Another green pincushion

I turned unsuccessful crazy patchwork block into a pincushion using Kootoyo's square pincushion tutorial, but omitted the buttons as none looked good. Without the buttons it can also be used as a pillow for a doll.

Last Thursday

Last Thursday evening as soon as my husband got back home from work, with a quick kiss and instructions about dinner, I left the house to rush to the Life Drawing class. After hurrying from place to place all day I was struggling to relax and there is nothing else that can ruin a drawing session as well as feeling stressed. With every quick sketch made I was getting more and more tentative instead of loosening up. Everyone around me seemed to be doing a lot of impressive shading – it is so much easier to notice good things about other’s work, while being super-critical of one’s own.

And then, during the break, the teacher commented on the expressiveness of my lines, which brought me back to my senses. I can do lines. Lines are easy. He also encouraged everyone to have fun and not stress about the end results. So I got out a charcoal pencil and let myself draw outlines with the bold lines. As I was starting to attempt to do some shading, the teacher was back and pointed out that mixing line and shading may result in very disjointed looking drawing, he encouraged me to continue working with lines to show the form. “It could be harder at first, but the result will be worth it” or something to that effect. Harder? Finally having fun, I wasn’t thinking about difficulty of various approaches. The advice of my old art teacher on varying the thickness of the line came back and so I kept on drawing lines. Even in the last drawings the proportions were all wrong, but I was happy with the results and the progress made from the tentative drawings to the bolder lines in the three hours.

At the end of the class we turned our sketches to face the middle of the room and looked at them – every one of them was unique and executed in differently. While walking home I contemplated how I stumbled on another piece to the puzzle of discovering my own style, amazed that I never connected my admiration for Lines in other’s artwork and my own work (you should’ve heard my raves about lines in Egon Schiele’s work after I discovering it in Vienna).

I used to love Life Drawing classes, enrolled into this one with the desire to have fun and I did. I left home feeling exhausted and stressed, I returned happy and full of energy.

To go or not to go?

For the last few weeks I was debating about going to Annabell’s exhibition at Stratford-upon-Avon on 8th to 15th June and it just got harder to resist as Kayla Coo is also going to be showing her work there.

I own one of her brooches, but would love to see her other work in real life – photos often don’t show well enough all the texture and beauty of the textile artwork. The problem is that few friends will be in London on that weekend, so do I brave going to another town by myself with a toddler just for few hours on a workday?

Discovered

On Sunday Can and I discovered this little flowering bush in our garden among all the weeds

After spending almost two years in a flat, I'm really enjoying having a little outside space of our own to play in and run around, specially on the days when we are stuck at home waiting for yet another delivery. A lawnmower arrived yesterday, so we can finally cut the grass once the husband is back from the work trip to New York.

Time is fleeting

My friend, let's not think of tomorrow, but let's enjoy this fleeting moment of life
Omar Khayyam

--
I thought of time when I saw "fleeting" to be last week's topic of the Illustration Friday. With every year time seems to pass away faster and faster. There are so many things I struggle to get done each day and many more for which, week after week, I'm unable to find time. Yet lately I keep on returning to the importance of stopping the mad rushing and savoring the present moment, enjoying my surroundings and the company of all the wonderful people, who make my life so magnificent.

Poppalina recently wrote a beautiful post about Life and Death. Hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I did.

P.S. I usually use the quotes I wrote down while reading books, but today's quote was found at http://thinkexist.com

Easter in Photos

Unlike Driftwood I was very disorganized this Easter, so we didn't have an Easter Egg hunt or new crocheted chicks to play with. However I baked two lots of hot cross buns and strangely enough the one made out of mixture of plain, rye and self-raising wholemeal flour turned out much better than the traditional one (I wasn't experimenting - just run out of plain flour). The four days ended up being packed with activities:


We saw newborn lambs at the Woodlands Farm


We went to a fair where the Little Girl got to ride the little trains, while persistently asking to go on the biggest, scariest, fastest and craziest rides.


We drew on the train to Royal Tunbridge Wells. (I just love the look of total concentration on her face when she draws - I suspect I look very similar when I draw.) We didn't get to see much of the town, except the main shopping street that took us to the Spa Valley Railway, where we spent a lot of time looking at and riding the trains - everyone in our tiny family seem to be a train nut - Railway Series is the current reading favourite and The Little Girl wants to change her name to Thomas, James or Percy (train characters from the above book).

Somehow we also managed to walk, run, play and feed birds & squirrels in the local park. The last one thanks to a stranger, who kindly gave a small bag of left-over peanuts to the Little Girl when his older children lost interest in the tiny overfed fury creatures.

From pincushion to toy

I needed a pin cushion for a long time and last week I finally made one using the tutorial by UK Lass in US.



Of course a day later it was abducted by my daughter to be used as a plaything, so I'll have to make another one for myself. There are so many to choose from:
- matching pear one from UK Lass in US
- yummy tomato one from Martha Stewart
- simple, yet cute toadstool, square or hexagon one from Kootoyo (she even has videos of how to make them)
- adorable tiny bottelcup one from Very Big Jen (check out the ones she made)

But I should remember do something really boring to avoid the upgrade of its pincushion status to the toy one.

Intro

After having a blog for more than two years I’m still not sure of my bloging purpose and so when I decided to start a new one I struggled to come up with the name. All the good ones I think of seem to be taken.

I came across the explanations of the meaning of the floating dreams: acceptance; letting go of the problems, worries and restrictions; being in harmony and enjoying being oneself. And since I keep on aiming to achieve all of the above in my daily life I decided on The Floating Dreams. Hope you’ll join me in my quest.