Athena Dreams Design

A Gypsy Girl Special

I'm over on Gypsy Girl's Guide today with a special for all my Gypsy Girls. Go on over and have a visit and be sure to read some of the other latest posts - the gypsy girls have been word-smithing and idea-making and being all-around inspiring.

February 2011 .:. Biz Goals

Pink Tulip necklace, available here.

January's goals were short, and really really sweet. I mean really sweet. I can't remember a month that was more fun, because my goals were fun. I think we all sometimes have a tendency to make work, well, work, when it may be work, but it's also what we love to be doing everyday (or most days), and so, it really is fun. Did someone, sometime, somewhere, really say that work should be any of these things:

• dreary
• negatively competitive 
• heart-breaking
• soul-sucking
• the thing you do until you get to go home to your real life

Yeah, I don't think so either. Most of us who come here at the beginning of each month are working for ourselves, (or are working to get there) we are growing businesses around ideas/talents/things we love to do, and sometimes we lose touch with loving what we are doing, so I am here to remind myself and all of you, let's get back in touch with that feeling: no matter the stressful days, the overworked evenings, the crazy deadlines, and the such like, we are here because we love what we are doing, and how lucky are we!

SO, here were my JANUARY goals:

1. Figure out what working smarter is, and how I can make it a regular and central part of my life and my work.
2. Create for fun and joy.

I can say I successfully did all of them. I am not done with #1 or #2, and I worked them all month long. I am going to keep my February goals pretty simple again, and see how that goes.

February:

1. Identify 3-5 new product categories to create with my art/design. Research. Prototype.
2. Find a mentor. I have NO idea how to do this, but the first step is always putting it out there. I want to find a mentor who is also an artist and a designer, and has worked their art and design into brilliantly placed, licensed product that are seen and bought and loved all over the world. 
3. I think #2 above might go under the category of working smarter.
4. Repeat #2 from last month.

OK, here we are, the shortest month of the year, so it's gonna go even faster than the one that just passed us by. Let's take February by storm, in a crazy, fabulous cloud of creativity, ideas, colour, movement and inspiration! Happy February everyone!

________________________

IF you are new to The Meetup or would like to play along, here's the scoop:

• Post a list of your business related goals for the current month on the 1st of each month on your blog. {If the 1st falls on a weekend, post on the following Monday.}
• Come back over here and leave a link to your goals blog post in the comments of my current month's goals.
• And then {and this is the most important part, since we are a community} visit all the links in the comments, stop in and say hello, have a conversation, meet and greet and etc.
• You can also "meet" the Meet Up peeps, go here and visit the links.

3 Weeks In

 

• My painting studio is almost clean. All the stuff is off the floor, most of it has found a home, and what has not found a home needs to live elsewhere. (That's why our garage looks like it "did" - see below)

• I have started to learn to use Wordpress. And it's fun, way more fun than I ever thought it might be, tho if I am being completely honest with myself, I secretly hoped it would be.

• After many years of knitting, I am dipping my toes into the pool of design. It makes me a little scared, and very excited - I have found that this is always a great combo in any new endeavor.

 • After almost a year, our cat has decided that she likes my husband. When he gets in bed, she no longer hisses and growls at him. That makes us all very happy.

• After one year and 4 months of living in our house, we cleaned out the garage. When we moved in we basically piled everything in the garage that we either didn't immediately need, or weren't sure what to do with. We unearthed many things we had forgotten about, and we are keeping too many of them, but getting rid of more. Behind all the boxes and rolled up rugs, we found the shelves. Still no room to park a car, but hey, there had to be space for that extra couch we don't know what to do with...

• Three days of sun, after many days of gray, and more than a few days of rainy since before Christmas, makes the whole world a new place.

• Week 3, we're right in the middle of week 3, and I feel as though I am right where I should be.

The Word for 2011

Looking back at my words for the past 3 years, this year's definitely diverges from the flock. My first year of the word was 2008 when I chose Balance, in 2009 I was all about Resilience, and last year I was Passion. I will spare you from evaluating last year's word or any of the other years here, but suffice it to say that each word proved to be important and prospicious in its own unique way, and my hope is that this years will be no different.

So a few evenings before the big year-change-over-event, my husband and I were sitting around the fire, talking about what we wanted to see and create in 2011:

• What things we wanted to stop dreaming about and make Real (yes with a capital R)
• What things had been on our life lists for a while but now no longer seemed relevant and needed to be removed
• What top things did we want to accomplish in 2011
• What things were feeling absolutely necessary to add/change/delete/remake etc.

And in the midst of our conversation my word came to me: Stride. I resisted it at first, it sounded kind of funny, dorky even. It felt so basic and elementary. Stride wears Keen shoes, and hats to keep the rain off its head. Stride carries sun screen, and a bottle of water and probably never wears mascara. But hey, that's me too. And then it came to me: simple. elementary. basic. = no drama. no pie in the sky. no, oh let's just say it, no bullshit.

I got this clear picture in my head of me walking, I was on a hill and I was walking with a full open stride. Legs fully extended, hips loose, ankles firm, knees happy, and I was moving, I was for lack of a better phrase, Hitting my Stride.

There's nothing I would like more for this year than to hit my stride with my art, with my business, with my painting, with the illustration styles I have been experimenting with, feeling out how my art as jewelery idea will go, and committing myself to using my words more, and writing, a lot. Full stride owning who I am. To take full and total ownership of who I am, what my art is, and not run with it but rather, stride into it.

Oh, and in the vision I had, I was smiling. Really big smiles, whilst striding along on a mountain trail, in the sun, birds are singing, and the grass is swaying in the breeze. Yeah, so here I am striding in to 2011.

January 2011 (!) .:. Biz Goals

After just 3 days of stepping away from work, from schedules, from anything that started with "I must..." I am not feeling ready to start it all up again, which then leads me to realise that I don't make enough down time for myself.

I don't have enough time to regenerate and reinvogorate my ideas, my creativity, my business, and this needs to be addressed in a very big way. A friend posted something this weekend that I need to reiterate for myself: Work Smarter, not Harder.

Right this minute, I have absolutely NO idea how to incorporate working smarter into my life, I actually can't even quite fathom what it totally means, but I know I want it badly. I know how to work harder, but working harder often always ends up with me working longer, and packing more stuff into a day, and sitting in front of the computer for hours that are ridiculously long, and leaving out many of the things that make a life fun and enjoyable and, well, a Life. Translation: I might be working dumber.

I think my #5 for December's goals is a start toward the Working Smarter thing, and #6 for sure, and definitely #7, and then I can't help but wonder, with all the things on my to-do list this year that carried over from month to month to month, how much of that is burn out and how much of it is overwhelm, and how much of it is that I have served up far too much for myself.

So here was December. I got none of it done, except My Word, (more on that later), because I had too many deadlines and too much work that had nothing whatsoever to do with this list of things I want to create, and everything to do with making money to make the budget work.

December Goals

1. website
2. New Resin jewelery designs
3. New Colour Story pieces
4. Finish my announcements to send to other blogs/websites
5. Create for fun and joy instead of deadlines and money
6. Let go of the things that are creating too much stress, and re-evaluate their importance/priority
7. Spend some face to face quality time with friends
8. Think about my word for 2011

SO, all that's to say, my January 2011 Goals:

1. Figure out what working smarter is, and how I can make it a regular and central part of my life and my work.
2. Create for fun and joy.

Hope you all had wonderful holidays, and am looking forward to an amazing 2011 with you all!

________________________

IF you are new to The Meetup or would like to play along, here's the scoop:

• Post a list of your business related goals for the current month on the 1st of each month on your blog. {If the 1st falls on a weekend, post on the following Monday.}
• Come back over here and leave a link to your goals blog post in the comments of my current month's goals.
• And then {and this is the most important part, since we are a community} visit all the links in the comments, stop in and say hello, have a conversation, meet and greet and etc.

A Thankful Sale

As a thank you to all of you who have stopped by to visit, to all of you who have purchased from my shop, and generally supported me in this life as an artist: A Thankful Sale!

From Friday the 26th thru Monday the 29th - Buy 2 or more items and receive 10% off your order when you use the coupon code JOY10.

I will also be offering free gift wrapping for this 4-day sale so let me know on your order if your purchase is for gifting and if you'd like it wrapped.

I hope you all are continuing to celebrate the season of grateful this weekend and having many beautiful moments with all your friends and family and those you love.

The Worry Game

Along with my brown eyes, 2 slightly tipped eye teeth, a button nose, and an inclination to go barefoot most all the time, I inherited the worry gene from my mother. There have been times when it has taken over my life, and other times it is running quietly in the background. It is almost always there.

In the midst of changes in my working life, the worry bug has been visiting me lately and so rather than blindly giving into that voice, I've been searching for ways to take its power away, to render it speechless, to pull it's metaphorical plug.

A few weeks ago I had to cancel a trip that I had much looked forward to, due to some unforseen things that came up, and so was home for the weekend unexpectedly. My husband had a gig that weekend and he said there would be a will-call ticket for me if I decided to get over my grumpy disappointment and come. So I surprised my grumpy-disappointed-self and I went.

It's funny how things happen. Don't we all say that at different times for different reasons? At the show that night the woman who had put the whole thing together talked about how she had been nervous while rehearsing and putting the show together. She is a drummer, an amazing jazz drummer who is in her early 70s now, and she had focused this show around her debut as a singer. A place out of her comfort level, out of the known, out of the Safe limits of what she is used to doing on stage.

While rehearsing for the show and feeling worried sometimes, she came across a quote, couldn't remember who had said it, but she wanted to share it with the audience: Worry is the biggest misuse of imagination. And I sat there, in the dark audience, and felt she was speaking directly to me. Sure, she was speaking to all of us, but for that second, she was speaking directly to me, directly to my heart.

So, what was I to do with that but take it to heart. I have imagination in abundance (thankfully) and so each moment of worry I have attempted to actively re-direct to imagination. Each second of doubt, look to imagination. Each hour of will we be able to pay all our bills this month, well, you got it, come on in imagination, because Worry sure isn't going to pay those bills, but I have a pretty good hunch that Imagination will come up with some solutions.

I have come up with some new ideas and some new projects, and my absolute newest (and for now my most exciting) one is that phrase painted on the wall of my studio, very large, hard to miss, and always in very plain sight. A reminder to that worry voice, that there are other ways to go, and different ways to play. Worry is the biggest misuse of imagination. Mm-hmm, that's what I need to hear...

40 Weeks In

• My re-entry from being at Squam has been slow and steady, with many moments of "OH, here I am, right where I left me." Painting has taken on a whole new level of clarity and has usurped most all of my dreams at night. The dreaming, and the dreams: wonderful flashes of colour and idea.

• It is feeling very fall-ish. You know how the days are warm and sunny but the breeze is carrying just a light note of chilly. I love this time in the year.

• I have started making some jewelery again that is available at RooTs Collective. Creating pieces for one shop and not trying to fulfill huge orders = Fun Fun Fun. Am thinking to add some jewels to my Etsy shop this fall, stones and beads and metals: such a different way to play with colour

• I wish I had done more of these XXX Weeks In over the course of this year, but then I think about what I've been reading in The Gifts of Imperfection, and I let that little thought about how I could have done things so much better and so much more "perfect" flutter away on a breeze.

• Colour can never be thought about too much.

• You can read some words I wrote about Language over at the Gypsy Girls Guide. And then stay a bit to read some of the other guest posts that have been put up since Alex is on hiatus. Some wonderful things happening over there.

• Life is so much an excercise in holding on and letting go, but learning when and where to practice each, seems more pertinent than ever to me these days.

A Little Bit of Teeny Tiny

Paintings for the Teeny Tiny Art Show at Three Graces Gallery

My teeny tiny brushes create colour and pattern, shape and shadow, line and form. They also create a feeling of fullness and completion, joyfulness and calm, problem and solution inside me.

Last week, when I was painting and painting and painting, and in between breathing and walking and remembering to eat dinner, I realised: There are some places, some times, some things that make me feel totally and completely at home inside myself, and painting is one of those things. There are moments when I feel as though I am inhabiting all the space inside this body, all the air passing in and out of my lungs, all the muscles and veins and tendons, and I am well and truly home.

There is so much more I notice when I am truly at "home":

• the sun has moved just slightly in the sky, and no longer streams blindingly in through the front windows as it did a month ago
• turquoise, while still my favourite, seems to have been eclipsed by golden yellows this time around
• there is lots of noise in the quiet
• often times when thinking a thought out to it's very conclusion, I end up with several more things to think about
• people who eat dinner on the patio at the restaurant next door sing happy birthday songs, a lot, and like to mimic operatic voices, and I sing along, softly, from my studio
• gray is almost always so much more than you think it is

And you? When and where do you feel truly at home, all the way to the very core of yourself?

How We Work

This spring and summer my studio has seen a lot of activity - painting for a few different shows, and working on illustrations for a big project, and through all of these deadlines I have found myself pondering my work habits — specifically my lack of cleaning up at the end of a day.

This week though I came to an important realisation: I am not neat when I am in process. In fact, I am the antithisis of neat. All my tools: brushes, paint, rags, pens, paper, xacto knives, and on and on, need to be out and within easy reach. When an idea strikes, or a problem pops up that I need to solve quickly, I work best when everything is right there ready to use.

And so this week, I declare to myself that when I am in full create mode my space is a mess, and truly I like it that way. I know so many people who clean up at the end of every day, and I have always so admired that, but I feel so free declaring that I, in fact, do not work well that way. Oh the freedom that comes with a realisation...

SO, how do you work? DO you pick everything up at the end of a day, or do you leave things out till a project is finished? Do you never clean up your creative work space, and leave it always in flux? I am always so interested to hear about how other people work, so please share . . .