multitude monday / feb 24

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My friend and classmate Katie MacLennan writes a great blog called Polka Dot Soup. On it she writes a post some Mondays called “Multitude Monday.” She writes, “Mondays are about documenting the little (or big!) things in life that make me oh-so-happy. Let’s make Mondays a day to reflect on the goodies, and not the baddies.”

I also just finished Brené Brown’s book “Daring Greatly,” in which she writes, “The shudder of vulnerability that accompanies joy is an invitation to practice gratitude, to acknowledge how truly grateful we are for the person, the beauty, the connection, or simply the moment before us.”

Katie’s been doing it long enough that she’s up to 700 things (doing 10 each time). Last week I posted my first ten. Here are the ten things right now that I’m thankful for:

11. Dinner with Adam’s folks on Sunday to celebrate his birthday and his Dad’s birthday. His mom, Mary Jane, is an excellent cook! I love spending face-to-face time with family.
12. Finishing a fantastic book in four days and crying a bit at the end. (Rare for me!)
13. Grateful for being able-bodied after reading that book.
14. A great local farmer’s market to attend on Saturday.
15. Meeting friends there and having things to talk and laugh about.
16. Although I’m sick of winter (like lots of folks I think!), the textures of the snow can be stunningly beautiful.
17. I’m excited to get a hair cut this week from my favourite hair stylist Tanis Delaney in Baddeck! I’m itching for a change, and am thinking I’ll even go above the shoulders. !!
18. Feeling mildly on top of my schoolwork.
19. Having truly lovely classmates to commiserate with when I don’t.
20. A container of Mary Jane’s beef-barley soup in the fridge to eat for dinner tonight.

Posted in Day to Day Life, Food + agriculture, Leah's thoughts, Outdoors, Towns + communities | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

links loved / feb 22

linksloved1 linksloved2

Here are some things I’ve seen lately that I thought I’d share. My #1 blogging inspiration, Elise is doing them once a week now and it’s inspiring me to do the same.

Today is when Elise’s first product of the “Make29” series is released, and it’s a beautiful letterpress poster. If I had any extra money whatsoever I’d be ordering one!

Katie shares beautiful photos of a road trip she and her husband took last August to Newfoundland.

I really really loved this encouraging post at A Beautiful Mess by Emma, about re-thinking being a “failure,” and reminding me that my dream life will likely look different than how I envisioned. “Being successful in whatever you are pursing in life is never going to magically happen one day and then it’s done. It’s an ongoing thing.”

I think these reasons why being 40 is awesome could also apply to being 30, which is the age I’m turning this year.

This is a funny Twitter bio generator.

And this is a great local-to-NS gardening blog, which I read mainly because it lets me dream of summertime and growing things. (And eating fresh-grown things!)

I could spend hours looking at the gorgeous work of Chicago-based design duo INDO. (It’s all recycled materials!)

And this super-cute print of an illustration by Malaysian artist Lim Heng Swee makes me smile. Hugs keep us alive!

Enjoy your weekend!

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snow day video fun

Another storm is hitting the island today and I’m staying home from school. Adam got to work in Sydney and called me to say, “Stay home if you can.” He’s a tough guy so that was a first! Luckily we have power and Internet, and a lot of my graphic design schoolwork can be done at home and communicated about over the Internet.

As far as more of a post, today I got nothin, but I thought I would share these two videos with you. (Because really, on a snow day, productivity is already at a low. So why not watch videos on the Internet.) The first is an incredibly catchy song that I bought on iTunes after a friend shared it on Facebook, and I’ve been playing it, seriously, non-stop ever since. It makes me want to dance and dance and dance! It makes me so, well, happy.

The second video is by Alison Faulkner, who I discovered just the other day through an Instagram link by Rachel Denbow. The video is six minutes long and the gal is adorable. She talks about projects she got super excited about, that ultimately didn’t do well, but how they prepared her for stuff she did since. The idea is, just get started. Don’t put it off.

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project process // hand-lettering

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So I was thinking it would be fun to share some of my design work with you all. I’m going to start by sharing a project that’s actually just starting, and share weekly as it goes.

It’s a little scary to do this, especially since it’s a project working in something I haven’t really done too much of! (Here is my last attempt at some hand-lettering.) But, such is the design life. I have found that through practice, either in the writers’ group I used to be in, or through regular critiquing in graphic design school, it gets easier to put one’s rough work in front of others, and allow it to be judged.

Deep breath! Here we go.

So in one of my classes at school (Visual Communications III), my teacher has given us “carte blanche” to explore things that interest us, for our main assignment for the class. As long as we keep him updated with our progress, we can do pretty much whatever we want. I’ve always been intrigued by hand-lettering (see here in case you’re not familiar with what it is) so I signed up for a Skillshare course to learn it. (Full disclosure: If you want to sign up for it, and it’s your first Skillshare class, and you use this link, I get $10 off my next Skillshare class.)

So the first step in doing a hand-lettered piece is to pick the phrase you want to do. I decided I wanted to do something that related to Cape Breton, so that if it turns out really rad, I can possibly sell prints in my Etsy shop. So after watching the first video, I sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil, and thought of some ideas. (That’s the image at the top of this post.) I decided on “We are an island, a rock in the stream.” It seemed like it would be a good fit because people would recognize it, and there are lots of ways I could work with it. I didn’t want to do “Dream Big Cape Breton” because I wanted to try something new from the phrase I think about and work with all the time. The Alexander Graham Bell quote (“But for simple beauty, Cape Breton out rivals them all”) was a tad too long for what I wanted. (Edited: A keen reader noted that I may have to get permission from the songwriter to use the song lyrics if I am selling the product. I’ll look into it and let you all know in the next post on this project!)

The next step is to do a “word dump” and to write down all the words that you think of, when you think of your phrase, to mentally set the tone and start thinking of imagery.

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Then it’s time to do research. Yay for the Internet! I use Pinterest a lot (and here is my Hand Lettering board), as well as plain old Google Image Search. I save the images to my computer and then use Photoshop to make simple moodboards. Moodboards set the tone of your project and are a great way to communicate to a client or an instructor what your goals are for a piece, before you’ve even started on the design. Here are the mood boards I made:

NobleLeah_handwritingproject_moodboard1 NobleLeah_handwritingproject_moodboard2

(A note on copyright and links: when I first posted this post in February 2014, I wasn’t planning to link through to each piece I’d used in my moodboards. But, after some more thought in May 2014, I decided I should give credit to the source of each of these images, even though I’m not claiming them as my own work. So from top: coal miners striking. Old Faithful Shop window, “Same Sun Here” book cover, “Some Day I’ll Wish Upon A Star”,“Live in the Sunshine” lettering, Vintage-looking alphabet, “Pullman Yards”, Hand-lettering with a felt-tip pen, Cape Breton Satellite image, number 7, coal miners underground. Missing: I forgot to note at the time the sources for the photo of the G.A. Robertson store, the rock-in-water diagram, the rock in water image, the house on the cliff, the striking miners and the Ingonish coastline, and and went to find them again and couldn’t. )

Then, since I was so excited, I did two mini thumbnails of ideas I was already having.

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And that’s how far I’ve gotten! I’m really excited about this project, on a number of levels. One is that I can’t wait to push myself to do hand lettering, and I’m also excited to produce something cool that also represents Cape Breton pride.

And like any crit session in class, I’d love to hear your thoughts on my project so far!

(Edit: As of June 25th, Parts Two and Three have been posted and you can check them out!)

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multitude monday

multitude-monday1

My friend and classmate Katie MacLennan writes a great blog called Polka Dot Soup. On it she writes a post some Mondays called “Multitude Monday.” She writes, “Mondays are about documenting the little (or big!) things in life that make me oh-so-happy. Let’s make Mondays a day to reflect on the goodies, and not the baddies.”

I also just finished Brené Brown’s book “Daring Greatly,” in which she writes, “The shudder of vulnerability that accompanies joy is an invitation to practice gratitude, to acknowledge how truly grateful we are for the person, the beauty, the connection, or simply the moment before us.”

Katie’s been doing it long enough that she’s up to 700 things (doing 10 each time). Well, here goes nothing. Here are the ten things from the past week that I’m thankful for:

1. Songbirds coming for seeds at my bird feeder. I love watching the mourning doves walk around the porch, they’re really cute.
2. Lots of books to be read.
3. A warm home to wait out the storms in.
4. A field and woods near my house to walk in. (Picture above.)
5. Good soil on the island I live on, for growing food.
6. Lots of schoolwork to do means I won’t get bored!
7. My partner being employed doing work that he loves (even if it means working backshift sometimes).
8. Being able to spend time with him on Valentine’s Day, even though we were both too tired to do much more than eat takeout BBQ chicken.
9. My friend Catriona safely giving birth to her son Xander last week. I can’t wait til they come back to Cape Breton to visit!
10. Real, handwritten-on-paper letters in the mailbox from friends in Ontario and BC. A letter is a little piece of magic, I think.

Well, that wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be! In fact, I can think of many more. I guess I will save them for next week. Thanks, Katie, for the inspiration!

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links loved / feb 15

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Here are some things I’ve seen lately that I thought I’d share. My #1 blogging inspiration, Elise is doing them once a week now and it’s inspiring me to do the same.

First up are both from Elise (big surprise!): I love pancakes on the weekend, so I’m going to try making these pancakes tomorrow, and she wrote a fantastic list of gift ideas for the new mom. (It’s not what you think – a sponsored post of stuff to buy – but more like “things you may not have thought of that a new mom would really appreciate.”)

I read about this lady and project in my monthly copy of Chatelaine: a monthly illustrated letter from Paris. (This is going on my birthday wish list!)

Dispelling the myths that bloggers have life all perfect and figured out: Confessions of a Working Blogger Mom. I really love seeing other people’s messes!

My Halifax friend Krista wrote this great post with tips on holding a clothing swap.

Cape Breton photographer Shoshanna Fraser writes about her “A-HA” moment for taking pictures of her kids.

Beautiful custom woodworking by a Sydney, NS furniture maker.

I signed up for this last year and love getting a little dose of life coaching in my email every morning. And it’s free!

I made this soup with kale this week and it was really, really good. Next up I’m going to try kale chips.

Following the Olympics is kind of mind-blowing. The athletes can do such incredible things! I’m nowhere near their level, but it does inspire me to move and use my body to do fun stuff. The human body is incredible!

And this analysis of the Sochi 2014 logo (and a runner-up) was neat.

Enjoy your weekend!

 

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a cape breton valentine

capebretonvalentine

With a post title like that, I bet you were expecting tartan or fiddles, weren’t you?! LOL.

My dear friend Adèle LeBlanc of Margaree sent me a sweet Valentine (above) and I thought I’d share it with you all.

This week Adam has been working backshift, so I see him for about 30 minutes when I get home from school at 3:00, before he goes to work at 3:30. The first night of this routine was actually kind of nice, to have the house to myself, but as the week went on I definitely missed him. It gave me a tiny taste of what some people go through all the time, with a partner out West in Alberta or wherever.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, there were perks, like being able to play pop music that Adam hates at a high volume, and being able to cook “weird” vegetarian dishes like kale and bean soup. (Adam’s more of a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy.)

We were going to celebrate February’s trio of “holidays” (our anniversary, his birthday and Valentine’s Day are within a week of each other) by eating at the Sydney restaurant where we had our first date, Trio at the Cambridge Suites. But, he’s worked a long week so I think it would be a lot sweeter to get takeout and spend February 14th on our sofa, watching Olympic coverage.

Next week it will be three whole years since we first met. It still blows my mind, not just that the time has passed, but that he still loves me. When I think about how awesome I think he is, and then I realize, “Holy shit, that guy loves crazy ol’ me!”, well, I feel pretty damn lucky. It’s like I still have a crush on him, and I forget that I’m his girlfriend, and then I realize it, like a goldfish with a short memory, and it makes me happy all over again.

Yup. That’s me. A goldfish.

Anyway. But the great thing about Valentine’s Day is, it’s not just about romantic love! It’s just a nice spot to sort of stop and go, “Wow, there’s so many rad, awesome, lovely people in my life!”

And, of course, it’s a fantastic excuse to eat chocolate or cinnamon hearts. Whatever your preference.

I hope that whether you’re partnered or single, that you’ve got love in your life, today and every day. Happy Valentine’s Day!

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