dear prudence

dear prudence, originally uploaded by SuzeArt.

another week has flown by and another song came to mind 🙂 This is what happened when I printed out the images Nance provided us with for week 4 of Collage Play with Crowabout.

Good Things that happened this week:

1) My son was given a full-time job, working for the Council. Hallelujah! Temporary for one month, but much better than sitting at home doing very little and sleeping his life away… fingers crossed, it could lead to something more permanent…

2) The sun shone! For more than 5 minutes at a time & on more than one day 🙂

3) My camera held out for another week! (It’s seriously on it’s last legs now 😦 )

Here’s to a positive, constructive week ahead…

Love to All xXx

Slave to the Rhythm

Slave to the Rhythm, originally uploaded by SuzeArt.

The third week of Nance’s Collage Challenges and I managed to produce this. I’ve had the song going round & round in my head for days now 🙂 I really enjoyed making this page, in spite of not feeling too inspired when I started it. All the drawing and colouring in took me right back to my schooldays. The song came later, after I’d left school!

Well, the days have turned into weeks, and weeks into months and we are already heading for Autumn here. The weather has been awful during most of August & I’m really fed up with it. I thought after the floods last year, we might have deserved a specially good summer this year… *sigh* Ah, well…. back to work for me..

Hope the sun is shining where you are! 🙂

Have a good week. Love to All xXx

If you want to get ahead…

If you want to get ahead…, originally uploaded by SuzeArt.

….get a Hat! Or an upside-down cereal dish, if you like! 😉

Week Two of Nance’s Collage Challenge already! I’m really enjoying myself having a go at this ~ it’s reminding me how happy I can be when I just let myself get absorbed in doing something for Fun 🙂

Fun is what’s been missing from my life for the best part of this year so far. I can’t believe how much I needed this challenge to wake me up again, and am so glad that Nance came up with this group idea and put in all the hard work to make it happen… Bless you, darlin’! xXx

I’ve been spending far too much time at The Orchard during the summer months – it’s easier for me to keep up with my work, but I do miss my boy & have an awful lot of sorting out still to do back at home. It’s a real dilemma – spend time at home & be alone with lots of hard work to do, or spend time in the beautiful surroundings of The Orchard, where there’s a huge amount of sky to be seen from every window, beautiful views in all directions, clean, fresh air; where a hammock waits for me to relax in it between rain showers (I’ve had the hammock for many years and this is the first time we’ve had somewhere to hang it), where my dog is happiest, where my significant other of the last 6 years lives….

What’s a girl to do? Cut pictures out and make Art with them, that’s what! 😉

Hope you’re all enjoying yourselves, whatever you’re doing…

Love to All xXx

work like a dog

work like a dog, originally uploaded by SuzeArt.

Haha! At last, some fun! 😀

Dear Nance has just gathered together a group on Flickr, called Collage Play with Crowabout. Each week, Nance will post a sheet of Collage images which the group members will then use to create some kind of Art.

The image of the woman’s face was the one that appealed to me the most from this week’s selection. I had a lot of fun playing around with the printer/copier & came up with this. Great fun! Just what I needed!

Thanks, Nance! 😀 xXx

turned to Blue…

Angels, originally uploaded by suesviews.

Hello.  I’m still here. Hope you are too 😉

I’ve been in such a state. Still in a mess, mentally, but hanging on in there and am so glad to be typing in this box again 🙂

It’s been a strange year. I miss blogging a lot. I miss creating. I miss ME! I don’t know where I’ve been, but I do know I’ve been in a dark place.

This moment (in the photo), captured a few weeks ago now, had me floored. I sat & wept like a baby. Totally overwhelmed. I was stood in the garden of The Orchard – the beautiful surroundings that were to be my home and are now my ‘office’. Bittersweet beauty. I’m getting there…

Life is Beautiful, even while we’re not appreciating it…

Love to All xXx

grey skies

grey skies, originally uploaded by suesviews.

Humble apologies for not being around for so long. I have plenty of excuses, not least of which is the fact that the holiday weekend was a complete washout, followed by almost a week of grey skies and pouring rain. I did have a trip to a plant nursery on Monday, which was lovely in spite of the gale force winds! I wish you could have seen me, eating my cream tea outside while trees were blowing down around me! lol

I gave in yesterday and took my camera out anyway.  It was soaked when I took this photo in the pouring rain – the lens was wet, as was everything else, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find that I’d successfully captured the drop on the end of the Oak leaf.

On a positive note, my son passed his driving test first time on Tuesday! I’ve been without the car ever since 😉 So, I finally got started on a few pages of the moleskine that I will send out soon. I’ll post separately about that as soon as I can. Thanks to all of you who have agreed to play! Bless you x

For now, I should be working, so I’ll say Hello & Goodbye again 🙂

Thanks for stopping by. Please send sunshine! 😀

Love to All xXx

glimpses

Gerberas from my Mum – I called this picture ‘Party Time!’ 🙂

my treat to myself – still not finished!

Forget-me-nots in the garden at The Orchard. How people can call them weeds is beyond me…they are SO beautiful!

Have a good week, all xXx

Blown Away…

that’s me. Totally blown away and so very very blessed to have such wonderful, thoughtful, friendliest of blogging friends in the universe! 😀 I can’t thank you all enough for the beautiful things you’ve done for me today. You are all so very precious to me, and mean more to me than you might realise. I am truly, truly grateful. Truly. Thank You all so very much xXx

It’s been a lovely birthday, in spite of the weather! 😉 Lots of rain and a bit of sunshine led to a lovely rainbow.. I woke at The Orchard at 6.30 this morning (eek!) and enjoyed a few hours of peace there while I did a bit of work (not much!). Then Stan and I drove home via the local DIY shop where I bought an extravagant tin of paint to complete the project I’ve been working on at home all week.

I started on Monday, painting the living room. Josh has helped me a lot, joining in with a roller when he got home from college in the afternoon, and I have persevered with a brush, doing the cutting-in round the edges. We’ve lived here for 3 years and never decorated yet, so this is such a treat!

I’ve gone for a subtle green, called Croquet, and today bought a complimentary (I hope) colour to use on the walls that don’t get much light. ‘Ambience’ was today’s indulgence, a gorgeous ochre-ish colour – all very soothing… Josh & I spent the afternoon painting a third wall. Nearly done now and I am SO pleased. So is Josh, which is a real bonus 😀

One wall left, which is the trickiest one. I have to clear the gorgeous wall-mounted bookcase that my Dad made & fitted last year, take it down, paint the wall and then try & put it back up. It’s very heavy, so I may be some time! 😉

Every interruption to our work was a welcome one 🙂 The postman arrived (at 3pm, for goodness’ sake!) with a very special surprise. I have photo’s, but not enough time before sleep tonight, so hopefully over the weekend…(no promises, you know what I’m like lately, but I’m hopeful!) Some parcels had already arrived and been saved and I had the best time finding out what they contained… I have more than one wonderful new book that I can’t wait to read.

Josh drove me (still learning – test next month!) to my Mum & Dad’s house where my two Aunties joined us for one of Mum’s Roast Beef dinners (‘specially for me – my fave!), and we all were joined by my brother & his wife on the webcam. Brilliant! I love being able to see my bruv, and we had a good giggle over my Dad’s old jokes 😀 Mum gave me a voucher that will get me an Aromatherapy back massage and I can’t wait for that! (7 years since I last had one!!) Aaaaaah…… A really lovely evening, rounded off perfectly by the discovery of some surprise emails when I got home.

Which brings me to the beginning of this post! Totally blown away, so very blessed, another year older (and hopefully wiser!) and in need of sleep. Thank you all so much for making it such a special day for me. Getting older is so much fun with friends like you! 😀

Work tomorrow, and choir in the evening, but then I will try very hard to get some photo’s posted here along with the moleskine idea I’ve been stewing over for so long already… in fact, chew this over with me, please, as I’m not getting very far with my plans ~

I want to send one of these beautiful journals out into blogland, to have it worked in by any/all of my blogging friends that I have not/may never meet. I know I am very fortunate to already have some beautiful work by some of you in my possession, but I would LOVE to have a journal containing work (of any kind – writing/art/whatever you like) by as many of you as will agree to take part. Something tangible, a real physical reminder of all you precious souls who are such an important part of my life.

The moleskine I have to spare is a Japanese (accordion-style) edition, which closes up to a small notebook size (A6-ish), so would be relatively cheap to post, but with plenty of space to work in, as it unfolds into one long piece of gorgeous ‘buttery’ paper 🙂

Those are just my immediate thoughts for you to consider – anyone want to play??? No pressure, this is pure self-indulgence on my part!

For now, my apologies for the lack of pictures on this post, and my heartfelt thanks for making my birthday (yesterday, by the time I publish this post!) so very special 😀

Love to All from a warm & fuzzy Suze xXx

p.s. I’ve just made a few moleskine photo’s public on Flickr if you’d like to see what I’ve been up to.

Arte y Pico Award

Thanks so very much to dear Judy , and to the lovely Fiona for awarding me the Arte y Pico Award ~ an award for blogs filled with art and creativity ~ there are some rules attached to this award and in passing it on to others they are as follows;

1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter what language.

2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his/her blog to be visited by everyone.

3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her/him the award itself.

4. The award winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y Pico’ blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.

5. To show these rules.

I wish to goodness I could give the award to Judy – have you SEEN what she’s been doing lately? My breath has truly been taken! Absolutely beautiful work that she is producing as part of her studies. I have never seen anything she made that I didn’t love to bits.

And Fiona, who I have been watching with great interest as she works her way through an Art Foundation course. I have often thought that she should be teaching the class! She is a brilliant artist with the most amazing imagination and I am so glad to have found her & her incredibly talented family online.

It never ceases to amaze me, the people we can meet here on the web who we may never have bumped into in real life! Wonderful! 😀

However, there are many, many wonderful bloggers to choose from, so here goes…

Would the following creative & inspirational bloggers kindly come & collect their award:

Wendy at WindyAngels – Canadian Angel who crafts with words & pictures. Always beautiful & straight from the heart.

Karen at A Scrapbook of Inspiration– whose posts are works of art in themselves! Limitless talent and endless encouragement to be found here!

Nancy B over at Something to Crow About – I love Nancy’s Art Journal pages. They are bursting with energy & real life and have inspired me ever since I was a brand new blogger.

Yvonne at BoxofTrix, who I ‘met’ before our blogging days! Yvonne’s work is so very beautiful. She is a prize-winning embroidery artist who offers her amazing creations for sale on Etsy now. I dream of a studio like her new one! lol 🙂

Last but not least, I will not be the first (or last, I’m sure) to give this award to Suziblu, who seems to have inspired the entire world lately! I love my visits to her blog, both for the inspiring artwork and the constant encouragement she gives to all of us aspiring artists!

My thanks to all of you, for the inspiration and your wonderful contributions to the blogging community. Please collect (right click on picture and ‘save as’, to somewhere you can find it!) & distribute your well-deserved award 🙂

And just so’s you know, I have been much more creative lately! The moleskine was the catalyst I needed, it seems, and I’ve been sketching like a loony! I have too much to share with you and need to write loads more posts here! We are coming up to my second blogging anniversary this month, as well as another little celebration IRL and I have a proposition for my blogging buddies, inspired by the wonderful project that was Isabel’s travelling journal. Have to try & think it through before I say any more…

Here’s a little something from my camera,

for now..
xXx Love to All xXx

good morning

good morning, originally uploaded by suesviews.