1. Fun Location – we hosted our mini retreat at the Magic Cottage.  You can plan your retreat in your home, at a cabin, in a tent in your backyard, in a room at a community center or wherever it’s okay to get a bit messy!

2. Artsy friends!  Invite a few artsy friends.  A couple of the girls were unable to make it (one is off on a Bolivian adventure ).  It doesn’t matter how many girls come as long as you have a love of art!  Here Nicci and Jenny are enjoying drawing in the studio. I sent out a “Shape of the Day” e-mail to all of the girls ahead of time to make sure they were all for it and they were!

3. Swag: Plan on sharing/swapping moo cards, prints of your art, zines, buttons.  Here we shared a zine from Jenny, button from Nicci, whimsical cards (jenny), my print and thank you card.

4. Show and Tell: Show your art off, books, comics and zines that influence you and that you love!

On the table you can check out Nicci’s washi tapes and also a few zines/comics that Nicci brought along to show.  The girls were fascinated by my extensive collection of art books so as you can see there is a pile next to Nicci that they were perusing. On top of the book pile is Jenny Doh’s book ART SAVES  and beneath it is Traci Bautista’s Doodles Unleashed. We shared our journals and drawings before starting to draw.  Everyone brought their own supplies however i did have extra supplies on hand.

5. Yummy food – serve yummy potluck food! I made a quinoa salad, Nicci brought homemade guacamole and Jenny brought strawberries and chocolate for desert! I had tea and coffee on hand as well. It was a gorgeous day so we ate in the backyard and lingered while talking about our art adventures.

Jenny’s magical drawing

6. Make Art – It doesn’t matter what kind of art you make – you can decide ahead of time if you would all like to work on one project – in that case the person who is doing the demo would have to send out a supply list ahead of time via e-mail or snail mail.  We decided to do our own thing and share ideas/techniques. I’m glad we did!

This is Jenny’s adorable doodle all drawn with her non-dominant hand. Doesn’t that look like a magic cottage in the corner?   Unfortunately i don’t have a picture of Nicci’s Girl she worked on but i’m sure she’ll have it up on her blog soon. She was a Steampunk inspired girl – very cool – complete with “cog” iris’. Nicci chose to use a combination of paints and dry media, Jenny did a pen and ink drawing and i created two art journal pages with pen and added colour with water colour pencil crayons.

Jenny’s whimsical drawings influenced me – that’s one of the side benefits of drawing together – you influence each other.  Jenny had a drawing of a simple person with a tiny house on their head.  It reminded me i want to move to the Sunshine Coast but lack of funds and also the scary thought of leaving the Magic Cottage behind has prevented that dream from happening.

There’s a magic cottage on my head !

pulling a magic cottage on a wagon!

So based on being inspired by Jenny’s drawing i created the illustrations which I’m sure will evolve into more later on! What you focus on you manifest right?

I know that just being together and chatting about our process and questions such as “What’s the meaning of the house on the person’s head?  What comes first the words or the art?” will get things moving, shifting and changing for us all!

I hope you have enjoyed this blogpost.  If you have please tweet it or mention it on facebook.  I plan on adding a Pinterest button today so that you can click on the button below to Pin anything you see here!

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I thought i would share a few of the photos my Stepdad Reinhard (Ron) took of the Mother’s Day/birthday Celebration yesterday.  We were blessed with a gorgeous day, lots of relatives and a sparkling Magic cottage garden. Here’s the Fishpond i fixed up for Sam’s first fishpond experience.

My glittergirl van still lives on in the garden – well the door at least .

Here’s a picture of my Mom with her two daughters (the other daughter Linda is in N.Carolina). My big sister doesn’t like being on my blog so i often put a smiley face over her to obscure her face .

My daughter-in-law Kathryn is ready to have baby number 2 any day now!  Doesn’t she look awesome?  Little Sam has found a very comfy perch to sit on – hopefully baby brother won’t mind too much?

This was Sam’s first encounter with a fishpond!  His daddy, my son Ryan, taught him to say “Here fishy fishy” before he cast his line over the fishpond.

Lucky Sam – he was the happy recipient of several lovely prizes (mostly from his Auntie Jessy) . What a fun game this “fishpond” is!

Baby Cillian checking out the festivities from his blanket. He’s thinking “Next year it will be my turn to catch a fish!” He’s such an alert little guy!

My daughter Jessica, Cillian and son-in-law Nis.

Some of the party goers enjoying yummy food.

Bernie, Jessica and Ryan’s Dad with baby Cillian

Bernie and lovely partner Nathalie feeding Cillian. Bernie is a yoga instructor – can you tell by the way he’s sitting?

My Mom chatting with Mr. G as he has a rest on the newly painted swing.

Here we are having a fun swing together!  And of course the paparazzi was in full swing for this fun photo opportunity.

All in all we had a pretty magical day! I hope you Mothers out there were able to celebrate in your own special way too!

Thank you for letting me share a bit of our family celebration with you!

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I hope you all had an amazing weekend!  Our weekend was mostly a work and Reno weekend (i did babysit my sweet grandson Cillian for a few hours on Saturday).  As you see here Mr. G is repainting the deck.  Those white bits are primer covering up the raw exposed wood.

This is what the deck looked like before.  Mr. G power washed the living daylights out of the deck to remove flaking paint.

I repainted the carpet on the deck a mottled green colour (three shades of green).  The edge has to have small checks painted all around – a very tedious job indeed. I will tape off the edges with green painters tape to prevent myself from going too haywire with the paint .

The old park bench has seen better days – i think this year might be it’s last year but until we turf it I may as well give it a fresh coat of paint right?

Doesn’t that look better? As you can see i painted one purple slat a darker green colour just because i didn’t want to go searching for the purple paint.

The front porch and sidewalk were looking very dingy so we bought some mauve porch and floor paint and i painted them as well. 

This is what my hands looked like at the end of the day – all painty .  It took forever to remove the paint.  We went out for dinner last night and i noticed i had brilliant green paint on my legs and taupe deck paint on my arm.  I am not one of those neat painter folks.

Now i have a bunch of magical garden metal pieces of art to repaint.  I designed them about 14 years ago and a fellow who owned a metal shop cut all of the shapes out with a computerized MIG welder machine.  They all need sanding down and repainting again.  I add glitter to the star and the spiral for that extra bit of sparkle!

Years ago i tried to start a business selling my garden art pieces.  The only problem is it took a couple of hours to paint them, I had to pay for each of them to be cut out not to mention i had to double the costs in order to make a bit of money.  If i wanted to wholesale my items they cost way too much for consumers to buy so i ended up abandoning the venture.  But i did end up owning some magical garden art plus all of my family and friends owned a piece of art for their gardens – whether they wanted it or now !

See you all tomorrow!

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On my art table today

A couple of weeks ago i received an envelope with this flyer “Do you Doodle?” and three pieces of cardboard from the Surrey Hospice Society. I am not sure how they got my address but of course I’ll participate. I’m having some problems working on the cardboard – it doesn’t take pencil crayons and watercolours too well.  Maybe when i start playing with micron pens I’ll have better luck!  After going to the Hospice societies website i see that they have asked celebrities, artists, politicians and Sports Stars to create amazing doodles that will be auctioned off during an event.

Since Mr. G and I live in a small magic cottage we don’t have tons of storage space. So I thought it might be nice to have a face cloth towel caddy to mount on the wall.  I began drawing up some ideas (I’d show you the sketches only Mr. G already threw them out ) and gave Mr. G a couple of options.  As always he tends to create something even fancier than i had drawn. I’m very happy with the results.  It’s fun to collaborate with Mr. G – he can pretty much make anything i can envision out of wood!  If you’d like to view two videos where Mr. G and i collaborate on a sketch of a crow caddy i came up with check this out:

Art Tool Caddy part one

Art Tool Caddy part two

The project was featured in Studios Magazine (Spring 2010)  a couple of years ago. It was a project focused on recycling – the wood and tin cans are all discards.

That’s it for today – i plan on going to a coffee shop while the housecleaners come today to work some more on my doodle/creation for the Hospice Society.

See you all tomorrow!

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As you will recall on Friday I had landscapers over fixing up the front yard.  They removed the butt ugly cedar bush as well as the three pyramid cedars (which were dead on one side) – the only thing that remained was the yucca plant.  The Large rhododendron near the house ended up biting the big one as it fell over when the landscapers were putting the cloth down. It simply fell over – the root ball was so small and the trunk was rotten on the inside. The gardeners marvelled at how it even had some buds on it. 

Mr. G and i were faced with an empty garden so had to go out to buy shrubs – they look so tiny compared to what they used to be however we are thrilled with how you can see the magic cottage much better when you come around the corner.  The yard looks tidier.  The magic cottage looks pretty juicy today as it’s raining. How lucky we are that the rain held off all weekend.  My muscles are so sore from all of the yardwork – but it’s a good kind of sore – we’re very happy with the results.

Last Friday I spoke about Landscaping as a metaphor for your life and how important it was to goal set.  You DO get a lot more accomplished when you goal set.  Brian Tracy talks about goal setting in the book “Goals” as well as in his book “Eat that Frog”. Jim Rohn talks about goal setting too in his books and audio CD’s. In the Success Principles, Jack Canfield talks about doing 5 things every day towards your goals (which is very do-able and less daunting when you look at a HUGE goal).

Whenever i am overwhelmed and don’t know what to focus on I go to my flipchart or whiteboard and create a mindmap about what i want to create.  Usually in the middle i have my main goal with radiating lines coming off of it.  At each of the spokes is either a step (an action step) or a mini goal that is a sub goal of my Main Goal.  If you don’t know what mindmapping is all about check out this great article by Moshe Mikanovsky .

Here is an old mindmap i created on my whiteboard.

Spring fling craft fair and swap

I went to check out Nicci’s Creative Finds Spring Fling craft fair and swap yesterday and picked up some stamps and fibres for my teens Dream Journal Workshops.  There were some wonderful finds there – lots of people were selling their no longer needed craft supplies at awesome prices. 

Teens Dream Journal DVD in New Zealand!

My friend Wendy of Late Start studio received her Teens Dream Journal DVD the other day and blogged about it! I’m so happy you like it Wendy and will be using it with your students as well as recommending the DVD to teachers in the near future! Stay tuned for a guest post from Wendy in the very near future – she’s an amazing educator and all around beautiful spirit.  I’m so happy to have met Wendy (online ).

Visual Bio – someone asked if they could see my visual Bio enlarged?  Here it is!

I’m so excited that tomorrow is the Time Machine Blast-off bonus Day!  If you order Creating Time from an online bookseller tomorrow you’ll receive over $125 worth of Artella Merchandise!  Stay tuned!

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On good Friday my friend Cathy brought her sister and niece and nephew over to the magic cottage for a tour and a bit of crafting.  Here are the eager beavers who can’t wait to dive into their frame project – Kaitlyn 8 and Ryder 4 years old. Aren’t they beyond adorable?

The kids had so much fun choosing their paint colours and then finding all kinds of embellishments to accent their fun creations!

Kaitlyn found some friendly plastic (broken jewellery) from over 25 years ago and a fimo mouth i created for a college project from 23 years ago. The legs were from an abandoned project. Who knew that being a packrat would come in handy? Kaitlyn was very pleased with her frame.

Ryder had fun with glitter, buttons and a variety of embellishments.  I even found a fun foam number 4 for him to use!  More is more right? Cool frame Ryder!

During the short tour of the Magic Cottage (it is a cottage after all ) Kaitlyn spied a couple of trolls in one of my shrines upstairs.  She squealed with delight and said she too collected trolls. I told her i had a collection of trolls too and that later on she could pick a troll to keep. She instantly gave me a BIG HUG!!!!  So when i pulled out my troll collection the kids did a Troll line up – easier to see them that way.   I said that both of them could pick a large troll and a tiny troll.  I’m not sure if the craft or the Troll choosing session was the highlight of their visit . 

At the end of the visit Kaitlyn, Ryder and I piled onto the bed for a quick photo.  What a wonderful end to a fun visit!  Thanks for visiting Ryder and Kaitlyn!

Soon I’ll be off to babysit my little grandbaby Cillian.  I can’t wait until he is old enough to craft! See you tomorrow!

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