sigh, the holidays are here...
I do hope you had a wonderful time and are planning something splendid for the new year. We had a very nice first Christmas with our wee lady, she's 11 months old now! We've been renovating away on our new home and my new studio keeps getting filled with construction materials for the house, hence the sigh... I still haven't packed up my old studio and feel like I just might sneak in there and start making pots again. The plan for my new studio is to do a bit more demo on the walls before we put it back together again. My wish list is to insulate and finish the walls, switch out the garage doors with french patio doors, paint the floor, install new lighting, and new electric, then at long last move in and get to work. Oh, I also need a sink and a heater and I'm sure many other needs will pop up. It's been slow going as many projects like this are. I just might settle for the bare
neccesities until spring. We just had our first snow to remind me that putting in new doors (which we have no experience doing) might be a cold difficult project and can wait until nicer weather. We thought we had the demo done until I figured out that the
electic on one side of the house didn't work and our unwelcome house guests (mice) just might have chewed the wiring. That paired with a curious
buldge on my studio wall have us wondering what's inside it (yuck!!!! I really don't want to know) So demo we will. The nice thing about a studio is that when we put it back together the walls don't have to be perfect like they should be in a house. Especially since there will be shelving in front of it. Anyhow, I wanted to update here since it's been quite some time since I've uttered a peep. The above picture is from just after the demo and it's a bit cleaned up and not filled with things that shouldn't be in there. I'll snap some new pictures once we actually start working on this. But for now, I'm still closed and thinking about having a moving sale.
Being creative comes naturally, honing that creativity into something tangible takes work. More work than most would think is truly possible. Small and large interruptions can happen and that starts and stops then restarts the creative flow. My creative outlet has been my business for the past bunch of years. 2010 was such a life changing year for me that my work needs to change. I spent it mainly out of my studio; having a baby, taking time off to be with her, buying a new home and studio, renovating the home, and organizing my wee family's life for this move. 2011 is sure to bring new designs. I know it will be some time before I am up and running, my new studio isn't even close to being ready. This seems like a good time to reflect on what has happened since I launched Little Flower Designs way back in 2004. I've been cleaning out my studio, pulling out work like the above tea set, the Just Friends pattern that brought me a lot of attention from the press and more orders than I thought I'd ever keep up with. Thinking about this makes me wonder if it's something that I should still be making. How long should I produce a design, how do I decide on a number I should cap it at to make it a limited edition. I do everything by hand from scratch so after I've made something a few hundred times I need to move on. My work and process has changed. I feel like I am about to create a new and exciting body of work.
The Nature Stories collection I started to work on over the summer felt like me. The platter above is from that collection. After having a baby, and being out of the studio I was feeling a little out of sorts. Once I started designing, with my daughter's little smiles to tell me what worked, I started to feel like myself again. It's a hard feeling to describe but being an artist for me is similar to being a mother. And now that I actually am a mother, I realise just how much care I have put into my wares and business. And all that care is hard to just set aside, so, while creatively I want to produce new work. The mama in me wonders if I should be taking care of all my old designs in some way. While I do sketch all the time, I work hard to make a design work across a range of forms. Should these designs be moving off the clay and onto paper or cloth? When I launched Little Flower Designs I wanted to be able to work in different mediums, clay has been so time consuming that I haven't had a chance to explore that properly. Anyhow, 2011 is sure to be a year for fresh starts and of course more hard work.
