A lovely birthday week

All I've got to say is 51 is not as exciting as 50! But, I like my own year for new year resolutions & I'm determined to make this year as wonderful as the last one ;)

I picked myself a bunch of flowers from the garden & no I wasn't drunk!

Lovely cards from my DH

my middlest, cheeky so & so & he got my age wrong!

Phone call from the eldest & the youngest is treking in deepest Mongolia as we speak but wished me happy birthday before he went.

A beautiful card from Linda , it's lovely, thank you! Look at that beautifully stitched tree in the middle & those scrumpcious colors!

An arty friend came over for coffee & cake & it was a sunny breezy day, wonderful. Cards across the mantlepiece & the middlest pointed out I should visit facebook; not been for weeks! where I found 15 more lovely wishes!

Managed lunch out in the garden sitting at the back of the house looking along a path to the right of which is this uncultivated border with all these lovely colors jostling together. At the weeping pear at the back there is the start of the dug over bit. I'll get to it one day! On the left is the fruit with a few herbacious.

Need to cover these soon. No plums for me this year ;( I don't think I'm alone in having no flowers in the spring. I can't think of a better birthday present than to be able to sit in my garden soaking up all that sunshine & color, such balm for the soul.

I've been struggling with my work this week, I'm always trying to decide whether what I want to do has 'meaning' or not - have I said ths before? whether it has value. I consider myself someone who works intuitively (I just love that word!) but only once I get going! I learnt from making the series of pennants - I got to 8 - that if you make a sketch, or a 'map' as Cas Holmes & Melenie Testa call it, you make life easier by telling yourself in which direction to go next, instead of struggling & wallowing around in a big black angst filled hole. Easy, get your stuff out, seperate out the pieces you're drawn to & lay them out as per your recent sketches. You can loosely follow a theme, just enjoy yourself& hopefully the meaning will come! I must come back & read this next time it gets dark out there ;)

                                     Samples, or maybe small parts of something (there's intuitive!)

Another sample, horizontal too, strange for me! Tried to print on organza, the bottom smudgy daisy on the brown paper. Didn't really work, any tips? ;)

A part of a collage or a hanging, perhaps, if I keep going, intuitively, that is. I used the Julia Capara/Cas Holmes method of very thin white glue (the link to JC is to D4Daisy & then follow the link to an interview for Workshop on the Web - interesting & some fabulous pieces of work even if you don't read it all, such a shame she died too early) - no wallpaper paste in the house, well, no wall paper at all! then stamped & stitched. It does feel quite intuitive but I need to be thinking about line shape form & balance etc don't I? ( I've only got so much space in my brain!) I'll keep trying & enjoying while I am.