Author: Jamie

I Made This

I Made This JRS

Remember when you were a kid & shared your creations with delight?

Maybe you even got to stick your art on the fridge for the whole world to see!

Let’s bring that joyful “show and tell” feeling back with…

I Made This!

What is “I Made This!”?: Each Monday here in the studio, I’ll invite you to share what you’ve made over the week before. It can be anything – a flower arrangement, a crocheted cap, a painting, a poem, a party, an outfit, a cake! Show what you made and tell us a bit about what the experience was like for you. What inspired you? What did you learn? How were you challenged? What did you love? And hey, if you want to share the inspiration, the pattern, the recipe, the kinds of supplies you used, we’ll all be the richer for it!

To Participate: Create an “I Made This!” post on your blog and add the direct link* in the Mr. Linky below. Be a sunbeam of love as you visit other makers, celebrating their creativity and sharing inspiration along the way. It would be great if you could also link back here as an invitation to other creative hearts to jump in and share. I’ve got a badge for you if you’d like to add it to your blog.

I Made This Badge

And please know, whatever you made doesn’t have to be perfect or beautiful or even finished – though it might be. I just want us to share what we’re creating with our hearts and with our hands and to remember how much fun it can be to say, “I made this!”

Let’s make this something wonderful!

*PS A direct link is when you share the address for the actual post instead of just your blog (e.g. http://jamieridlerstudios.ca/introducting-i-made-this-monday instead of just http://jamieridlerstudios.ca)

I Made This: Spring Painting

Art Day at Jamie Ridler Studios

This weekend it’s been so good for me to take sometime off. I’ve been out in the garden, I’ve tucked into my sketchbook and Shannon and I managed to make Friday an art day at the studio!

Art Day at Jamie Ridler Studios. Palette.

If you watched my $10 Art Supply video , you’ll want to know how my porcelain display plates worked as palettes. This was my first chance to try them out and they worked like a dream! As paint palettes, these long plates had plenty of room for different colours, cleaned up like a dream and were the perfect place to rest our paintbrushes. I’d recommend this new use for familiar dinnerware!

JRS Art Day Background

One of the things I’ve learned to do is to take several pictures as I paint. First, if I like a certain stage of the work, it makes me less intimidated to continue with it because, heck, if I wreck it, I always have a picture! Plus, these paintings can make great backgrounds for jpgs for the studio!

2014-04-18 Art Day Spring Muse

On our art day, Shannon and I completed a lesson for Lifebook 2014. This lesson by Marieke Blokland of Bloknote gave us so much! It got us playing with drawing faces, exploring simple visual symbols and creating heads and backgrounds separately – and I’m sure a lot more.

I’ve been really loving how we decided to approach this course. Whether we think we’ll like a lesson or not, we do it. Whether we think we’ll like a technique or not, we try it. More and more we’re discovering how the learning is in doing something other than what we would normally do.

That’s what I made this week. How about you?

I’m sharing this post as a part of I Made This! If you want to share something you made this week, come on by and join in!

Your Life Is Your Studio

Your Life is Your Studio
Creative living belongs to everyone. You don’t have to be Mozart to invite music into your life. You don’t have to paint to add colour to your day. You don’t have to be a writer to find your own voice. But of course, you can be.

What is the last creative thing you did?

If your immediate answer was ‘nothing’ or ‘I can’t remember,’ open up the scope of your thinking or focus even more specifically on your day-to-day. If you’re an artist, think outside of the box. Look beyond what you drew or photographed or wrote. Did you whip up a meal out of what you had in the cupboard? That’s creative. Did you write a blog post? That’s creative. Did you choose to wear a particular necklace with a particular shirt? That’s creative too.

Every day you make choices that express your own unique take, your own special reaction to the world and all that goes on within it. Your life is your studio, and you are creating each and every day. You have the opportunity to create joy, passion, beauty, thought, love, whatever it is you think life needs more of, by approaching your life creatively.

I invite you to recognize and grow the creativity in your life in a very simple way. If you’re here, you likely have a journal. If not, maybe today is the day to go out and find that special book that’s going to capture your thoughts, your wonderings and your creativity. Once you have a journal, each day acknowledge something creative that you did. It can be anything. (Despite the rumours, there are no creativity police. You get to decide what your creative act of the day was) Creativity loves to be appreciated and this simple process will let it know that you recognize its presence in your life and that it is welcome.

Jamie’s creative act of the day: I cut 3 tulips from my garden and put them in a little vase by my front door. I love the gentle white against the deep blue wall of our hallway.

Now it’s your turn.

Sunshine & Icicles: The Vulnerability of Growth and Loss

Green in the Garden

After a long, dark, cold, icy, snowy winter, last weekend it was incredibly exciting to see signs of life in the garden! As we bundled up hundreds of twigs, as we pulled away piles of of last year’s fallen leaves, as we chopped through remaining patches of ice, what a joy to see green.

Every time I would find something I’d let out a big “woohoo!” and call Justin over to have a look. It felt so very good to move into spring, my favourite time of year.

And then, the next day looked like this…

Snow Day

Those poor tender exposed shoots were met with the cold and the snow.

They remind me of my heart.

For the past while, my duties as my mom’s executor slowed down and I consciously took a break, knowing that when tax time came around I’d be back in it. I’ve been feeling good, feeling strong and inspired, motivated by the new studio and all that’s coming to life here.

And now it’s April and I’m facing my loss head-on again. I’m going through Mom’s papers, seeing her signature, stumbling across her little notes to herself. I’m back in last April, when we knew she had cancer and my sister Suzie came to visit and stayed. In an instant I’m as raw as I ever, my heart vulnerable in the face of the snow and ice.

I am a tender shoot facing the spring and the snow, the icicles and the sunshine.

And like the plants in my garden, I am both vulnerable and resilient and I will move, day by day, towards life.

Sunshine & Icicles

Kundalini, Music & Following Creativity’s Lead

Every weekday morning I invite you Behind the Scenes at my studio.

Today I’m heading out to my very first Kundalini yoga class. I’ll tell you what it was like tomorrow. I’m also exploring music for the Thrive workshop. It’s exciting to discover music that connects us to earth, air, water, fire and spirit! As I follow creativity’s lead, I continue being surprised by where it leads me!

Today’s Get Ready Music: Classic Rock Wake-Up Call

Mentioned in Today’s Show:

Getting Over My Fear of Drawing:
Having Fun with Shapes & Lines
stART: Creating as We Go

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Tumblr, Interns & Answering a Morning Pages Question

Every weekday morning I invite you Behind the Scenes at my studio.

Today I fell down the Tumblr rabbit hole. Do you use Tumblr? I’m so curious to hear what you find it “just right” for. I also start working with my spring interns on projects from workshops to the website to bring more podcast collections your way. Plus, I answer a great question from Donna on the Beach about what to do with our morning pages.

Today’s Get Ready Music: Today’s Dance Club Hits

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