Cobbled & stitched together snippets

The start of new seasons tend to make me pause to evaluate how I’m doing things, and think about what I can do to improve in different areas of my life.

Lately, I’ve been brainstorming how I can be more creative here on my blog. I hope you enjoy today’s post of cobbled & stitched together snippets.

For some time now, I’ve been sitting down dutifully every Saturday to write my blog posts for the week. I scheduled them out for Monday, Wed, and Friday evenings. I had a topic for each day – Monday was work in progress shots, Wednesday was art journal day, and Friday I would share recent paintings I had made.

Having set topics and a schedule left little room for creativity or being spontaneous. I rarely, if ever, jumped on here to write a post just because. I had my Saturday schedule, and that was that.

Lately, because of the schedule & topics, I’ve felt that blogging had become a tedious job that I wasn’t enjoying. I only continued doing it so I could tick it off on my must-do list each week. I knew it was time to take a break, and do a reset.

A couple weeks ago, I set fire to my Saturday schedule & threw my topics out the window. Being disciplined served me well for a time, but I’m going to let my future self take over from here & trust the process. What that will mean, I’m not sure?

scrumptious pear
with cubes of diced ginger,
& peanut butter on top

Most likely it will mean more random photos will be posted. I love photography almost as much as painting, but I haven’t been messing around in Photoshop much because the photos didn’t fit in with my topic of the day.

Winging it suits my personality better. Today I feel like posting a longer post than I normally do, so that’s what I’m doing. I have no idea when I’ll post again..it could be in a week, a month or tomorrow? I’ll poke my head out again when I have something new to share.

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we were all beautiful once

Tiny antique brooch I picked up last week.
I’m not normally a jewelry type of person
because
1. I have severe allergic reactions to some metals
2. I don’t like how jewelry feels on my body anyway
it’s heavy, sometimes noisy, and distracting
but
I like this piece.

It’s dated May 2, 1900 on the back. When I held it in my hand, I couldn’t help but think about all the women before me, who also held it in their hand, and wore it to special events. It’s quite a treasure, and for some unknown reason, I feel an attachment to it. I don’t usually feel attached to things I buy to resell, and I highly doubt I’ll ever wear it. Yet, I’m going to keep this one until the feeling passes.

I’m going to leave you with one of my latest portrait paintings. This girl kept showing up in my mind’s eye, insisting she wasn’t going to leave me alone until I painted her. She seems to have a lot to say with her expression, so I’m glad I listened.