Well, hello! What a strange few weeks it's been. My final deadline has been vanquished and handed in. I promptly collapsed with a cold and complete exhaustion and am only just feeling like myself again. For a few weeks I pottered about the cottage like a rather substantial ghost; feeling empty and devoid of any creativity. I've never been that burned out and grey-feeling before, and I hope I never am again.
I'm very, very excited about what's going to be happening next year, when *things* go live, but glad I don't have the horrid clashing timelines anymore. I've just washed up eleven months worth of paint pallettes and restored the cottage with a housework blitz. Now that my time is almost my own for a while, I hope to get out and use these; I've been meaning to try my hand at landscapes for ages and it would be nice to do some art just for the sheer pleasure of it.
As a little reward for getting my jobs finished, I treated us to these gorgeous slipware mugs by Matt Grimmit, a Cotswold potter working from Evesham. I bought mine from Cheltenham Museum, but he also has an Etsy shop. (I wanted to have the humbuggy striped one, but Andy fell in love with it, so I've got the Mediaeval green one instead).
Andy was a bit nervous about using them every day; we've killed quite a lot of china on the cottage's stone floor. But the nice thing about buying modern ceramics from a living artist is that even if the worst happens, you can still replace them. That's the theory anyway.
If only life were as easy. I had a rather nasty encounter with a relation today, a sharp reminder of why I don't *do* family (in my case they are either ineffectual or downright bad news). It's one reason why I keep myself hidden away in this quiet life, as it brought back latent feelings of anxiety and stress which I've worked for years to dispel. It quite shook me up, but it also galvanized me into getting on with things and resurfacing - just in case anyone had missed me.
I'm very, very excited about what's going to be happening next year, when *things* go live, but glad I don't have the horrid clashing timelines anymore. I've just washed up eleven months worth of paint pallettes and restored the cottage with a housework blitz. Now that my time is almost my own for a while, I hope to get out and use these; I've been meaning to try my hand at landscapes for ages and it would be nice to do some art just for the sheer pleasure of it.
As a little reward for getting my jobs finished, I treated us to these gorgeous slipware mugs by Matt Grimmit, a Cotswold potter working from Evesham. I bought mine from Cheltenham Museum, but he also has an Etsy shop. (I wanted to have the humbuggy striped one, but Andy fell in love with it, so I've got the Mediaeval green one instead).
Andy was a bit nervous about using them every day; we've killed quite a lot of china on the cottage's stone floor. But the nice thing about buying modern ceramics from a living artist is that even if the worst happens, you can still replace them. That's the theory anyway.
If only life were as easy. I had a rather nasty encounter with a relation today, a sharp reminder of why I don't *do* family (in my case they are either ineffectual or downright bad news). It's one reason why I keep myself hidden away in this quiet life, as it brought back latent feelings of anxiety and stress which I've worked for years to dispel. It quite shook me up, but it also galvanized me into getting on with things and resurfacing - just in case anyone had missed me.
