It’s a quiet day at home.

Everyone’s busy doing their own thing,

and I had enough of photography for the day.

So I snuck away into my studio and altered a book.
This is a sweet little children’s book with sturdy pages. It is called Sheila Sinclair’s Quest by Muriel Stapley. I loved the little cameo image on the front cover and decided this would be my quest to play book.

I glued every three pages together with a glue stick to make a sturdy “canvas” for holding paint, collage, anything. This left me with 18 paintable surfaces. Not too long, not too short, just right for a quick fun play.

The first page evolved into a life-sized petunia blossom from my garden, painted with acrylics and India ink on a backdrop of collages paper.

The second pages features a found phrase and is painted with black gesso, India ink, colour pencils and white chalk.

For the next pages I’m playing with constructing pop-ups.
Stay tuned for more.

I’m not usually all “ugh, Monday morning!” but today was an exception. By 8am I made tea, took the garbage out, let the carpet cleaning service in, moved furniture out of their way, and realised that not only were they going to make a racket with their shampooing machines and hoses, but the lawn service came next door and fired up their trimmers, mowers, blowers and all the other __owers they had. And then the garbage, recycling and green recycling trucks started their systematic beep-beeping reverse back lane pick up.

And I realised Kerstin left me a dozen scrubby organic limes. I don’t like the taste of limes very much and have no idea what to do with them.

There was only one thing for it: go hide in my loft studio.

I call it a studio because it sounds nice to me, and it is my studio, but it’s also my office, my writing room, sewing room, craft room, and storage for photo props, equipment and Binky and Bunny’s toys, and, it was a mess.

The thing is, this is my space, only mine, and no one is really welcome up here when I’m working, especially in this studio half, except with permission. So I decided that I should probably invest in myself a little and clean my space up. This decision was helped along beautifully by my friend Julie who wrote the loveliest manifesto, who in turn linked to this interesting girl, Gillian. So I cleaned up one half of the loft/office/studio.

This is the half of the loft where the skylight makes for the best light to paint and so this is the studio half. In it are three great big desks and a large table. An easel which holds big canvases usually stands in the middle but is foldable and slips behind the roll top desk.

I pulled out this inspiration board I made in 2009. It’s funny, mainly because I change the images I have around me so often, but this board still makes me happy. I still like to look at it. I wonder why I hide these things away. This one will stay out for a while now so I can look at it, but at the same time, I feel like making a new one. Haven’t made one in several years and I used to made them quite often. Anyone make inspiration boards out there anymore? I hope so.

Here’s a little collage of the desks and table tops. Top left clockwise, nice things to play with inside the cubbies of the roll top desk to distract me from paying bills…lol, the French easel set up for use on the art table (it took me forever to sort out the pencils, pens, brushes, etc. I’m telling you right now, put things back where they belong after use, you’ll thank me later!), Fred the frog on my writing desk (he makes sure he looks stern so I write and don’t fool around, and here is the little owl which C made for me beside a fossil bowl full of iron pyrite and vintage lead and wooden stamps. For some reason I have a lot of iron pyrite around. I’m really drawn to it. I wonder what that means. (My grandmother always said I’m part magpie and she was probably right about that.)

The roll top desk is where I pay bills, keep track of expenses, deal with business correspondence and calculate taxes, you know, all the yucky life stuff. And speaking of taxes, I guess I better get back to work. I’ll clean up and photograph the set/sewing/storage/craft part of the loft in a day or two. (when I get it looking presentable)

I know I’m dreadfully and very unfashionably late but would still like to link up to Mary at Little Red House for Mosaic Mondays because it’s a treat to visit as many of the gals as I can. In the meantime, anyone got any ideas what to do with a dozen scrubby looking organic limes? (No, I don’t drink margaritas, mojitos, daiquiris or cosmos.)