New Year, new inspiration

Happy New Year. It’s been a busy start but I find being out teaching has a positive effect on the time I have at home to create my own work – better time management when there’s less of it to ‘waste’!

Early in 2019 we took a trip to SE Asia – Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. 3 years later and I am still sketch-booking away through all the visual reference I collected.

I have printed, sewn, drawn and painted a lot of work and now I’m pinning it all up to live with and waiting for another wave of inspiration to guide me as to what to make of it all next.

January – birds, birds, birds

There is nothing like a new year to bring about a sense of re-set even if a complete fresh start is not really needed.

Some years I don’t want to celebrate the passing of one year into another, some years I need the blank page/fresh start feeling that a new year can bring, some years I need to feel like I can write something new into existence.

This year I just wanted to spring clean and re-set my creative system.

So I spent two whole days last week removing all the old to-do lists, old inspiration material and old designs etc from my board and filing them away without a telling off from myself if they never came to anything – everything finds a time and place eventually, this I am learning.

Birds have been on my mind for a while now. I often find that I am percolating inspiration when I’m working on other things and collecting towards the beginning of a project.

And how! When I started filling up the board (which is huge) I found I didn’t have room for everything without taping stuff to the walls and hanging a mini-washing line up too.

I love it. It is a creative volcano of birdy inspiration.

My friend Dana had been painting birds just before Christmas.  I was so taken with this Blue Jay and so delighted when he came to live with me here.

And what serendipity that he arrived in the mail on the day I was finishing my pinning up. She has such a talent – have a look in her shop if you’d like your own bird.

I also had a new teapot for Christmas and some new bird tiles and when I got out my collection of bird books I could see just how long I have been percolating this collection.

I’ll show the books on their own one day as this is already a photo heavy post and the books deserve to be seen close-up as the illustrations are beautiful.

And then as if to seal the deal, this weekend I opened my Country Living magazine to find even more inspiration in the form of this…

I could be here for some while!