Catching up

Well hello.  I well and truly fell off the blogging truck that time.

But I’m back.

I have fallen behind on some things the last couple of busy years so I’ve been trying to catch up on those.  Pippin is going great and I love it, and now I can figure out how to balance stuff out a little.

We’ve been on a bit of a health kick around here.  I’ve been trying out green drinks.  This one had quite a lot of… uh… texture.

This one had blueberries and smelled like a swamp.

They’re actually very good though, and I feel like superwoman after I drink one.  Not just because I’ve been a very very brave girl to drink one.

In more catching up, I’ve been wooing my offspring with a fairly continuous run of good dinners.  This salad last night made me glow.  I’m not sure why I should feel so virtuous eating such yummy good food.

My house is poised on the edge of being KonMari’d.  It’s been poised for a few weeks but this is happening!  Maybe tomorrow!  Sorry,  no picture of ‘before’ forthcoming!

I was missing doing some sort of unstructured fiddling around so sat down to play with these a while ago.  I just love old denim.  I could play with it for days.  It’s such a humble fabric.

These hearts were cut out of old jeans from all four of us.  Sometime I’ll show you the project I used most of the jeans for.  I’m still getting used to it and deciding if it was a good thing or not.  I was either thinking outside the box and being edgy or losing it completely and someone should take away my glue and staple guns.

This denim is from a pair of my daughter’s cutoffs that she was retiring.  I deconstructed them and added a few little stitches in bright red and orange thread.  To be clear, I’m pretty sure that big hole on the front was there when she bought them.  Shaking my head but also get it.

I find when I do stuff like this with no definite plan where I’m heading or ending I always end up taking ideas back into Pippin designs and into my painting.  My brain has become a huge set of open shelving with all the images hanging out in a glorious mess!  I will not be KonMari-ing that spot.  When I’m working on something I wander around in there a bit and mentally pull things from here and there.  I’m working on a new ‘dozens’ design right now, it’s just about ready to send off, and I used a blue purple colour in the border that had got stuck in my head.  I had unloaded a colouring book app of all things one night when I couldn’t sleep, and it was one of the colours available there.  I almost never use purples but this one fed back into a design.

I hardly ever use purples but it turns out I do love my pinks.  I thought I was so not a pink girl but I love hot pinks.  Pinks and oranges and reds.  My happy place.

And I guess I love them not just in painting and designing but sneaking in everywhere.  These were the clothes I packed to go to TNNA market in San Diego in January.   There’s a quote I love.  “She always wears black but she has the most colourful mind.”

I think when you love colour as much as I do you need some calm zones so the colours can pop out but not overtake!  Because honestly.  Look at these mini oranges shot unfiltered in late afternoon light.  They could overtake.

(And by the way… “later afternoon light”!!!  How nice does that sound?  Hello spring.)

A week or so ago Mary and Jill and I met up for one of our Pippin retreats we are enjoying so much.  We have been lucky enough twice now to meet up in this beautiful spot and we spent a couple of days mixing a ton of work with laughing and goofiness and excellent food.  I so love working with those two.

We spread our stuff out all over the table inside and had enough time for new thoughts to come up and come up again and maybe get woven into a plan.  Everything seems to find its own time and place, and as we talk I sometimes see eagles whirling outside.  A happy spot.

This time the weather was nice enough that I snuck away the smalls that Mary has been stitching for a bit of a photo shoot.  The greys of that table are the greys I stick in almost all of my designs.  Weathered and warm, and again a calm zone so that the bright colours don’t take over.

Heck, I even managed to do yoga one morning, looking out at that view.

In between the offspring wooing and shorts deconstructing and green drink sloshing I’ve also got some new designs out the door and I think you’ll like them.  They’re out getting painted and will be coming along very soon.  Here is the early sketch of one of them.  There are those greys and oranges and pinks and reds again.  My thing, I guess.

Nice to be writing again.  I won’t stay away so long again.