I’ve been on a mission this year to do more of everything - to actually do the things I like, and care about, rather than just endlessly thinking about them. I’d say it’s been semi successful so far. I’ve done at least something every single day, which is honestly more than I can say for some previous days in past years of my life. It’s still proving a challenge to fit everything in, especially around going to work, but I do feel like things are going in the right direction.

I painted for the first time in many years, and found it just as soothing and cathartic as I needed it to be. As I’m at the beginning of creating a new collection, there are just about a thousand images and ideas floating around inside my brain, and pushing some of them out and collating them into one amalgamated piece feels like a helpful part of the process.

infected wisdom teeth & a fox jaw, march 2023 acrylic on board

I disappeared for a few months from this page and my general social media presence as rose eerie - I worked incredibly hard getting the fourth issue of 5.18 Magazine out (you can find it here) however this resulted in my desk and workspace becoming a doom pile of chaos, a literal hell-scape that sat like a looming demon in front of my sewing machine, preventing me from getting back to creating unless I faced and organised it. I think it also served as a perfect procrastinating opportunity, a reason to put things off for a while, give myself time to reset. I’ve missed sewing more than I realised, and now feel re-inspired to get back to it - writer’s block almost suitably cured by a few months spent reading (The Wasp Factory, The Lord of the Flies, Witches Bane and most recently American Psycho) and generally sorting the rest of my life out, it feels as though there is now more space in my brain to work again. We all need a holiday sometimes.