Category: inspiration

Insomnia and Inspiration

Robin

It’s that time of year again. Too much food, not enough exercise, late nights, late mornings, never shifting from the sofa. I’ve officially done too much relaxing now, eaten too much chocolate, and I need to get moving again. Yesterday I started sewing, and now that the Christmas knitting is finished I’ve picked up a couple of long-abandoned projects that I’m enjoying working on again.

Last night I couldn’t sleep, and was nestled into the sofa again at half past three in the morning. I managed to find a spot of David Attenborough on the telly, and when he’d finished I found a programme with Maya Angelou. I also watched a five minute preview of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”, and that’s five minutes of my life I’m never getting back. Sometimes I despair of humanity, I really do, and I don’t know what kind of mess we’ll be in when people like David Attenborough and Maya Angelou are gone.  I was very glad to have the opportunity to watch them, and even though I’m very tired, I’m also inspired by their excellence and experience.

Frosty Garden

When the sun came up, I opened the blinds and curtains and was met with this. I’m sure I’ll show you many pictures of this view, and this picture doesn’t do any kind of justice to the beautiful light that fills this space. Now the ice is melting as the sun comes up, and every leaf in the garden is twinkling as the heavy frost melts and falls. The houses at the back are nearing completion, and I’m thinking about what kinds of trees we can plant to disguise the vast expanse of that big brown roof. We were lucky enough to suffer very little damage in the storms, just the loosening of a few already-wobbly fence panels, but we know we have a lot of work do do out there.

Crafty Corner

Inside the house, I had a little flash of inspiration right when I should have been going to bed. This led to the late night shifting of furniture, and the creation of a little crafty corner. It’s not the most elegant arrangement, but it fits in the space and fulfils its function, which makes it ideal! The table and chair are from the 1950s, and used to belong to my Great Uncle Frank. They’re the closest thing I have to a family heirloom in furniture terms, and I’m really happy that they’ve found a little space in the new house. (Plus they match the curtains, which is a bonus!) The bookshelf on top used to belong in Paul’s teenage bedroom, and we have several of them scattered around the house. I might paint it, if Paul doesn’t mind. It’s the perfect size to hold my knitting books and magazines, and the big box at the bottom is my “emergency craft box” that I have to confess I haven’t touched since the move.

As always, when the New Year approaches, I’m full of good intentions and thoughts of diaries and journals and plans. Every year I buy a new planner or start a creative project that always falls flat after a few weeks. This year I’ve downloaded Susannah Conway’s Unravelling 2014 workbook (free) and Leonie Dawson’s Life and Business Workbooks (not free). I’ve also joined a Facebook Group called The Documented Life Project, which is about keeping a planner and art journal combined – something I’ve tried before, but never quite succeeded at. I’m hoping that now I have a little place where I can sit down, with arty and crafty materials at hand, I’ll have no excuse not to follow the weekly prompts and see what happens. We’ll see…

A lovely parcel arrived from France!

Cozy Memories goodies

Look at all these lovely goodies! I recently entered a giveaway on Facebook, when Sonia of Cozy Memories reached 500 Likes. I was very surprised to find out that I’d actually won – and here’s my prize!

I was expecting to receive the festive Mug Rug, shown at the bottom – a lovely organic cotton coaster with room for a biscuit on the side. I was also expecting the scarf, which I chose with a voucher that was part of the prize. I wasn’t expecting the matching square coaster, the lovely handwritten card, and the delicious tea bag! The scarf came in a lovely hand-dyed drawstring bag too, which looks to be just the right size for storing my tarot cards.

Cozy Memories Scarf

Best of all – everything is made by hand, with natural materials. The linen scarf is dyed with Sicilian Sumac, sourced locally to Sonia, and the colour is a gorgeous grey-toned purple. I had a really hard time choosing which item I wanted from her shop, as everything is so lovely! I was very taken with this zipped pouch, dyed to the same colour and decorated with a ginkgo leaf.

Cozy Memories scarf

In the end I decided to choose something that I could wear often, and that would fit in with my wardrobe. I have a lot of clothes in variations of black, grey and purple, so this scarf will go with all of them! I especially like the variations in the dye that you can see in the photo above. They add a lovely depth to the fabric, and a reminder of the natural dyeing process.

In the spirit of paying things forward, I’ll be having a giveaway on The Eternal Magpie Facebook page, when I reach 100 Likes. Now I just need to choose something that I think people would actually like to win!

Playing with Kuler

 

This is a screenshot from the Adobe Kuler app on my phone.

I’d read about it on the Spoonflower blog, back in August. They sometimes run design challenges requiring a limited colour palette, and this particular one was run in conjunction with Adobe.

You point Kuler at a photo, and it picks out a selection of compatible colours for you. (You can also start from scratch, with a colour wheel, but that’s not really the part I’m interested in.) You can choose from five pre-set moods, or you can choose your own set of colours directly from the image.

I was thinking about the photographs I stuck in a scrapbook the other week, and wondered whether pasting the colour charts into the empty space left by a square image on a 6×4″ print would be a worthwhile thing to do.

Looking at this image, I’m not sure. Sticking all five colour charts together like this makes it harder to see the subtle differences between them, and I think I much prefer the phone screenshot, where you can just see the one.

I do wish there was a better way of saving the colour chart alongside the original photo. The ones from my phone are screenshots taken before I pressed the tick to save the colours. Once you’ve done that, the photo goes away, and you’re left with just the chart.

From the website you can download the colour charts as .ase files which you can import into Photoshop’s swatch panel, which is very useful, and it will also show you the rgb and hex codes for the individual colours. But again, once you’ve chosen your colours and clicked save, the original image is lost. Screenshots it is then, I suppose!

Mind you, as evidenced by the shield bug above, the original photo doesn’t have to be well-composed or even slightly in focus in order for the app to work! You can also use the phone’s camera to pick colours from life, without having to use a saved image.

All of this is making me yearn for a better camera/phone hybrid though. My iPhone is a 3gs, which is quite old now, so the camera’s not all that great. The one I keep seeing advertised is the Samsung Galaxy S4, which runs on Android. If all the apps I currently use on my phone (not that many, it has to be said) could be run on this, then I might be inclined to make the switch. Not that I can afford it right now… but for a truly compact camera, that can take quick snaps and upload them on the fly, this might be the way forward for me.

(Although even just typing that sentence is making me miss my SLR. I am nothing if not fickle.)

Midnight scrapbooking

Midnight scrapbooking

At the end of last week, I ordered some photos from Photobox. They had an offer on 75 photo credits for £5 + £2.99 p&p, so I took the opportunity to upload a pile of photos from Flickr and have them printed. (That offer seems to have expired now, but they have different promotions all the time.)

I have to say that the Photobox website left me extremely frustrated. The direct upload from Flickr wasn’t working, so I had to download all the photos I wanted and then upload them to Photobox. Which. Took. AGES. I resorted to uploading them in batches of 10, and it took a good couple of hours for them all to go through. And then, because my photos are square, I had to go in and manually edit each of the 75 images to centre it on a 6×4 piece of paper, rather than having them cropped, which is the default setting. If I’d realised that ahead of time, I’d have batch processed them all to 6×4 in Photoshop, which would have been much quicker.

That said, I’m really pleased with the photos themselves, and the speed of delivery. There are a few where I’ve tweaked the colours too much and they haven’t printed well, but that’s my problem not theirs. The quality of the prints overall is really nice.

Last night, in a fun-filled bout of insomnia, I sat down and trimmed the white edges away from each print, and stuck them into a folder filled with A4 sheets of sugar paper. What I want to do is use the photos for inspiration, and fill the pages with sketches based on elements from the photos. It might be shape, colour, texture… who knows.

I keep looking at online courses in “creative journalling” or “artistic sketchbooks” or “unleashing your inner artist”… that kind of thing. Trouble is, I actually know perfectly well how to do all of that stuff already. My problem isn’t so much with lack of creativity, as lack of confidence and motivation. I’m hoping that by spending time messing about in a scrapbook, making small experimental pieces that aren’t for sale – in fact aren’t “for” anything, will eventually lead me to bigger, more creative work.

Now I’m just hoping that the scrapbook itself isn’t going to turn into a lesson in not using 20 year old invisible mounts that I found in the back of a cupboard while sorting out all my old photos. I suspect they’re old enough not to be acid free, and if all the photos fall out when I pick up the folder in six months’ time, I might have to have a little cry!

Tumblr: June archive

Here’s my Tumblr archive for June – better late than never!

You can see the archive in more detail, here.

I haven’t been using tumblr as much lately. I got bored of seeing the same images flash past over and over again, so I decided to see who was following me, and clock back to follow everybody. This turned out to be a HUGE mistake, as the signal-to-noise ratio is now so bad that I can barely find anything I like at all!

I still haven’t really got back into Pinterest either, and I feel as though my own tumblr’s getting very samey, somehow. Perhaps I need to get away from the computer a bit more, and look for inspiration in the real world.

Unravelling

27/05/2012

Starting today, and for the next eight weeks, I’ll be taking part in Susannah Conway’s “Unravelling” e-course. A bunch of women from all over the world will be getting together online, to share photos and respond to writing prompts, with the aim of getting in touch with our “real selves”.

See, I’m already so nervous about what anybody who might be reading this will think about it, that I’ve put “real selves” in inverted commas as an act of self defence. To show I’m not taking it too seriously. Except I am. I’m taking it very seriously indeed.

There are a lot of things going on in my life at the moment. You’re aware of the surface details – my job has changed, I’m struggling with my health, we’re moving house. I’m also going to be 40 this year, and phrases such as “mid life crisis” are being thrown around. After we’ve moved, Paul and I want to change some of our routines, improve the way we live. I certainly want to improve and change the work I do outside of my “proper job”, and to think more deeply about why I’m doing it, and what it means to me.

I won’t be sharing everything I do for the course here, although I will certainly share some of the thoughts that come out of it. The first assignment will be posted later today, and I’m both nervous about it and looking forward to it at the same time. Let the unravelling begin… I can only hope that I don’t fall apart in the process.

Tea Dresses

Tea dyed fabrics

It’s a long while since I’ve done any experimenting with natural dyes, but I was thinking about tea dyeing again this morning. This came about because I’ve been saving all of my used tea bags (ordinary black tea and lots of different herbal varieties) and stashing them in the freezer. They’re all in bags, a month’s worth at a time. It turns out that I drink rather a lot of tea, so six months’ tea bags are now taking up rather a lot of space.

The reason I’ve been saving them this way is that I’ve been thinking about a (currently imaginary) project of making “tea dresses”. The dresses would be made from organic cotton, or vintage nightdresses, or maybe old doilies and table linens of various descriptions. Each one would be dyed after its construction, in a month’s worth of tea bags. Theoretically each one would be a different colour, as no two months’ tea combinations would be the same. (Actually, they’ll almost certainly all be beige, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

However, something suddenly occurred to me, after watching a detergent advert on the telly.

How do you wash a dress that’s been dyed with tea, when modern detergents are specifically designed to remove precisely this kind of stain?

The Internets provided me with answers ranging from “add salt to the dye bath” to “rinse with a vinegar solution”, and people also suggested washing at various temperatures and with different kinds of detergents.

Conveniently, a friend’s husband is something of a detergent expert (how useful!), and he had this helpful advice:

“Effectively you’re using a tea as a direct dye so it will be prone to fading. But there are a couple of things you can do to help. After you’ve stained the cotton, let it dry and leave it for a few days. The air will help to set the colour a bit. You could also experiment with a hand wash in bicarbonate of soda which will darken the colour somewhat (alkali does that to tea for the same reason that it gets lighter when you put lemon juice in it). From a detergent point of view, we rely strongly on bleach to get rid of tea so avoid powder detergents and detergent additives such as Vanish. Then wash on a cool short cycle and you will create unfavourable conditions for tea removal. Just don’t spill coffee down yourself ;)”

Fantastic! So another friend’s suggestion of using a rubbish detergent (as she never manages to get stains out of anything, apparently) is a good one, as is only washing in cool water. The bicarb/alkali information is very interesting, and I happen to have some litmus paper in the Shed that I can use to find out what sort of pH produces good results in terms of both colour and fastness.

I know that these dresses will fade over time, and to me that’s going to be part of their charm. I plan to make them fairly plain, and then embellish them as I go along, so they’ll effectively remain a constant work in progress. I might even keep collecting my tea bags, and re-dye them once a year.

You all know what I’m like for getting all excited about a project and then wandering off before it ever gets past the imaginary stage, but I should probably actually try to make a start on this one soon. Not least because I don’t really want to have to explain to the removal men why I’m moving six months’ worth of frozen teabags from one house to another!

Tumblr: May archive

Here’s my Tumblr archive for May…

You can see the archive in more detail, here.

They’ve changed the archive layout, which I hadn’t noticed until I went into it to paste this image together. I do tend to look at my own archive page quite a lot, it helps me to see trends and themes that I happen to have been collecting lately. Apparently it doesn’t always help me to spot duplicates though – oops!

I tend to collect images and store them in the queue, so that they can be doled out at regular intervals rather than flooding the dashboard all in one go. Having said that, my queue has almost run dry because I really haven’t been feeling terribly inspired lately. I also worry about the lack of attribution for the vast majority of the images I’ve collected here – which is the main reason I stopped using Pinterest. Between that and Instagram‘s decision to just use people’s photos in any way they liked, I cancelled both accounts because I wasn’t comfortable with having content used in that way.

However, looking at my blog stats today, it seems there’s an increasing trend of links coming through directly from Pinterest – so it looks as though they’ve improved the way that attribution is carried from pin-to-pin. I’ve resurrected my Eternal Magpie account, but haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to switch away from Tumblr, or use both for different things. I guess I’ll play around with both for a while, time permitting, and see how it goes.

Tumblr: April archive

Here’s my Tumblr archive for April…

You can see the archive in more detail, here.

Tumblr: March Archive

Here’s my Tumblr archive for March…

You can see the archive in more detail, here.