I guess this is the end...

... of an adventure. I enjoyed blogging over here for a while, but as I recently stated, time has not been on my side lately, and this place has suffered from it. I find it hard to motivate myself to maintain two different blogs, and since I've started posting about my costuming adventures here as well, I figured I'd just as well redirect you to oen place where I talk about all my creative endeavours.
Hop over to my regular blog ! I'm still babbling over there !

Danke Cay !

I got an award from the lovely Cay ! wOOt ! Thank you Cay !
Here's the (rough) translation from the award text :
You got and award and want to get it going round ?
Post the "Liebster Blog" (favorite blog) image and the instructions (this text you're reading right now). You should also link to the blog of the one who gave you the award and comment there to tell them you accept the award and give them the link to your award-post. Then thing about 3 to 5 b of your favorite blogs, link them in your post and tell the blog authors about the award as well.
The goal of this action is to give some exposure to good, still not so well-known blogs , so please don't link to blogs that already have 3000 followers, but to the talented beginner bloggers and the one who've already been blogging for awhile but aren't that big in the blogosphere yet.

You know guys, it's hard to choose ! There are so many blogs I love to follow... Some of those already got the award... Hmmm, ok, here's my choice, in different languages.
Femmes en 1900 - come on, drool with me !
Cotumière hystérique - awesome creations !
Etching birds - because I always learn something from there !
Le dressing de Mademoiselle de L'Isle - she's amazingly talented !

And now it's back to sewing.... or to trying to sew, as it appears I lost my bodice pattern - which I needed for the sleeves, frack !

Thankful....

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving here but I love the idea of, once in a while, reflecting about all the things that make our lives beautiful and wonderful...
I'm thank-full for my beautiful son. Two years ago I was standing in tears because some doc thought I would never be allowed to have children, and here I am, with a beautiful and charming one-year-old sitting on my lap while I type this, and expecting our second child.
I'm thankful for my wonderful husband, always supportive, inspirationnal, and just as charming as his son. Over the years he's brought out the best part of me.
I'm thankful for all the matvelous friends I've met over the years.

I'm thankful for my hobbies, for the joy and light they bring into my life and the time I'm able to spend with them. I get to spend blissful hurs every week making art and learning about printmaking techniques (wait until I can show you my monotypes ! Monotypes are made of Awesomesauce !). I have an impressive collection of period material I can use as inspiration for my costume creations, and I have recently spent time scanning those pictures.

This blog just got a lot more interesting... *sarcasm off*

Not posting much lately, right ? The reason for that is currently sleeping next to me - he obviously decided to start the night early after babbling all day. :)
Let's see, what happened over the past few weeks... I took care of little G. I had my second printmaking workshop, printed a few more editions from the Medusa print I showed you last time. I took care of little G. I put up the Christmas tree. Took care of little G. Designed and printed the birht announcement cards (what ? Two months late ? No way ! Where did the time go ?) Took care of... See a pattern ? *broad grin* I have things in the works but it's taking me ages to finish them. And then, when I meant to take a few pictures to show you around my current life and even maybe *gasp* list something new... then... my digicam gave up the soul. And I still haven't ordered the new one - well I guess that's on the menu for tomorrow.

(I have my secret Santa's present under this tree, but I'll be strong, I'll wait until Christmas !)

But so that this doesn't sound like a pity party - which it frankly isn't. Really, I do have rough days when the kid is cranky for 15 hours straight, but today was amazingly good ! - well, so that you don't think I'm just drowning in exhaustion and post-partum depression, I have to thank the lovely lovely people who bought Christmas cards from me ! I have only 7 left, total, so if you want some grab them QUICK ! Lady Darkstone is coming on Tuesday and wants to buy some as well, so some designs will just be out of stock until next year !
Now to further assess that I'm on a roll, I am going to leave the kid in his father's care and grab my knitting needles for a last minute Christmas present. AND if this goes well, I might even open the "Knitting and Sewing" section of our shop in a few weeks (I'd say day, if it weren't for the kid and the looming holidays and assorted family visits).

What to do on a week-end

It's already Saturday evening, but that doesn't matter much in the end when you're on maternal leave and your husband is on vacation, right ? Except for groceries shopping, all days are about the same. Yet I'm stealing Karuski's idea and posting what's on the plate for this week-end.
- buying fruit and veggies and chesse - done, thanks to the Home Geek
- having Lady Fi, her husband and Mel come over and be all awww and aaaaaah over Gabriel - done, and happy to have seen them
- pick up some more baby stuff - partially done, still need to go to the store for a scale
- list one item in the shop - done. For the first time ever, I'm putting an original for sale. The Happy Hippo print will come later.
- take care of Gabriel
- get some rest
- get some creative time if at all possible - well, a blog post is already something, right ?

This drawing was actually done before I left for the hospital, but I didn't have enough time to list it. It was my challenge entry from, wait... two weeks ago ? Something like taht... The theme was "This is for you", and this was an hommage to Renate from Kreativlink. Funny whimsy meets some degas-esque inspiration...

I have to learn to type and draw single-handed...

Here's the reason why I've been silent lately. We came home on Tuesday with our little Gabriel. He's really adorable, very calm and fuss-less. And he's, of course, the most beautiful baby in the whole world. Yes, I'm biased :)

My creative space is on fire today !

See ? Quite litteraly ON fire.
This is not the place I usually most of my time in - although I do love to cook. But not to the point of spending all my productive time there. This is where I spent these last few days however. I am preparing meals and freezing them for the time after the birth when we will be very tired and trying to adjust to our life as new parents. I don't foresee much time for cooking then, pasta everyday does not sound that appealing, and the pizza place nearby has closed. Hence, I'm preparing homemade pizzas, salted cakes, and some dishes that are easy to cook in big quantities and taste better when reheated. I have one more rabbit to cook tomorrow, and an onion tart, and after that I'll probably have to stop because the freezer will be full. I feel very productive seeing the little boxes with the labels "blanquette" and "bourguignon" waiting for a lazy evening !

For more creative spaces, have a look at Kootoyoo's ! Come play with us !

Cum pedibus

I know my feet look ok in the picture but trust me, they're not. My feet have the worst karma ever. Just the other day, I managed to break a toenail and slice a toe open by hitting a stool. Not a rough edged, dangerously looking metal stool, noooo... A perfectly homely and peaceful wooden stool with nice, not sharp, well-rounded corners. A stool that has been sitting in the same place fo the workroom for weeks and I just forgot it was there, bumped into it and hopped away crying ouchie. Now you can laugh at me. Weirdly enough, the bad karma is limited to hitting things, and sometimes having items fall on them. This is quite odd given the biggest hazrad for bare feet in our house most certainly is pins. They are stray pins everywhere, no matter how much I pick them up and vacuum, there's always at least one pin on the floor in any given room. It used to scare my Home Geek to death...

Je sais que mes pieds ont l'air ok sur la photo mais croyez-moi, ce n'est pas le cas. Mes pieds ont le pire karma du monde. Pas plus tar qu'il y a quelques jours, j'ai réussi à me casse run ongle et m'ouvrir un orteil sur un tabouret. Pas un tabouret méchant avec de grandes dents et des bouts de métal coupants qui dépassent, nooon... Un tabouret parfaitement paisible et civilisé en bois avec des coins bien arrondis. Un tabouret qui occupe la même place dans le bureau depuis des semaines, qu'il m'a suffi d'oublier pour entrer en collision avec et m'éloigner clopinante. Maintnant vous pouvez vous moquer de moi ! Le plus étonnant, c'est que mon mauvais karma pédestre se limite aux heurts et parfois aux chutes d'objets, alors que le plus grand danger pour un paire de pieds nus dans cette maison est sans aucun doute la présence d'épingles. Peu importe combien de fois je les ramasse et je passe l'aspirateur, il y a des épingles partout, dans toutes les pièces. Ca terrifiait le geek domestique au début de notre relation...

Silly me !

While sketching and coloring, I'm also working on putting a third trial run tarot deck together. I worked on it some yesterday - well today - let's just say : last time I was awake before now. Then I let it dry overnight and went to bed like a good girl. Or so was the plan.
I made the mistake to go have a look at it during the night, to discover that it had gone awry. The wallpaper was getting wavy and all. After that, I unsuccessfully tried to get back to sleep, but my mind was just running in circles, I kept thinking about how to best fix this mess and other options to make that deck. So I got up again.
I *think* I am going to keep working with the current method. Half of deck #3 is now drying between stacks of books. Here's hoping it still looks okay in the morning.
Silly me although thought I had to go buy fixative. Turns out I already did last time I went supplies shopping !
Now I'm trying to get back to sleep, I need it, but I'll leave you with a little previwe of my "Enchanted Forest" sketch.

En parallèle avec mon travail de dessin, je fais des essais pour la troisième version d'essai du jeu de tarot. J'y ai bossé un peu hier - enfin aujourdhui - disons : la dernière fois que j'ai été réveillée avant maintenant. Puis je l'ai laissé à sécher pour la nuit et suis gentiment aller me coucher. Enfin c'était le plan. J'ai commis l'erreur d'y jeter un oeil quand je me suis relevée cette nuit, pour constater que ça n'allait pas du tout. La tapisserie se mettait à faire des vagues, ack ! J'ai bien tenté de me rendormir après ça, mais impossible, mon cerveau surchauffait à se demander comment réparer ça et s'il n'y avait pas de meilleures solutions pour fabriquer le deck. Donc retour au bureau.
Je *pense* que je vais rester sur ma méthode actuelle. La moitié du deck numéro 3 est en train de sécher sous des piles de livres, en espérant qu'elle sera toujours présentable demain matin.
Ma petite tête de linotte était aussi persuadée de ne pas avoir de fixatif. Sauf qu'en fait j'en avais acheté lors de mon dernier passage chez Arteis !
Ce coup-ci, je vais essayer de retourner dormir, j'en ai besoin. Mais je vous laisse avec un petit aperçu du croquis pour "Forêt enchantée".

Ten things - dix choses

Inspired by With Love and Affection I was thinking today about all the things I want to get done in the next few months. I figured making a list of the ten top priorities would be a nice start. Ten things, let's say, before autumn comes around.
1. Prepare the baby's room
2. Make the Tarot deck ready to sell
3. Create at least one art doll
4. Sign in for a nude drawing and an engraving course
5. Sew a pregnancy rococo outfit and wear it to an event
6. Get into the promoting stuff
7. Open a shop on Craftiz.fr
8. Reorganize my personal website to link it to Serpentaires
9. Buy a new digicam
10. Make enough stock to add new items to my shops every few days (I'm a blatant copycat on this one)
Oddly enough, it seems doable - a bit unusual for the woman who always makes unfinishable lists. I'll try to keep track of this over the summer and to keep you posted ! Anyone wanting to share their ten summer projects ? Consider yourself tagged!

Inspirée par le blog de With Love and Affection je pensais aujourd'hui à ce que j'aimerais accomplir dans les mois à venir. Lister les dix items prioritaires serait un bon début. Dix choses à faire, disons, avant l'arrivée de l'automne.
1. Refaire la chambre du bébé
2. Finir le jeu de tarot
3. Créer au moins une poupée
4. M'inscrire à un cours de dessin de modèle vivant et à un cours de gravure
5. Coudre un costume rococo pour femme enceitne et le porter à une sortie en costume
6. Faire la promo de nos boutiques
7. Ouvrir une boutique sur Craftiz.fr
8. Reorganiser mon site web personnel pour le relier à Serpentaires
9. Acheter un nouvel appareil photo numérique
10. Produire suffisamment pour pouvoir lister des nouveautés plusieurs fois par semaine (Je fais une copie éhontée pour le dernier item)
Etrangement, cela semble faisable - ce qui est plutôt bizarre pour uen adepte des listes infinissables. Je vais tâcher de suivre mon progrès et de vous tenir informés. Quelqu'un qui se sent de partager ses dix projets estivaux ? Considérez que je vous refile la patate chaude !

Week-end

We spent the week-end in Briançon (1200m above sea-level, near the italian border), it was warm and sunny, we walked, ate, and got sunburnt. And I took loads of pictures !

Nous avons passé le week-end à Briançon, par un temps magnifique, à marcher, manger et prendre des coups de soleil. Et pour ma part, à prendre plein de photos !

Lots of pictures of doors. The rest of my week-end pictures can be found on my Flickr photostream.
Beaucoup de photos de portes. Le reste des photos du week-end est visible sur mon Flickr.

My creative space

What's brewing today. This one gave me a hard time, partly because it's hard to take pictorial license with something you know as well as rococo underpinnings. And it isn't gettign any better as I have NO IDEA what to do with all the blank space around her. None of the few tries I did looked convincing.
In the top right corner are two wooden cubes that are in the works for our friends' kid, little E.

Sur le métier aujourd'hui... J'ai sué sur cette illus, notamment parce que j'ai du mal à mettre de côté l'exactitude historique sur les sous-vêtements rococo. Et ça ne s'améliore pas, je sèche sur le fond de l'image, mes quelques essais n'ont rien donné de concluant.
En haut à droite, deux cubes en cours de réalisation pour le fils de nos amis, E.

And the good news ? We've found a new car ! It's big, it's red, and it should be our in ten days. Yay !

Et la bonne nouvelle c'est que nous avons trouvé notre nouvelle voiture ! Elle est grande, elle est rouge, et elle devrait être à nous d'ici dix jours. Youpi !

RIP Pilot V5... or not

So the reason why it was getting so hard outlining the frames on the major arcanas wasn't me getting shakey, or my wrist being too badly sprayed (I fell down yesterdya and twisted it more than you normally should), or my blood sugar being too low. It was my pen dying. Luckily I have a few spare pens at home, so I wasn't stuck without a trustworthy Pilot 0.5 . It's the first time I've used a Pilot so much it refuses me its services. Usually I lose them before that happens.
Oddly enough, the dead pen seems to not be quite dead. I was able to doodle some with it a few minutes ago... Weird.

Donc si je n'arrivais plus à encrer correctement l'encadrement des arcanes majeures ce n'était pas ma main qui tremblotait, l'hypoglycémie ou une entorse du poignet due à ma chute d'hier. C'était mon stylo en train de mourir. Par chance j'ai quelques stylos de rechange à la maison, donc je ne me suis pas retrouvée coincée sans Pilot 0.5 . C'est la première fois que j'en use un jusqu'à ce qu'il me refuse ses services - d'habitude, je les perds avant.
Bizarrement, le stylo mort n'a pas l'air si mort que ça, j'ai pu faire quelques gribouillis avec tout à l'heure... Etrange.

Nouveau bureau !

J'ai un nouveau coin pour travailler avec mes pinceaux !
I have a new drawing desk !

C'était un pupitre que ma grand-mère s'était fait fabriquer pour pouvoir dessiner debout... De toute évidence, je suis plus grande que ma grand-mère :D Et dessus, la preuve que je travaille sur notre tarot.
It's a scavenged piece from my Grandma's attic, she had it made to be able to draw whilst standing. I'm obviously taller than her ! And on the desk, pictorial evidence that I'm working on our tarot deck.

Expanded blogroll

C'est fou tous les sites sur lesquels je suis tombée récemment qui sont bourrés d'inspiration et de jolies choses à regarder. Mention spéciale aux blogs BDs, qui ont fait subitement grandir le petit cadre à droite. Je me sens très nulle à voir le travail de certaines... je me rassure ne me disant que je ne suis pas (encore) spécialisée dans l'illustration mais... pfiou, y a bu boulot !
I've recently stumbled upon a crazy amount of inspiring websites and blogs - especially illustrator's blogs, as shown on the little column on the right. I'm amazed by the quality of some women's work - and feel very, very humble when I see it. Granted, I'm not (yet) a professionnal in illustration but darn... there's a lot of work ahead !

I should have posted this some time ago already... Some years ago I was asked to draw a tarot deck (well, just the majors) with a medieval feel to it. I looked at many pictrues form the Codex Manesse - but only after I had drawn the Fool in a not-totally-medieval style. Some weeks ago, I eventually redid the card in a matching style. Pictures of the rest of the deck still to come.
Un dessin qui attend d'être posté depuis quelques temps. Il y a quelques années, on m'avait demandé de dessiner un jeu de tarot (enfin, les majeures seulement) dans un style médiéval. Ce que j'avais fait, en me documentant beaucoup sur le Codex Manesse, mais seulement après avoir dessiné un Mat dans un style plus contemporain. Il y a quelques semaines, je me suis enfin attelée à refaire un Mat assorti aux autres cartes. Oui oui, je vais aussi poster des images du reste du deck.

Aaaaargh ! Labyrinthe...

I've just spent a few hours untangling status problems. And let me tell you, it's COMPLICATED here to get the equivalent of a business license. Complicated and expensive. I posted somewhere on my To-Do List for the shop "Not get crazy about it !!!" and I think it's the right time for that. Must. Not. Get. Crazy. I'll try to throw some questions at the few artists I know personnally and see how they do it.

Je savais que c'était le waille... mais en fait c'est pire ! J'ai passé la matinée à essayer de démêler l'URSSAF, le statut fiscal, la retraite, la sécu, le statut d'artiste libre ou pas. Et c'est.... à s'arracher les cheveux, comme en témoignent les nombreux posts partout sur les forums "Mais comment je fais ???" avec à chaque fois des réponses différentes des impôts et de l'URSSAF. Vaste rigolade. Jaune. J'ai quelques contacts sous le coude pour demander à des artistes en exercice comment elles font. J'avais noté quelque part au sujet de ce projet "Ne pas devenir dingue !!!", je crois que c'est adapté.
En tout cas, le moins qu'on puisse dire c'est que notre pays ne favorise pas la création indépendante... Ca me donnerait des envies d'aller m'installer ailleurs, ça.

Introduction

It's Saturday night, and I'm a little too worn out from the work week to be 100% productive with the pencil and the needle, so I figured I'd as well post a little introduction.

About us four, first. We're four friends scattered through the South (that is, not too much in the North) of France. We're all crafty in various ways - we mainly draw and paint. A good half of us sews, too, and makes pretty photographs. After taking custom orders here and there or selling our production by ourselves, we decided to get together, joining our forces and creative minds, with in mind the option of opening an Etsy shop. Stay tuned for reports of our progress, more infos on us and sneak peaks from our work !

Samedi soir, après une semaine un peu fatiguante. comme je n'arrive pas à être à fond dans le dessin ou la couture, autant en profiter pour taper une petite présentation.

Pour ce qui est de nous quatre, pour commencer, nous sommes quatre amies réparties dans le Sud (au sens moitié pas trop au Nord) de la France. Nous avons toutes nos petite spsécialités, toutes dessinent et/ou peignent, une bonne moitié coud et prend de jolies photos. Nous avons travaillé sur commande ici et là et avons fini par décidé de rassembler nos forces pour créer ensemble et peut-être à terme ouvrir une boutique genre sur Etsy. Bientôt, vous pourrez trouver ici plus d'infos sur nous, les progrès de notre projet et des aperçus de notre travail en cours !

Every beginning is small

I have been struggling with the set-up of this for hours. But at least *now* we have a banner. Not a perfect one, but that'll make do for now. There's still waaaay to go to make this blog look good. But it's a start, right ? Hello world !

Bon, après quelques heures de dérapages, une destruction, une reconstruction et un catalogue d'erreur côté serveur (air pas content de l'utilisatrice...), je crois que les fondations sont posées. Je crois. Bonjour Blogspot !

Fi, ne t'inquiète pas de la double invitation... en répondant à la deuxième ça devrait marcher. Et si tu as le temps de jeter un oeil à la bannière une fois que tes commandes seront prêtes... ;)