Almost every Thursday morning I am woken around 5 by the noise of the rubbish trucks. As soon as I hear that familiar rumble and clunk I immediately feel a rush of addrenalin and panic as I think “Did we put out the rubbish bins?”. Every Thursday – without fail, and I think we have forgotten to put out the bins maybe twice in the last ten years. So I immediately remember “yes, we did” but by then I am awake and my nerves are fried. This morning, instead of lying in bed for an hour cursing the stupid rubbish trucks, I got up, made a cup of tea and sat out on the couch and wrote 1500 words. Brilliant.
I’m leaving my trashy adult novel for the time being and have started some writing for the Middle Reader age group which is the 7-12 year olds. I am writing fast and furious and the ideas are flowing. This is surely the best bit of the process – characters unravel and situations appear on the page seemingly from nowhere. I guess my Muse was sipping rooibos on the couch next to me this a.m.
Kokeshi dolls slowly but surely covering the ironing board.
Reprinting my moon print on the gocco. One more colour to go. (more creative spaces over at Kirst’s place)
I have been pleasantly busy with all my artwork at the moment. Printing, sewing, painting, designing, drawing. It’s all wonderful fun but it takes up the time I would otherwise dedicate to writing a coherent blog post.
But lots of things are making me go “weee!” including:
1. Fiona’s doll pattern. The dolls are so beautiful – and the pattern is a joy in itself.
2. Pip. Always Pip. And her fabulous list of gocco links.
3. Stephanie’s tooth fairy pillow from 2005 (ah, the good ol’ days) because Amelia’s tooth is finally in need of a tooth fairy pillow.
4. This video of the 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world. But you know? Click on it and watch it in a larger version – if not full screen.
5. Looking up photographs of the Loch Ness Monster for the wee bairns only to find a National Geographic (old) news article about the theory that the sighting of Nessie in 1933 may have been a circus elephant! Too cool.
6. Celeriac. I have fallen in love with the ugliest vegetable on the planet.
After a huge amount of rain (for Melbourne anyway) in the last 24 hours we now have lovely clear sunshine spilling in our windows. The studio is especially good on such mornings – lots of light and floorboards. I have already done some gocco printing and now have to wait patiently for my new supplies to arrive next week. This week I have also been painting more wooden dolls (I am especially happy with the little traditional shaped doll in her red stripes) and sewing the skirts on rabbits.
I have hit a bit of a roadblock with the wooden dolls. I have used water based inks to paint them which is crazy, I know, but I have had previous experience with these inks (Art Spectrum’s Artists’ Pigment Ink) and they have always dried with a kind of plasticky, water resistant finished. I expected the inks to dry similarly on the dolls so I could coat them in a varnish to seal them and finish them off… unfortunately when I started to paint on the varnish (Atelier’s Satin Medium and Varnish) the inks ran… I am hoping I can find some kind of spray on finish which will help waterproof and seal the dolls. Off to the art shop for advice!
School is back and Lily has decided to start afternoon napping again which is kind of her, so I am getting a little bit of creative time:
1) painting wooden dolls
2) getting back to those marshmallow bunnies
3) piling stuff on my sewing table
4) reading “On Writing” by Stephen King but not actually doing too much writing. It’s good! I haven’t read much SK before but even his memoir is a page-turner.
My creative space this week has been quiet. I managed to finish the doll, but life is shifting slightly as Lily’s afternoon naps all but disappear and we get busier with friends and family. I am looking ahead at the next six months as being fairly full with the daily hub-bub of being a mum, but 2010 will be different again as Lily starts kinder and I start working again. What will that work be? That’s probably where my creative space has been this week – in my head, figuring these things out; making plans… The rest of 2009 is about working that out and setting things up ready to blast into action in February 2010.
This is the stuff that I pulled out of my bag (apart from the laptop) from last night when I got to go and do some stitching in a place where the ducted heating was belting out good warmth. Thank you to my kind host who kept it running for my sake even though it meant several people had to go bare foot to enjoy the balmy climate.
“My Creative Space” this week has still mostly been on my laptop doing my Every Day in May writing, but I have also been working on my doll to send off for the Casa Bernabe Orphanage project. Her head is much smaller than the dolls I made for my girls for Christmas but she should still be a decent, huggable size.
Other acts of random creativity this week:
1) I made a chicken pie. It wasn’t ready when I had to leave last night, but there’s enough to serve up again tonight and I am looking forward to that goodness. I learnt that I can make a pie (including the pastry) fast, if I need to.
2) I started sketching some ideas for a Paper Moon print. I will need to clean the studio before I can get the gocco out but it’s great motivation.
3) … hmm.. it’s been a bit quiet creatively speaking. Oh, but that’s right : the writing! Apart from yesterday, I have managed to get at least 500 words down every day, even though it’s way too cold to get up at 5.30 at the moment. My manuscript’s at 65, 363 words and that’s with some heavy edits. The plot structure is out.of.control – I was thinking yesterday that it’s a little holding a jelly (jello?) in my hands. No matter how hard I try and hang on to it, bits ooze between my fingers and the whole lot threatens to fall at my feet in a big messy splat. But it’s draft one, it’s always going to be a jelly draft. At least this one is raspberry flavoured.
All my photos for the “My creative Space” project seem to be yellow, and badly lit. That’s because my creative space continues to be the kitchen table (which you can see also doubles as a much used & stained craft table). My studio space is lying unused because not only am I not sewing or painting or drawing much at the moment, but also because Lily has more or less stopped having day time sleeps and if I want to do anything I need to do it at the kitchen table while she potters about or watches television. I am now completely used to writing while having a conversation about the cat on the front deck, or why a pineapple lolly (pictured above) isn’t actually made out of real pineapple or negotiating the eating of an extra piece of apple before we move on to the yoghurt. I can write amongst the chaos of breakfast dishes and cut ‘n’ paste projects. My laptop has a permanent sticky (literally) “|\” key due to a blob of wayward marmalade. But when you gotta write, you gotta write.
In an ideal world I would lock myself away in a room of my own and bang away at this book and that day will come, I am sure. In the meantime, the soundtrack to this book definitely includes a good dose of the Playschool theme song.
Paper cutting, on the otherhand, is a different matter. If a child dare talk to me while I am hunched over my cutting board and I accidentally cut through a delicate little curl, or frond or papery pigtail then beware the snarling she-mother-beast.
Look at some of these writers’ beautiful rooms (photographs by Eamonn McCabe from the Guardian’s Writers’ Rooms series):
Jane Gardam was one of my favourite authors as a teenager. “I don’t sit in state at my desk very much. I move around the room when it gets too untidy, like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party”.
Louis De Bernieres has a spot in a small shed in his garden, overlooking the vegetable garden and orchard.
Edna O’brien’s room looks so snug: “Often I cannot find a book that I urgently need and have to repair to John Sandoe’s to buy another copy, which means that I have four or five editions of my favourite books… Am I alone in spending a disproportionate amount of my life looking for things?” – um, no.
Rose Tremain has a room full of colour with a view of the garden; “Often, I lift my head from the work in hand and gaze out at the garden. All writers spend great drifts of time staring into space – a habit not tolerated easily by those who aren’t writers – and my green space falls away towards a dark shrubbery and a phenomenal Scots pine tree, which was probably a sapling when Charles II was on the throne.”
J G Ballard’s room where he wrote his novels for 49 years. “The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.”
Jane Austen’s desk. “From this table the revised manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice went to London to be published in 1811 and 1813. From this table too came Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Here she noted down the encouraging comments of neighbours – Mrs Bramston of Oakley Hall, who thought S&S and P&P “downright nonsense”, and “dear Mrs Digweed” who volunteered that “if she had not known the author, she could hardly have got through Emma”.”
Roald Dahl’s shed – “The table near to his right hand had all kinds of strange memorabilia on it, one of which was part of his own hip bone that had been removed; another was a ball of silver paper that he’d collected from bars of chocolate since he was a young man and it had gradually increased in size. There were various other things that had been sent to him by fans or schoolchildren.”
The space I was mostly creative in this week was actually curled up on a mate’s couch busting out some crochet moves (and after that it was all about Twilight – which is now, thankfully, finished) but I didn’t take a photo so instead I thought I would snap my favourite (creative tool) combination right now; my laptop and my earbuds. Phil gave me a membership to emusic for Valentines Day, and then a gift voucher from iTunes to supplement it so I have been finally catching up with eons of good music, with a special interest in music which is good to write to. I am definitely of the school of people who find some appropriately ambient music extremely useful for inspiration.
I love to write to music. It makes it all happen in my head.
Just this morning I tried a little experiment. I took a scene I had already written, one where a certain gentleman and a certain woman meet for the first time. He’s delivering firewood and is wearing muddy boots which he has to shuck off at the door. She’s in her pajamas and wearing slippers. I think I originally wrote it while listening to Another side of Bob Dylan. I could smell the wood smoke, see the blush in her cheeks. Firing up iTunes, I reread it and played a Sigor Ros song… suddenly the scene needs to be much more epic and sweeping. Get rid of the slippers! More brooding looks! More allusions to a deep connection from childhood! The next song is a poppy little number from Simone Rubi with a slight disco beat and everything needs to be funnier, more flippant. More light remarks about the unlikely attraction to such a hulking mountain man especially when she is wearing some kind of slinky dressing-gown. I skip to a Sondre Lerche song from the Dan in Real Life soundtrack and the slippers are back, and while everything is cheerful, awkwardness pervades and cups of tea are slopped on the table, confidence slips, throats are cleared nervously. Actually, axe the Sondre Lerche, as it is way too distracting. Back on to some cool electronica beats which match my typing speed.
So, you see it takes me quite a long time to shuffle through my music to find the perfect music to make the perfect scene. Some might call it procrastination (and an expensive excuse to buy music). I call it necessary inspiration.
Do you write to music or do you prefer the sweet sounds of silence?
If you do use music, what do you listen to? Maybe I can add yours to my playlist.
So – My creative space yesterday was the kitchen table. I had Amelia home sick from school and when she wasn’t drawing or driving me crazy, she commandeered my computer to play mathletics so I was left twiddling my thumbs. This ended up being a very good thing because it forced me away from twitter and google reader et al and into the studio where I found the pair of tiny little scissors I bought a while back for the purpose of creating some papercuts. I have been wanting to have a go at this for a long time, inspired by the great papercut goddesses Amy Karol and Elsita Mora, and the papercut guru Rob Ryan. Watching the Miso + Ghost Patrol doco on the ABC just nailed it for me.
I have always had a huge passion for silhouette art works – probably because of some of Jan Pienkowski books full of fantastical scenes or those Dover books full of quaint vignettes.
Papercuts seem like the perfect way to get that contrast and the drama of shape and line. Obviously Pienkowski (above) could get a huge amount of detail using pen and ink but have you seen Elsita’s papercuts? (of course you have!) … I look at them and GASP at the detail.
I am definitely not so impressed with my first effort but I thought I would publish it anyway to show a “starting point”. I rushed my design and then added bits spontaneously. I had a ratty toddler jiggling constantly at my elbow and a mathlete across the table stressing as she competed online against a boy-genius from Qatar. I had a blunt knife, a wrecked cutting mat, a crappy pair of scissors and my two layers of paper seemed to be unforgiving so my first effort is pretty awful (a good craftswoman *always* blames her tools) but I have dashed out this morning, and bought a tonne of new blades and a better cutting mat and some fine black paper so we’re all systems go. While I found the process frustrating yesterday (I think it might have been easier to fold some of those complex origami planes!), I can completely understand how it could be quite addictive and even quite meditative.
Hello!
I'm Claire Robertson and I live in Melbourne, Australia with my raggle taggle family and a house full of junk. I like to write, draw, sew and grow vegetables. Loobylu is my scrapbook, my side-project, my brain-dump.
You can also find me on Twitter and on Tumblr.
Subscribe to Loobylu
