eek!

Oh my, oh my. It has been so long since I posted here. Life has kept me busy, and I haven’t been doing much art making. However … I have lots of new ideas floating around my head for new work, so I hope to be creating again soon.

In the meantime, let me leave you with a mosaic of some artwork that’s been inspiring me lately.

{mosaic created by FD’s Flickr Toys}

1. Untitled, 2. caroline carefully arranges everything she holds dear, 3. rachel ann austin_Pleasant 5 x 5, 4. birds, 5. house wren, 6. View From the Stacks, 7. five berries, 8. lucy counts the stars no. 11, 9. heaskedtotakeourpicture

My heart feels like a Saturday morning …

daydreams flutter around and fill up my head … {Joy Williams}

I’ve been loving the sunshine and spring-like weather so much. I made a lovely spring mix to listen to that’s filled with good tunes by Joy Williams, Meredith Andrews, JJ Heller and The Civil Wars. My fingers have been itching to paint and collage. I’ve been daydreaming of words to write, and I’ve been eagerly exploring new career possibilities.

I also recently discovered a brilliant new writer, Kate Morton. I found myself completely swept up in her book The Forgotten Garden, and I can’t wait to read the other book she’s written called The House at Riverton.

{source}

I love this photo of author Kate Morton at what, I assume, is her writing desk. I’m absolutely smitten with the adorable gray vest she’s wearing and what looks like a painted picnic table desk. Kate loves and writes about some of the things that have captured my imagination since I was a little girl: “crumbly old houses, lonely libraries, forgotten gardens, discovered diaries …”

Reading Kate’s deliciously engaging novel has inspired me to want to begin writing fiction again. On her Web site, Kate offers the following advice to aspiring novelists:

I spend a lot of time before I start the actual writing dreaming up my characters and plot. I read everything I can get my hands on around the subject so that the world of my story begins to take shape. I like to imagine that the story is already out there, that it happened to real people, and it’s my job to uncover it rather than to make it up. I scribble ideas that may come to nothing, I daydream about my characters, I fill my head with the world, atmosphere, aesthetic, music, smells, voices of the story I want to lose myself inside, and then, suddenly, all the disparate jigsaw pieces start to link up. My advice would be to allow your idea the time to gestate—if it feels real to you, it will feel real to your reader, too.

I love that and have a feeling I might just take her advice and start daydreaming …

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. {Johann Wolfgang von Goethe}

On my ♥ today …

Romans 12: 1-2 ♥

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

I also like The Message translation:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Those verses are my heart’s desire. And during this difficult season, it is my prayer that I’m living out these verses—that He is changing me from the inside out, transforming my mind and preparing me to learn what His will is for me for the next season, so that I may be able to respond quickly and joyously to follow Him where He leads.

Many blessings to you and yours today.

Hints of Spring

1. library love, 2. Untitled

1. coming home…, 2. doreen ‘stay a while’ placemat

1. a little happy…, 2. Her Royal Highness

1. letterpress class:, 2. desk

The sun has been shining the last few days, and I’m delighting in the subtle hints of spring. As I wrote last year, there’s something about the spring that fills me with hope and inspiration.

I’ve posted a few Flickr favorites above that have been inspiring me, as I eagerly await spring’s arrival. (And aren’t those typewriters gorgeous? I’m on the lookout for a Royal beauty myself!)

It’s been a long winter, and I’m hopeful that the Lord has new possibilities to reveal to me in the next few months. I continue to live in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in faith and overflowing in thankfulness.

As the weather continues to perk up, I look forward to exploring a few nearby neighborhoods for quirky coffee shops, used bookstores, antique shops and flea markets filled with treasures.

P.S. Here’s a happy, sunny song to celebrate the recent sunshine.