in which she naps and i dream

the other day when my daughter woke up from her afternoon nap, and i asked her, as usual, "did you have a good nap?", she said "yes", and added, "what did you do?" i told her i worked. but it really didn't feel like work.

i did this:

and next time you napped i did this:

and then you napped many more times, and  i made many more of those, and came up with this, which is still a work in progress, so please keep up the nice and long naps!

so while you were napping, my lovely, and having sweet dreams, i was trying to make my dreams come true. little by little. but sometimes, like now, i wish i could just nap as sweetly as you do.

MOYO 4 is here!

...and i am in it! this was such great news to come home to. my ankles hurt  and my eyelids are drooping, so unfortunately i can't read the issue right now (what do ankles have to do with reading, you ask? i say, don't ask) - but i can proudly share the fact that my design (remember the time i thought i was lucky?) was the first runner-up in the MOYO Floral Twist Design Brief. congrats to the winner, Antonija M, second runner-up, fellow designer friend Majo BV, and third runner-up, Rebecca Beck.

below are my entries:

flower bed 

flower people

flower stems

these are from my flower power collection, and they are the first florals i have ever designed. i am glad the judges thought they are "simple and effective". i always strive for simple, bold and playful.

ok, this was old work. next time i will share new work. i am working on it.

i don't have time to write this!

i am not sure how much time i have before my baby wakes up - just checked on him and came back - so i have to make this one brief. here i am, drinking tea with one hand- tea bag tea, no time to make real tea - eating mana'eesh with the other- google that if you don't know what it is, no time to go off topic - and typing with both. this week, whenever i have a small window of free time that i can spend awake, i have been drawing these characters for a kids' product i am working on.

i am sure you can guess the theme.

i would like to draw worms. i am tired of owls. today designer Onneke feels fish are the new owl. i love them. i think worms would be great too.

everyone is still asleep . yes! now i can post this and maybe get some rest.

what was i thinking?

recently i have been thinking what was i thinking when i was planning to blog regularly, or to blog at all...or to get anything done other than changing diapers, nursing, singing lullabies, rocking, cooking, running around a toddler begging her not to wake the baby, taking pictures, doing the dishes, the laundry, filming my babies, and loving them to death. 

but as i said when i started this blog, i am not fully satisfied with myself unless i am working on a creative project. so there have been days when i have felt empty, but also days like today when i find the time and energy to achieve tangible results and meet deadlines. yes! deadlines! what was i thinking?

i can't share much at this point, but here's a little peak into one of the designs i am developing for a line of kids' products.

i have also been obsessed with worms. but you will have to wait to hear all about those. hopefully a day like this will come by again soon. when i can just listen to the birds, sip tea, blog away, and miss my sleeping babies.

red tulips in my city

my thoughts have been scattered lately. it's partly hormonal (if you're new here, i had a baby almost a month ago), partly due to lack of proper, uninterrupted sleep, and partly due to recent events in my beloved cities of boston and cambridge (i am sure you read the news, not just blogs!). so times have been crazy, to say the least, and i need to reorganize myself. so that's what i mainly (and unsuccessfully) tried to do today (in addition to meeting a deadline about which i can't blog yet.)

i also went on a walk to clear up my mind. it was a warm day and red tulips were everywhere.

if you like flowers and florals, you should check out prolific designer Michelle Drew's (who says she would be even more prolific if she could design in her sleep) fun A-Z Flowers Project at Pattern & Co. and you can join in the fun, if you like! i am hoping to do so before she reaches the letter "T", but i am not sure that will happen. i am hoping to get organized first. i am not sure when that will happen. i am also hoping to be able to blog regularly. friday evenings, more specifically.

till then, i am hoping to have a plain, regular, normal week.

an unfinished circle

today i woke up to great news. well "waking up to" is a figure of speech here, since i didn't really sleep  - my 3 weeks old son made a lot of noise all night - so the truth is "i switched on my laptop to great news." 

the big news being that one of my main goals for this year was accomplished: studio aliQue was featured on Print and Pattern, which is THE BLOG when it comes to pattern design. you can read the feature here.

exactly one year ago, it is on the Print and Pattern blog that i found out about the online course The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design, offered by Rachael Taylor and Beth Nicholls. thanks to what i learned in that course, my work has now been featured on that same blog where my new journey started. it's as if things have come full circle. although i am not sure this figure of speech is appropriate either, since it sounds like an ending, when things are actually just beginning. 

so here's to unfinished circles and new beginnings!

note: starting next week, i will try to blog on thursday evenings. we'll see how that goes. please don't expect any masterpieces, just making sense and using proper grammar is good enough at this point - it all depends on how many hours of sleep i am allowed by my tiny boss, this funny high-maintenance new little creature in my life.

the clouds before the quiet

i have decided to take a mama break for a couple of weeks. this means i will not be blogging regularly, but whenever i have the time, energy, and desire to do so. sorry if this sounds too philosophical, or too cliché, but life goes by so fast and i want to stop and cherish these moments. obviously, all moments are precious, but i want to live these first weeks with my son slowly. i want to watch him get used to this world, and notice how my daughter grows to be a big sister. i don't want to feel (as i have done in the past) that my life is full of joy but i am not there to enjoy it. there is nothing more sad than that schizophrenic state (in which i have been) when you feel like you are happy, but cannot enjoy your happiness, as if you were watching your life as a movie, where good things are happening to an actor who is playing your part. ok, i'll stop here. 

a fact about me - in addition to the fact that i have occasional bouts of philosophical gravity like the one you just witnessed -  is that i don't like unfinished projects. so before taking this little break, i wanted to complete my cloud family. here are the latest members:

Baby

Swimmy (hommage to Leo Lionni)

and here's the bunch of them:

cloud family

before i go to live my happiness, i want to share words of wisdom i read in my daughter's first book which was a gift from my mom, called "Awake to Nap" by Nikki McClure. it is an unfinished alphabet book. at the end of the book, there is a note by the author:

I made this book while my infant son napped. I could only cut the pictures while he slept so the pictures are small and quick gleanings from my new life as a mother. The dining room table became my studio. I would put down my pencil as lightly as possible so as not to disturb the baby, hoping for a few more moments of work before I, too, had to take a nap.

The alphabet was never finished intentionally; the naps were too short and life too thrilling to justify going all the way to Z. I no longer had the attention span and neither did my baby. We were too awake.

in a way my mother's gift to my daughter was also a gift to me. a gift that told me to know what's important. i don't always know, but i am learning.

i am looking forward to not seeing you next week. maybe the week after. but please don't take it personally.