Wednesday, January 2

january 2013

I have many reasons to love january: the long holidays, beautiful summer weather, sleeping in, tennis on tv (and in person), the beach, iced coffee, driving with the windows down, freedom and TIME.
I get into the habit every year of making a "holiday" list.  It's not usually a physical list of jobs or words, but it's certainly a physical presence.  There are piles of things to sort, tackle, fix and start all throughout the house that are labelled "holidays".  At the beginning of these big holidays, I usually am too tired to really deal with much of it.  There's a quick cleaning frenzy and then I'm content to look at things for a few days and ignore them.  Three days ago I got my mojo back and started into them all.

The types of things that I leave can be as mundane as sorting paper into the filing cabinet and re-arranging piles in the spare room, but also excitingly, things that are more fulfilling in the creative sense.

I started making new cards which is a great process.  I am making more of some popular designs which sold out at recent markets, but I'm also making a lot of new ones.  I've got a collection of amazing old prints and photographs from encylopaedias and novels which are being made into absolute one-off cards.

Here you can see little piles of cards in various stages.
At the back is a tray filled with cover pieces ready to be put together.
Front left is an example of a vintage illustration, and next to it is an example of some of the popular phrase cards that also use some vintage book paper.

I love sewing paper together as it gives it another texture and design element.

One of the january jobs that I enjoy is trying to plan out the year ahead.
I have work and personal commitments that influence those plans, but as the market dates are announced I put those into the year's schedule, as well as their application opening dates.  I try and spread markets out throughout the year, but a lot of market organisers seem to share the same ideas and there can often be a glut!  I have to travel between 75kms and 300kms to attend markets, so it's not something that I can easily do as many weekends as I would like.


And I also discovered a little while ago that the website I had started to build in 2012 was shut down.
How did that happen???
Well, I have to take a lot of the blame for that - I hadn't done any work on it in a long time, I hadn't even checked it for a long time.  I didn't realise that I was on a limited renewal (not automatic like I requested) and therefore it just ceased to exist.
Now I'm in two minds and whilst I have spent time and money learning how to develop an independent website, I'm clearly not in a position to be able to update and maintain it as should be required.  So it's a loss and a lesson, but I'm happy to spend more time here in blogpost instead.  So hopefully you've noticed a slight change here.  I'll keep tweaking as I find how to do more things, but my main focus will be the content itself, because that's what everyone loves most on a blog (well I do anyway!).

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