Archives

Gratitude Friday is a weekly ritual I started in order to focus on all the small and big positive things that happened during my week. I invite you to join me, you’ll see how much being thankful can change your life. If you want to know more about it, read my introduction post.

Hello shiny Souls !

I hope you had a great time celebrating and did not abused good food too much 😉

I won’t say much today, as I’d rather be making our new year cards with my girls if I don’t want them to be shipped in March ahah

This week, I am thankful for:

• A good Christmas with my husband and our two daughters. Simple. But filled with joy, laughter and excitement. I listened to my body, knowing when to slow down so I wouldn’t push too much.
• Santa Claus went a bit crazy this year (in a good way), we were all showered with thoughtful gifts under our big Christmas tree.
• We spent an amazing moment with two of our neighbors (two families) a week ago. Baking on the afternoon before eating a big potluck, then we went carolling in the other houses of our complex before going home to play music and sing and just enjoy each other’s company.
• The puff pastry recipe Melissa shared with me: less effort, less time consuming, and really good. I now have some in the freezer and know it won’t be a difficulty to do it again when I will run out of it.
• New projects I need to get done, like today and tomorrow if I want to meet my deadline. Going with that point, I am thankful for the trust invested in me.
• Reiki.
• Simple but strong friendship. One of my best friend emailed me and said how she liked that we could stay silent with each other for months, but we knew we were keeping each other in our heart and that it was an «easy» heartwarming relationship (we met about a decade ago or so now).
• Music. Guiding me. Soothing me. Boosting me.
• Memory keeping.
• Family walk in the neighborhood. Collecting rocks. Collecting beautiful wood sticks.

What are you thankful for ?

If you wrote your Gratitude Friday on your blog, don’t forget to enter your NAME and URL below so I’m notified and can come to read you (you can also join by commenting this post):
[linkme]

Hi beautiful Souls !

I hope those of you who celebrated enjoyed your time and I wish you a merry Christmas.

As the end of the year approaches, and that I am improving the quality of my Art Prints, I need to make more room.

Until now, I was printing via an external source. Which was nice, until it went wrong (meaning very long printing delay, orders needed to be filled when it was not yet in my hands. For example). It was the starting point of looking for a professional home printer that would not be an investment I could not afford. And you know what I think: when something is meant to happen, everything falls perfectly into place. First, my husband agreed to look online what could fulfill my expectations and needs. Then, I searched online for the different providers, and of course one was having a sale on the Epson Workforce 7510 and delivering here… oh yes, that was it 🙂

It is an all-in-one large scale scanner and printer. I will be able to scan my 11×14″ canvas in one piece instead of puzzling them and stitching the image in Photoshop (which worked great and was better than not being able to do any print of larger artworks at all)…

It is a huge leap for me. As my neighbor told me, it is stepping into the Light, affirming «I AM an artist, a professional, I can not deny it any longer now.» as a personal statement. And it rang a deep bell in my core when she said that out loud to me.

Finding the right paper is still a quest BUT I have found a paper I really like: it is a 80lb (300g/m²) with a satin finish (so between glossy and matte). I chose a 8.5×11″ as the standard size for my prints (they currently are printed on 8×10″) and have the same paper in 4×6″ so you can choose a postcard size if you want.
I personally really like it (which is important when you are a seller).

I am having a BUY 1 GET 1 FREE sale until the new year. Simply purchase one print in my Etsy shop, and tell me in the «note to seller» box which one you would like to receive for free.

I am doing it to clear my current stock so I can update my entire prints section with the new improved items 🙂

Click on the image to go in the shop:

Merry Christmas to those of you who are celebrating today !

You know I love making lists. They tend to keep me on track (not always though). If we didn’t all die tomorrow (coincidence it is supposed to happen on the day of the Winter Solstice, December 21th ?), I am starting to plan what I desire and wish next year to be.

I was looking for a great quote to share with you in this post, and came accross this one by C.S. Lewis. I loved it so much that I made a poster-ish from it.

Because even if I do know the importance of NOW, I am one to make plans ahead. I noticed that as my thoughts often run at 100km/hr (hmm wondering how fast this is in miles. anyway), I need to keep track of them. This is where the lists come in handy (I even have a french book all about making lists, titled «the art of lists» ahah). So this list is just as it crosses my mind. Some are already «on the way», some just thoughts for the moment:

• Attend an art retreat (planned, I’ll be in Port Townsed (WA) in June for the Sugar & Spice retreat).
• Send submissions to creative magazines, with the hopes to be published.
• Finish the secret project, and share it with the World. This is one that means a lot lot to me.
• Create in my Art Journal more regularly, get back to it.
• Do my Project Life album on a weekly basis, print photos as they are taken. When I feel it, create some cards to go in the albums (as journaling cards or as filler cards). Share it on the blog.
• Connect with the local art community.
• Find a gallery that will gladly exhibit my art.
• Make at least a {Painting/Journaling In Motion} video a month.
• Become more familiar with our DSLR camera (a Nikon D5100). I have already some basic knowledge but I want to go further.
• Use my BigShot and Silhouette cutting machines more.
• Create with my girls on a weekly basis. We all love it.
• Bind more journals (for my personal use, my girls, and more for the shop as well)
• Play one or two instruments. And start learning music theory again (mine was in 5th grade for the last time. I still remember a lot, but I want to go further).
• Play more with my Wacom tablet.

Of course, this is an open list. This seems like A LOT. but some of these can actually be combined together 😉

Have you already thought of what you would love to add in your creative life next year ?

Gratitude Friday is a weekly ritual I started in order to focus on all the small and big positive things that happened during my week. I invite you to join me, you’ll see how much being thankful can change your life. If you want to know more about it, read my introduction post.

Hello dear Souls !

Maybe this will never get to you because well, the World is supposed to end today (but they were not clear on what hour it would happen, though…). So who knows ?
I am one of those who deeply feels a shift, an extra sensitivity in the emotions, I have been feeling lost, vulnerable, on the edge all week.

This has been a pretty rough last few days (and if I really introspect, it has been there for a bit longer), but today marks the beginning of the Holiday vacations, both for my girls and for my husband, which makes me pretty happy.

This is in the moments where everything seems blurry, when loneliness seems to be taking control that taking some time everyday to reflect on all the positive that surrounds me helps the most. It kind of works the same as my relationship with writing (and my brother told me on the phone the other day that lyrics come to him way more easily when he is in a dark place that any other time): it is when I feel hopeless that the words come out with more ease and fluidity. It’s a shame, because who wants to be depressed in order to be (more) creative, uh ?

This week, as I sit down to think of what happened to me recently, I am thankful for:

• Having a car lent to us until we got ours back. We were told after the accident we’d have to wait for a week to a week and a half, it appears the chances to get our car back before the new year are very slim…
• The Christmas show at our girls’ school, was very sweet.
• We went to see The Hobbit. Like at the movie theater… which never (or rarely) happens as we don’t have family to look after our girls so we can have date nights, or time out. Thank you to our neighbors who proposed to do so, so we could go.
• Friends.
• Opportunities. Being opened to them. Letting them IN.
• New cookbooks, «Chloe’s kitchen» (discovered her a while back as she was in an episode of FoodNetwork’s «cupcake war»). It is a vegan cookbook filled with recipes you would not even know they are vegan ! And also Kris Carr’s «Crazy Sexy Kitchen», that is amazing but on the raw side. I won’t become either vegan or a raw eater but… I love new perspectives. And I am thankful for my husband’s open-mindness (is that a word ??), as he is never complaining about my (sometimes weird) tests in the kitchen.
• Christmas cookies afternoon with my neighbors.
• Honest open conversations about beliefs, theology, religion. Deepening my Spirituality. Putting words on it. Finding solutions to feel whole again. All hand in hand with my Love. Because he listens and understands and supports and loves.
• Accepting and creating new opportunities.

No pictures shared with you this week. I know I’ve recently shared with you another song from Emeli Sandé, but… I feel the need to share this one with you, called «My kind of Love»:

I wish you all a good end of year holidays. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not. Say «I love you» to your closed ones, even if it is just over the phone. Hug them. Shower them with your love. I know it sometimes tough at this time of year (it is for me, as I am far away from my family, except the one I created).

If you wrote your Gratitude Friday on your blog, don’t forget to enter your NAME and URL below so I’m notified and can come to read you (you can also join by commenting this post):
[linkme]

For this second installment of my 2012 in Review, I want to share with you some of the stuff that I really enjoyed and made my Life easier. I am all for simplicity sometimes (I am a complex person, but I love simple)

«Workbook + Planner» from Leonie Dawson.

You know I am a total fan of what Leonie shares in the universe, right ?

Last April, I decided to finally jump and join her Goddess Circle, that has thousands of women from all over the World, gathered in one place and sharing about business, about life, about struggles and great accomplishments. I do not regret any penny spent for it. You can never feel alone in that circle, and will always have someone glad to help you out if you need it.

This year, Leonie switched up things a bit. Instead of only having a personal Workbook+Planner, where you can plan how to create your own beautiful and perfect year, where you can safely write your heart out about your big, tiny and small dreams. Where nobody will tell you you are silly for wanting to birth this to the World, or if your secret dream job is to be an astronaut for example.
Do it for you, include what matters to you, excluding all fear of judgement (and I am talking here even about your own judgement of what is reasonable, what is stupid etc.).

Here is what Leonie says about it on her website:

The Create Your Incredible Year In Biz + Life e-workbooks are DIFFERENT. They are powerful catalysts of change that not only inspire a new direction but make you feel good about yourself at the same time! They call out your highest potential, and your ability to make it all happen.

And this year, she added a second workbook+planner, the Business edition ! Such a great thing to help plan your business month by month *she has monthly calendars in it*.

I printed mine, and used my spiral binding maching to bind it.

Thanks to these tools, I am not afraid anymore. I am confident in what I want to achieve, and how to actually get there, step by step.

Get more infos about it right here (affiliate link).

«Project Life» by Becky Higgins

I.am.not.a.scrapbooker.I love some scrapbookers like Lisa Truesdell, Amy Tangerine, and more.

But this is not my thing, I suck at scrapbooking, to be totally honest with you (I did try…).

And this year, Project Life was simply all over the interwebs. Even if you are not in the scrapbooking universe*, you are most likely to have one of the artist you love sharing about her own Project Life albums (hey ho Miss Fei-Fan Balzer 😀 she is just an example).

For those of you that are not familiar with PL, this is a simple (and I do mean it: SIM.PLE) way of memory keeping. Everything can be made for you: you need a 12×12 photo album (the one with 3 big rings), you purchase one of the BIG photo pockets pages pack, a core kit, and you are good to go. Of course, you can make it as simple as tucking your pictures, writing your journaling in the pocket pages (and so the only other items you would need would be your printed photos (of course) and a good pen; or go crazy and create your own cards, add embellishments, etc in it.

We live thousands of miles aways from our families (they are in France, we are in the West of Canada). I want to keep track of our life. I want to remember when our minds would be too old to do it by themselves. I want our girls to have pages and pages of pictures and comments to browse through when they’ll leave home to start their own life.

And so Project Life is the perfect solution for me. I purchased a small Selphy printer so I can print from home (but I still print at Costco when I have a big batch to get).

Now, as Project Life is getting bigger and bigger, a lot of scrapbooking brands create papers on the 3×4 and 4×6 sizes (and the 4×4 as well) so you can use them in your PL album.

I am pretty excited that Studio Calico and Becky Higgins teamed up to create a Project Life monthly kit (I dropped my Card kit from them to subscribe to this one instead). It will contain exclusive cards, a stamp set and who knows what else yet (the first kit will ship in January).

Becky also teamed up with American Crafts. This means her products will now also be available for purchase in your local scrapbooking store instead of online only. It will be in Spring 2013 I guess. I will soon post what I use and how 🙂
Because for now, if you are in the US you buy Project Life items in Amazon. And if you are elsewhere, you can buy them via Scrapbooker Inner Circle.

I wanted to add something else, but after reflection, I think it does belong to an all different post («My great lessons received in 2012»).

Do you use Project Life as your memory keeping system ? I plan on blogging about it on a regular basis in 2013. Sharing what I love, what I do, what works and what is a total failure 🙂

Did you discover tools this year that helped you ? Would love to know.