Fossils, flowers and a collage of pictures

I've had the Artist's Way weekly tasks pinned up on my desk this week as a way to urge myself into action. I've been quite excited about these as they involve doing, not just thinking. The ones I've been tackling have been:

• Find 5 pretty/interesting rocks
• Find 5 flowers/leaves
• Create a pictorial collage of your past, present, future and your dreams.

The thinking behind these tasks is all about appreciating yourself, your surroundings, and recovering a wonder and sense of possibility about the world.

For the first task I spent the evening at Kimmeridge Bay. Kimmeridge is a rugged, windswept bay full of smooth clacking pebbles and soft grey sand. The sea is shallow and warm, alive with forests of seaweed and swirling glittering grains of dark sand. I come here not only for the breathtaking views and gothic romance that clings to the cliffs, but also for the fossils and sheer beauty of the rocks. Here are my five finds:

For flowers, I didn't have to look much further than my garden. It's bursting with colour at the moment. From the indulgent red roses, to the sunshine dandelions, it's a kaliedescope of plants bursting into bloom.

The collage was really fun to do. You can see mine below, but first I'd like to share the process with you as I found it uplifting, insipiring and satisfying. Ideal for days when things are getting you down and you need something simple and fun to get you going.

First, arm yourself with at least 10 magazines - any kind of magazines. Don't limit yourself to only what you normally read but pick up free leaflets, or publications that grab your attention becasue of pictures, or colours, or words. The most important thing is that you are going to be ripping them up, so they need to be ones you're not intent on keeping. My stack included old copies of Wanderlust, Muse, Mslexia, Bookseller, Young Writer, National Trust, and Gardners' World.

Once you have your pile, limit yourself to twenty minutes and go through the magazines ripping out pages or images that appeal to you. Maybe you see something that reminds you of your past, or you notice a picture that embodies hopes for the future, or an image that encapsulates now, or maybe you rip out a page that just calls to you for whatever reason.Don't be too choosy, go on instinct, you can always discard later.

After twenty minutes you should have a good stack of images. Now it's time to arrange these in a pattern or an order that you like. Take a couple of sheets of newspaper, a stapler, some glue, sellotape and get to work arranging them. You may like to cut images down neater, and be more choosy about what you include. But try to work quickly, letting your instinct lead you. This is about throwing out a reflection of yourself and your memories and your hopes and dreams - it's not about constructing an artifice.

Once the collage is done, step back and admire. Then hang it somewhere special. Share it with others, or keep it private, whichever you prefer - but use it when you are feeling lost, or down, and it should brighten you, invigorate you and make you smile.

Mine is on the wall of my study. I'm really pleased with it. I love the combination of elements that I recognise as being intrinsic to myself: themes of fantasy, literacy, childhood, travel and exploration, wildlife - all this runs through my blood and is reflected in the images I chose. It reminds me of the colours of my soul whenever I begin to feel a little faded. Here's the finished collage, and some close up details.

My favourite image, without doubt, is the woman about to dive off the rock. It symbolises how I want to be: brave, fearless, bold, bright and daring. plunging into the unknown with a smile on my face.

This is how I aspire to be.









That's all for now. I have a crafty night planned tonight with two of my most favourite people - I can't wait.

Bye for now,

rb x

A date with an artist...

Or rather, an artist's date (see last blog post).

When I talked about this last time, I emphasised how artist's dates are supposed to be for you and for you only (i.e don't bring a friend along). The more I thought about this, the more I felt it was probably aimed more at people who have regular jobs, a family, and basically no time for themselves at all. For me, it's different. I am on my own pretty much all the time. So for my artist date this week, I decided to make a concious effort to surround myself with people.

As proof that the universe supported this decision an old friend of mine who I don't see very much emailed to see if he could stay over as there was a wedding in the area. Normally my defense mechanism would kick in: social interaction is dangerous - avoid! avoid! avoid! But this time, I overruled it and set myself to manual control. Basically, I said 'yes, come and stay.'

As the weekend drew nearer I was plagued with misgivings. I worried we would have nothing to talk about, that there would be awkward silences, that I wouldn't get him off the topic of Playstations and X-boxes. All in vain! In fact we sat up until 2am drinking red wine and talking about books, tv, film, love, relationships, travel... most nourishing for my inner-artist, and my soul. The best bit was a late night text from another friend inviting me to join her for a long walk in the countryside the next day. My friend and I were delighted to accept.

Sunday was sultry and hot and G and I roared off into the Dorset countryside with a picnic in my rucksack, memory card in the camera and a taste for adventure. We arrived in the car park of Badbury rings raring to go.

Badbury rings is a beautiful spot. An old Iron Age fort overlooking Dorset country. The inner sanctum is crowded with beech trees and sun dappled paths. I felt like we were entering a fantasy novel by Charles De Lint, I'm sure if we had waited long enough a spirit guide would have appeared and asked us to choose a path and follow our destiny.

However, we had many miles to tread and so we began the journey proper on a long roman road, the sun high in the sky and feeling like we were in the beginning of the movie 'Stand By Me.'

What followed was one of the best days I've had in a long long long time. We spent a perfect June afternoon bumbling about the countryside. We got lost a little, adventured through fields of barley and fields of 'hmmm - not sure what it is, beans maybe? peas? cabbage?' that grew higher than our heads and were splashed with the red splatter of poppies. We dabbled in streams as clear as air and as cold as ice. We ate lunch in the shade of an old 13th Century church. We followed a river that twisted and turned through meadows rich with flowers and dragonflies and we waded through a river-ford when we realised we'd missed the stile.



We arrived back in Badbury Rings car park just before 5pm and there was a flurry of activity as we all changed in or around the car. It was time to take G to his wedding reception.

The evening was spent getting lost down country lanes, chatting in pubs and politely gate crashing weddings to semi-dance to a fantastic Gypsy Jazz Band.

A wonderful wonderful day.




And yes, I have continued my morning papers. Next post will be revealing some of the tasks I've been working through this week.

For now though, here's a quote to ponder...

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."

Until next time,

rb x

Finding my way...

I hate it when I can't sleep. It's not natural for me; sleeping is one of those things that I do best. So, when I can't sleep I know that something's wrong and I need to sort it out. On the occassions it happened when I was younger and less self-concious, I used to write poetry about it. These days everything I do or think or say is tinged with self-doubt and cynicism and the act of writing poetry, or doing any writing that touches to the nerve of me, seems like whiney self-indulgent angst. And yet, I truly believe that self-indulgent whiney angst is necessary in order to function properly. You just have to make sure that you're not letting it take over your life.

I've been thinking a lot about the younger me recently. I feel so souless these days. Everything is an effort or a pretence. I used to be idealistic, optimistic... an absolute believer in the power of dreams and self-belief (although admittedly I still had my gloomy moments).

In a bid to recover a sense of myself and to reawaken the more innocent, earnest me I ordered Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: A course in discovering and recovering your creative self.

It's a twelve week course that's meant to confront your fears and self-doubts and imbue you with the belief that creativity is a gift that must be nourished (she refers to an inner-artist-child that needs to be allowed to play). There are a couple of rules that have to be followed on the course. The first is the morning pages - you wake up in the morning and you spill everything out of your head and onto three pages. You write, write, write and expunge all that crap and debris that clutters in your head and you start the day afresh.

I cannot stress enough how utterly brilliant this exercise is, and the utterly utterly best thing is that you DO NOT read over what you have written. You put it away and you DO NOT read it. If you read it you are simply imbibing it all over again.

When I did the morning papers the world was a brighter place. Did you notice the past tense? Yes, I am no longer doing them. Why? Because I was embarassed about them. And lazy. Embarassed about taking time out to write down stuff that is cluttering my heart and head. But lazy too. Too lazy to get out of bed 15 minutes earlier to do this one thing that makes me feel so much better. The longer I left it, the more ashamed I grew, until I stopped doing the course. I got up to week 8 and stopped. Why? I want to continue it... I felt it was helping and yet I stopped. Foolish foolish me.

The second rule that you have to keep is the Artist's Date. This is a date you make with yourself where you spend two hours, once a week, 'feeding' the inner-artist-child. Basically, it means you indulge. You do whatever you want, as long as it is something completley for you and your artist. And you do it alone. No combining it with a shopping trip, or picking someone up, or doing a favour for someone else. It is a completely selfish two-hours to spend on yourself and your dreams.

I have done 2 artist's dates in the 8 weeks I've been doing it. For exactly the same reasons as I stopped writing the Morning Pages: I felt embarassed by it. Like I didn't deserve to do them. That somehow letting myself have two hours of fun was wrong. I suppose I should have just made sure that everyone else was getting thier two hours of fun too, and then I wouldn't have felt so guilty. But I wish I had the guts to do them. I wish I had the imagination to think of what I would do if I took myself on an artist date.

So, as I was lying in bed tonight with a hundred million stupid things whirling about my head, fluttering in my chest and making the walls close in tight, I made myself a promise. That I would stop punishing myself for wanting to be something. To let myself enjoy things again. To stop taking life so seriously.

Of course, promises are easy to make in the middle of the night when you can't sleep. They help you pull the duvet up a little higher, roll over and drift off to dreamland. I don't know if I can keep it. I don't know if I care about myself enough to do it. But you have to start somewhere. So I've made a promise and I am deliberately writing it in this rather earnest, embarassing blogpost as a sort of testimony to the earlier me who would have thought nothing of penning a few angst-ridden lines to appease her inner-artist-child.

However, to prove that I am taking this seriously, here is photographic proof that I have done my (very early) morning papers today. Normally I write in a notebook, but the closest thing to hand when I got out of bed was some business stationery. Which worked too.


If I manage to keep this promise, I will make a record of it here. I will write about artist dates, I will discuss exercises that worked, or that didnt' work. I will write up inspirational quotes like a starry-eyed teenager. But I will not write about the Morning Pages. Because that is the other rule about them. Apart from the photo above, which is serving as a sort of pledge, the Morning Papers are never to be shared. They are a release. Release and fly free.

To get us started, here is a quote that I absolutely love. I have written it up and stuck it on my wall. One day it will be in italics at the beginning of a book that I have published. Maybe I will have it in every book I ever publish. But for now, it is here for you to read and ponder:

And with that, I bid you good night and hope to enjoy some carefree slumber.

Rosie x

Friends and weddings

I seem to be at that time of life now where everyone I know is either engaged, married, preganant or already parents. It's weird that these things really do come in batches. Calculating guests for my own weding next year I realised that if everyone brought their children we would have eighteen under 5-year-olds running around. Now, I'm all for having children at weddings, but that's a lot of little people!

However, there are some little ones that I most definitely must have at the wedding. My brother will have a little girl by then and I can't wait to see how mischeivious and cheeky she's going to be, and of course, it wouldn't be the same without Jennifer's little girl. And then there is my little god-daughter. I say god-daughter, but it's not really religious. I suppose I'm more of a guardian to her. David, my fiance, is guardian to her twin brother.

We've just spent a wonderful weekend visiting them, and attending another friend's blessing and wedding party. The day was a classic June afternoon - hot and sultry. My favourite part of the day was spending time with the Applin family. The twins are just so much fun and seem so happy and full of joy.


We got changed at their house and then raced down the M4 to meet up with friends in Reading before catching a taxi to Aldermaston Mill for the wedding blessing. I'd been up the night before making a card for the lovely couple. It was a bit of a last minute affair because I'd completely lost track of the date, but luckily I was able to borrow a red card from Jennifer and then found enough stuff amongst my random stash to create something (it helped that Hobbycraft have been having a sale on the last few times I've been to visit!).

I cut the heart shape out of patterend cardstock and used pop-up foam squares to stick it on. The romance embellishment is from a pack of stickers I let myself buy a few weeks ago.

I managed to find a photo of the two of them together and printed it out. Then I cut out a frame of patterned paper. I didn't have any scalloped shaped-scissors, so did the scalloping with normal scissors, but it worked well because I wanted it to have a rough and handmade feel to it. I'm not keen on everything being perfectly straight and symmetrical. I like a bit of disorder in life!

The one downside was that the ink smudged on the paper tag once it was glued on (you can see it on the top and bottom edges), but apart from that I'm quite pleased with it, and I know that Mr. and Mrs Smith were really touched to have a handmade card (exact words were 'the card is genius', which I'll try not to let go to my head).

It was a good day, and really fantastic to meet up with people I hadn't seen for months. Now it's back to searching for work, filling in application forms and doing the accounts. Oh Joy.

Rosie x