

the beauty is that my fabulous bloggy friends send me inspiration/temptations (camera porn, remodeling, weaving, maps) all the time as well, so i don't even have to find all of the beautiful things out there by myself. (a big thank you for that, even if it is, at times, hard on our bank account (ahem, kristina, i currently have the high bid on TWO lots of cameras, thanks to you, tho' there's still a lot of time left).)

what do you do to feed your inspiration, ephemeral beast that it is?

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p.s. click on the mosaics to take you to my flickr, where there are links to all of the original posts!

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!

reality t.v. and inspiration

i'm jetlagging. i wake up promptly at 4:30 a.m. these days. and because i'm wide awake, i just get up. i actually quite like it, because i can sip my chai in quiet, early morning darkness and ponder things...things like how although obama won, we still aren't rid of sarah palin. she's busily being spoon fed fox TV opportunities to appear innocent and maligned by the meanies in washington. and people are still writing her love letters like this one (it's really quite hilarious, do go read it). and it struck me that she actually thinks she's some kind of winner on some (far) stranger than fiction reality show. then again, what reality show isn't stranger than fiction? the problem for me is that although we voted her off, she's STILL HERE, so it's like some especially perverse twisted reality show from hell. i do wish they'd stop broadcasting it soon.

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but, thinking about reality t.v. reminds me of some concepts that husband and i once came up with for reality programs. one of our best friends is head of entertainment at the danish t.v. channel that i like to think of as the CSI channel. but, in addition to CSI, they also have a few locally-produced reality programs. gems like "farmer wants a wife" and "gay army" and "the young mothers," which could soon offer a spot to bristol palin (but i digress).   husband and i pitched the following to her:

1. gay construction--very flamboyantly gay men are given asphalt and paving equipment and asked to lay some road.
2. near miss--ordinary people as air traffic controllers in some of the world's busiest airports.
3. quack docs--ordinary people performing surgery on willing victims. we figured with the whole me-me-me culture of fame that there were enough stupid people out there on both sides to make half a dozen episodes or so.

strangely, despite how clearly inspired these ideas are, our friend didn't actually take any of them further...

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and speaking of inspiration, in order to escape the SP channel, i went looking in the blogosphere for inspiration. and i found some here. and here. and here as well. and i totally love this, i mean who doesn't need some encouragement? and there's always so much inspiration on flickr.

i love the echoes journal so much, the notion of selecting and photographing objects, then trading them with three others and photographing them again is so appealing. does anyone want to do something similar? i'm seeing a cross-continental collaboration...won't you please play along?

inspiration is as close as the library

i've been perusing jan messent's designing for embroidery from ancient and primitive sources, which i just picked up from the library. it's so fascinating i even let my coffee get cold! it was published in 1976 and tho' some of the embroideries and crochet look very 70s, i'm mesmerized anyway. we're a bit enamored of the 70s around here anyway, so it kind of fits.

for a person who thinks almost constantly about inspiration, it's an absolute goldmine - full of ideas on sources of inspiration and how to use them. i scanned a few pages, just of the parts in which messent uses the white horse of uffington, an ancient ground mark in berkshire, england, still visible from the air. 

she shows various ways of using the basic graphic outline of the horse to create very different things....a circle, a repeat, reverses, blocks, color, texture. it has opened my eyes to a whole host of new possibilities.

i'll be on the lookout for this book as i comb the flea markets, but for now, i'm grateful for well-stocked libraries and a service that delivers whatever i want to my local library for pickup, just within a couple of days.

where will your inspiration take you today?

a few of the things i made today

remember that inspiration i told you about earlier? i could see this wire-y tissue paper butterfly thingie in my mind when i woke up, so i had to make it. you can see some of where i got the idea in my inspiration mosaic below. but i wanted it to be more naive and rough somehow than the ones in the mosaic. i think i succeeded. and in this case, it turned out even better than the picture i had in my head.

then i made a new springy garland for above my desk. this house is so depressing and awful, even the simplest little touches can brighten it up significantly. some bits of a handy little moda hunky dory jelly roll made for a very quick garland indeed. in fact, i made two and i want to give one away! so if you'd like to have a little springy garland for your very own, just leave a comment about how you feed your inspiration.  i'll draw a name at the end of the week and send it to one lucky person!

and lastly, a lilly pulitzer fabric garland for sabin's new room (i got the squares here ages ago). it's not hanging up properly yet, as there is still painting going on. but i think by the end of the week, we will be ready to reveal sabin's new and improved room!

i also painted clouds on the wall, made chicken stock and red velvet cupcakes and even managed to cook a vegetarian meal and completely resist putting in any bacon. and with all that coffee i drank, i expect this creative streak will go on well into the night.

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don't forget the garland giveaway! leave a comment about how you feed your inspiration and you might be the lucky winner of a springy garland to brighten up these grey winter days.

travel inspiration

iPhone photos snapped of shop windows in greenbelt 5 - makati

i find that travel feeds my inspiration like nothing else. so i thought i'd share some beautiful things i spotted in the fabulous, upscale greenbelt 5 mall in makati. i snapped the photos with my iPhone and unfortunately failed to note the names of the shops, tho' they were all local filippino designers. the bold necklaces and the simple dresses were inspiring to say the least. as usual, i don't really know what i'm going to do with the inspiration yet, but time will tell.

i did buy a simpler version of the necklace in the lower right, so perhaps i'll make something simple and elegant like the upper left and wear them together.

what i'm enjoying most is the sense of possibility just thinking about it brings.

quiet inspiration

a foggy monday morning. the easter holiday has begun, so no hectic panic of getting the child up, fed and dressed. no dashing to make her a lunch to take to school. just a leisurely stroll through flickr and pinterest and blogs. so tho' i woke up from strange dreams, got the tea-honey-milk ratio all wrong and got yelled at for making the child's nutella toast all wrong, this monday is shaping up to be quite all right. quiet. contemplative. inspiring.

inhabit - a collaboration i found on flickr between kikiclark & moiraandobbie

kathryn clark had been a flickr contact since i stumbled across her foreclosure quilt series, but i hadn't discovered her blog until today. if you, like me, are in the mood for some quiet, contemplative inspiration on a monday, you should make haste to her blog immediately. or well, at least after you're done reading this. and definitely do read about the inhabit project. wonderful food for thought about the spaces in which we create.

kathryn led me to find another beautiful blog called found while walking. be sure to read jamie's post about kathryn. because it all connects. all of these loops and snippets of inspiration and contemplation.

and lastly, before i go to sew something, through kathryn's blog, i was led to this beautiful, quiet, contemplative video of anna allen sewing.

that definitely makes me want to get to the sewing machine.

happy monday.

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seeking inspiration

as the paint shapes up on the walls in the writing house, i find myself increasingly thinking about how i want to decorate out there. i chose the dark colors (the ceiling will be even darker) because i want it to have a cozy, almost cave-like feeling and i chose the rich turquoise because i want it to have a moorish/turkish feel. i'm going to have all kinds of creative supplies at hand and yet another sideboard (with 12 drawers) to use as a work surface. but, i'll have quite a lot of wall space to do some interesting things.  so, i've been looking for inspiration and finding it...

in an interview with artist kat mcleod on design files ...

and this cool stuff by artist jeff canham on design for mankind...

and here ...on danish art group superflex's website

and this fresh, funky embroidery by megan witmarsh, also found on design for mankind

my latest obsession and daily visit is design for mankind, erin does the best tumblr i've seen yet. and she has a cool magazine too, that's a free download. totally worth checking out next time you need inspiration.  i'm not sure yet how i'll put all of this inspiration together, but i am confident it will gel in my head and come together somehow. perhaps i'll embroider bold statements on small canvases and group them together on the wall....so many possibilities.

she's back on that inspiration thing again

like many out there, i was inspired by the women of 3191, quietly, mindfully depicting their lives on opposite coasts. and again like many, i longed for such a project. one which would push my photography. one which would push me to be more mindful of everyday things myself. one which i would share with someone whose photography and view of the world inspired me. and i am so happy that i have found kristina and that project. we were just discussing last evening that we found each other thru the überfabulous sandra juto's blog. and we all know she's very inspiring too - so thanks sandra, you undoubtedly don't know it, but you brought us together. and i'm so pleased with what's unfolding.  both kristina and i were traveling last week and we're sharing our travel photos all week, but first, a little glimpse of the weekend just gone by. do go check it out here.

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as you all undoubtedly have noticed, i travel quite a lot. i need the excitement. i need the pulse. i need to see new things, to experience new things. going away makes me more grateful for home as well. in short, travel is a sort of life blood to me, keeping my perspectives fresh and my eye honed. it makes me tick. i was thinking about the things that i look for when i travel. i find i'm drawn to the familiar...

starbucks only recently came to denmark and it's only in the airport, so i associate starbucks with travel (sorry bill, i love a good starbucks latte, despite what they did to the sonics). and look how relaxing it is!

but mostly, i'm drawn to the strange, the unexpected, the challenging...

and i'm a sucker for a good ruin--tho' this one--newgrange, a stone age site, was a bit reconstructed (in the 60s, can you tell?) for my taste...

there were some marvelous petroglyphs (my beloved helleristninger) there, which i am certain will be showing up soon in my art.

* * *

i've been vicariously watching the results of rachel's latest art journaling course go up in the flickr group and have been doing a bit of art journaling along with it...as you saw last month. and i've got a couple of pages going, where i have created a lovely background and i'm totally stuck on the words. me, stuck on words, imagine that. i wonder why that happens? i'm trying not to obsess about it and just let them come in their own good time and in the meantime, enjoy making pages that will be great bases for the eventual words.

* * *

hmm, what else inspires of late?

there's a lot of shoe and foot photography out there in the blogosphere these days and i'm finding it has made me a little obsessed with both buying new shoes and photographing them. hmm. i wonder if this particular bit of inspiration is healthy? got these in dublin (which you already know if you've been hanging out on twitter). they're super comfortable and they look pretty in the afternoon sun. 

* * *

i find myself going back again and again to look at jude hill's marvelous spirit cloth creations. both on her blog and on flickr. her small quilted stories are so dense with layered meaning that i am just drawn to them and inspired by them. i've worked a bit farther on the first piece that has arisen from her inspiration and still don't know what it will be. i'm using it as an exercise in patience as well and just enjoying the process of watching it unfold before me and trying to listen to my inner muse when she tells me what comes next.

where are you finding inspiration these days?

gin & tonic sorbet

what i love about the blogosphere is how it's constantly expanding, like the universe. it gives us new ideas and brings us new inspiration and new friends all the time. and new friends mean new opportunities to play old games. :-) so, thanks to my new blog friend polly, who writes beautiful things like this (go read it now and come back, i'll wait, believe me, it's worth it), i have five new interview questions. we know i adore this format, so here goes...

Polly: I know you've lived in Denmark for some time now. As An American in Copenhagen, (Gershwin's new tune) what do you like the most & the least about being an expat in Europe?

me: it's so strange to realize that i've lived in denmark for more than ten years now. where did all that time go? it's been so full of experiences and laughter and fun, that i really can't believe how it's flown by.

i have to say that i feel less like an expat than i once did and that now i really only have that expat feeling  when i choose to, which does still happen occasionally and usually after an encounter with an especially cold, unfeeling aspect of danish culture.

what i like most about being an expat in denmark is that i more or less have permission (at least psychologically) to treat situations which bewilder me in some sense from an anthropological standpoint--as an analytical observer of the strange behavior of the natives.

what i like least: during the bush administration, answering for all of its sins just because of the passport i carry. i didn't vote for the man, and could definitely not explain him. but thankfully that's over. actually, the same happened during the waning years of the clinton administration, where i was asked to explain what we were doing to our president over the whole monica lewinsky thing. my response was always the disarming comment that i would have been doing what monica had done if i'd been given the chance--clinton was totally magnetic if you ever saw him in person.

the other thing i like least is that i fear that i will become a permanent speaker of the language we affectionately call "danglish." this is a mixture of english and danish, which pretty much takes the worst of both and throws them into a grammatical/verbal mishmash. i feel at times a distance from the vibrancy of living within a culture of which the native tongue is your native tongue and therefore you are hip to all of the neologisms as they happen (staycation, carmageddon and the like). i fear i will preserve some mid-90s version of english for all eternity (or at least the rest of my life).

Polly: And if not in Copenhagen, where do you think you would be right now?

me: this is a very interesting question, not least because i've pondered it on occasion. but even more so because if you'd told me fifteen years ago that in fifteen years, i'd be living in a house with my husband and daughter in a small town of 18,000 in denmark, married to a guy i met in macedonia, and commuting to work in the shipping industry in norway, i'd have laughed and said it was completely impossible. i could never in my wildest imagination have imagined the series of events that would have to happen for me to be in that situation. and yet, here i am, doing all of those things. so i think it's not a question we can ever really even imagine the answer to.

what i imagined would happen with my life was that i'd finish my Ph.D. and be teaching slavic literature at some american university somewhere (preferably somewhere like berkeley, but more likely somewhere like KU (no offense to kansas, they at least used to have a perfectly good slavic program with an emphasis on the south slavic even, i almost went there but instead chose chicago)) because you have to take what's available the year you graduate.

instead, i am ABD on the Ph.D. and don't intend to ever finish. i unexpectedly met a nice danish boy in the balkans and followed him home. in a fit of boredom i ended up working in the software industry and accidentally worked for microsoft for a few years. then i found myself in the maritime industry, which feels strangely like home for someone who grew up in the middle of the US about as far from big-ass ships as you can get.

i guess if it wasn't copenhagen, it could be oslo or singapore or hong kong or manila. i could see myself ending up working for lloyd's list or trade winds or fairplay, reporting on shipping industry news.

but, you really never know where life will take you, so i try to stay open to the possibilities that present themselves.

Polly: Your latest obsession is eyeballs and you seem to be a very creative and crafty person. What inspires your creativity?

i think a lot about this and am trying to tune in to what inspires me, in the hopes that i can make it happen a bit more. but what i'm learning is that you can't make it happen. but, what i think you can make happen is being in a state of openness to inspiration. but i find that i'm not very good at predicting what will inspire. a flea market or a museum visit often can do it, but of late, the light falling a certain way on a branch might be what grabs me. sometimes i'm surprised by what makes me feel inspired.

flickr almost always inspires, but i sometimes feel it mires me down too much and actually serves more to overwhelm me or lead me astray than truly inspire me.

i get a lot of inspiration from my reading and i read a lot...articles, books, fiction, non-fiction.  i think it goes without saying that i find a lot of inspiration in the blogosphere (and yet i felt compelled to say it, hmm...).

i have a couple of highly creative friends who i try to spend time with when i have a lot of ideas swirling in my head, but can't see a way of making them come together. because that's the thing about me, sometimes i have given myself so much input that i get stuck on the output part. i think i need to develop a more disciplined way of dealing with that (but that's the stuff of more pondering and another post).

i'm also a person who is inspired by a deadline. together with a friend, i signed up for an art exhibition at the end of october, because i need a goal like that to go for. i know that the pressure of needing to have enough things to exhibit will inspire me and spark my creativity. it's just how i work.

but probably what inspires me most are the daily conversations i have with husband. he's a super smart, funny, thoughtful person. he thinks about things and articulates his thoughts very well. he has lots of wacky ideas, but usually they only appear wacky at first and then you realize they're really deep (and probably somehow related to evolution/cultural capital/the industrial revolution). he's also got a marvelous ability to see things in fresh, new ways. if i'm stuck on an idea, i tell him about it and he always, always helps me see it from a fresh, new angle. i love that about him.

and i do think i'm getting over the eyeball thing, because i've started to notice and think about nests...oh, and stones. and i'm developing a bit of a thing about windmills, especially old decrepit ones. i hope this new obsession doesn't go all cervantes on me...

Polly:  A fashion question:  If you could only live with one accessory for the rest of your life, which would it be and why? Only one item! (I've been asked this question, it's a good one... )

me:  i have a lovely pale green (we have a cloudy day and it doesn't look very green in this photo) embroidered pashmina that i bought in goa a couple of years ago. at the time, i didn't really need it, but i also didn't want to go home empty-handed after a very eventful trip. i almost didn't buy it because the guy selling it rubbed me the wrong way, but then one of my colleagues was going to buy one too and the price suddenly got better if we both bought one, so i went for it (totally to help her out, you know, altruistic me).

i'm so glad i bought it, because i have used it so much. i've bought two seasons of winter coats to match it, i've used it as my only "coat" on a cool summer evening. it dresses up any outfit and gives it a touch of exoticism and luxury. just yesterday, i wore it to the funeral and some of the other guests were trying to appropriate it from the coat rack at the house, thinking it had belonged to the deceased and was now fair game. (luckily, i retrieved it in time.)

it wears beautifully, i've had it dry-cleaned a couple of times, but it continues to look like new. it's a color i never tire of and now that i'm doing a bit of embroidery myself, i find myself carefully inspecting the marvelous stitchwork. so my one accessory would most definitely be this scarf.

but i'd be pretty sad to give up my "obama won" ring.

Polly:  Everyone in this chain of interviews have asked and answered this next question so now it's your turn :-)  If you had to choose a flavor of ice cream that most fits your personality, what kind do you think you would you be? Feel free to make one up if necessary.

me:  i asked husband this one, actually. and since his favorite flavor of ice cream is licorice (silly dane), he said licorice.  it's unusual, a bit peppery, not at all normal, rather strong and can be a bit overpowering. not everyone likes it, but if people like it, they love it. 

i actually think that fits pretty well. but i can tell you that licorice is not my favorite ice cream.

i'd personally probably try to concoct something like a gin & tonic sorbet if it were up to me. grown-up, sophisticated, relaxing, refreshing and with a bit of sass. something you'd like to spend time with every day.

thanks, polly, for these fun questions (i may have to actually invent a G&T sorbet now). if anyone wants to play along, knowing you have to identify yourself as an ice cream, please let me know. :-)

painting time is thinking time

i continue to paint the big drawer thingie (købmandsdisk--danish just has a better word for it!) in the kitchen and the slow, methodical work lends itself to thinking and flights of fancy. i think i'll be a bit sad when it's finished (which is soon) because i actually feel that the repetitive, not particularly creative act of brushing creamy white paint on wood has awakened inspiration within me at last. 

so many ideas are coming to me--writing ideas (something fun on great restaurants in out-of-the way places for scanorama), ideas for starting a creative "support group," so i have people to do creative stuff with (this means you, janni!), home decor (i'm thinking petroglyphs) and some ideas for more gocco notebooks (also thinking petroglyphs), new earrings, and yes, even scrapping! i printed a whole lot of pictures last night and made what i can only characterize as a breakthrough scrap page. (not because it was particularly good, but mostly because it's the first one i've made in months, despite continuing to buy supplies like there's no tomorrow.)

and although the desk looks a mess, it's just the kind of mess that i've been longing for...

ideas i had ages ago are returning to me...stamping cavafy's ithaca on the stairs is one of them. i'm also getting new ideas...a treasure map painting on a wall in the garden. small colorful tea-light holders hung all over the garden. bright print fabric pillows and cushions and tablecloths. 

all these months of gathering bits of inspiration and tacking them to the board beside my desk, seeking inspiration online and in magazine and books is finally paying off. i just had to give myself time to let the ideas gel.

if only a great name for my etsy shop would come to me, that's currently the obstacle that's stopping me on that front. perhaps it will tomorrow when i finish up the painting.

or perhaps it's all just paint fumes...

a weekend in denmark

i'm tumbling so many upcoming posts in my mind. when my inspiration/action correlation began to clear on friday, it provoked so many thoughts and ideas. so in the coming weeks you can expect posts on:

1. alice in wonderland
2. architecture
3. whether hyperlinks represent a topography of thought
4. nordic mythology
5. really tiny mushrooms
6. bullying in the workplace
7. whether it's possible to fast-track the process from inspiration to art
8. a perfume review (i've been thinking for awhile of doing these on a weekly basis)
9. hugin & munin
10. eyeballs

* NOTE: checking them off as i do them. 

but all of these things are still swirling in my head at the moment so for now, i'll just share some scenes from a winter-almost-spring weekend in denmark, some of which are hints to the above:

sabin's first riding lesson

it went smashingly and she's in love

mmm. latte.

and felt heat protectors in scrumptious colors (#22).

ATCs for sabin's swap

oops, we were supposed to mail these yesterday.

oh well, they're so good, tomorrow will be fine.

"where do i report my quest?"

lots and lots of world of warcraft

eyeballs (#23)

really tiny mushrooms

hope your weekend was full of laughter, candlelight , fresh bread, inspiration and a bit of fresh air.