I chuckle every time I have to photograph new marshmallow flavors (in this case, espresso, which we’ll have for sale in a few days - they all got snatched up within an hour at the BK Flea). I mean, how many different ways can you photograph a marshmallow? But strangely enough, many ways and I am becoming a bit obsessive over them, mostly because they aren’t looking like marshmallows to me so much anymore, but abstract shapes with weird textures, particularly the oddly shaped ends of the pan that don’t get packaged up.

It’s all part in a series of projects I’m doing with the bits and pieces of materials that aren’t used but discarded from the byproducts of the biz (well, except for mushrooms which are my other photographic obsession. I’ll show you those soon).

I’ve also been toying with the idea of selling photographic prints for awhile. It’s been a long process, however, and I’m nowhere near opening up shop. It’s partly due to the fact that I’m feeling a little bit unsatisfied with certain technical aspects of the photos like sharpness and resolution, etc., but largely due to the fact that I’ve been searching for some kind of theme to unify the work - I don’t want to just throw together a collection of my favorite photos - and so this is where I’ve been struggling. I think over the years I *have* developed a certain style - the product shots are pretty minimal and monochromatic and props are used sparingly, but that may be more to do with the fact that I very well may be a lazy stylist. I am, however, becoming more and more interested in photographing food as completely abstract forms which is why I find marshmallows and mushrooms appealing, but….would anybody buy this stuff? (OK, Nichole, I know you would). I can only imagine it if they were blown up big, to take that abstraction even further with an exaggeration of size that is out of context which is why I’m obsessing over sharpness and resolution.

In any case, I’ve got some plans to push these abstractions further. We’ll see where they go.

I’m in overdrive work mode again. Knee deep in the crazy, juggling 3 projects. Insane. Never experienced deadlines like this.

But as busy as I am, I’m really itching to work on some of these projects that I’ve started in my downtime, particularly the ones that involves the teabags. Why does it work like that? When work is slow, all I want to do is sit on the couch and do nothing but surf the fashion and gossip blogs and eat Doritos (yes, my weakness and I’ve had whole twitter conversations about them with other fans), but when I’m up to my ears in work, the motivation suddenly appears out of nowhere. Infuriating.

But all this to say…I’m back. I’m feeling infinitely better. The antibiotics have kicked in. Not as lost or depressed as I was feeling for several months back. I have energy again. I’d just like a few more hours in the day, please.

PS. I did an interview with my friend Amy for her Playlist series for the Herman Miller blog. The first in the series was with Nichole (didn’t I say she was my parallel universe twin?). You can read mine here.

Trying not to focus on how slow things are progressing on the ChangingMyCareer front. There have been many distractions and so much administrative stuff for the business to take care of, not to mention the hours it takes to respond to emails and inquiries every day. I’m doing a bit of drawing but not sure where it’s taking me. Instead, I’m trying to ride each day and trust the pace that things are taking, but still, it’s been quite challenging to find solid blocks of time to work on anything. I think if you have young kids, you’ll know what I mean. The day becomes so disjointed when one kid has to be dropped off and picked up every day and the other kid has an opposite schedule from the first. You learn really fast to work in 2-3 hour time chunks, which is not always conducive to productivity and sometimes not enough time to get anything rolling. It always kills me if I have to stop to go pick up the kid when I’m on some kind of roll, knowing that the momentum might be gone, but that is life as a working parent, isn’t it? We adjust.

We have never had full time childcare. We could never afford it. It’s always been about juggling work and family schedules for the last 6 years to make full time hours work on part time childcare. This is why it was such a relief when Mia started Kindergarten this year and why I’m excited to have some sort of predictable schedule in place once Claudine goes to school 4 days a week in September. It’s not a full day - the day ends at 2 for her and 3 for Mia, but still. It’s more stability in time than we’ve ever had.

This also will mean the end of our relationship with out part time nanny this summer. She has been with us for 6 years, 2 days a week, since Mia was 3 months old and I’m really not looking forward to the conversation that we’ll need to have. I am not so good with confrontations of that nature. It’s a big change for all of us and I can’t imagine being in a situation such as hers, to spend so much time with these kids, watching them grow up, helping them grow up, and then one day…gone.

This is something I’m working on. I’m going to post work in progress once in awhile even though I normally hate to do that, but in an effort to let go of that unrealistic perfectionism, I thought it might be a good idea. Posting things might also make me more accountable. I don’t know what it is exactly, but this week has been a rather strange week. A break in normal routine for sure and I don’t feel like I got a single thing done, but also losing some focus on all these ideas that I’ve had in my head. I know that it’s normal in the cycle of creativity to question the validity of what you’re doing once in a while, so I guess I’m just stuck in the bottom of that cycle. I’m starting a short 4 day freelance project tomorrow so I’m hoping that will kick me back into gear, but I’m also really ready for the week to be over so that I can start new again. Anyone else feel like this week just dragged by?

I think I’ve hit a wall. I was coasting along all happy and motivated, planning my (hopeful) escape route and then I started drawing.

It was not good.

I mean it was fine, really, but I’ve been so out of practice that it made me wonder how I even made it through art school. Now I’m not going to say this to brag, but I will tell you this story just to make a point. When I was applying to colleges here in NY, all the art schools except Parsons had scholarship competitions as part of their admissions process. One school (Cooper Union) had us do a take home exam where you had to complete specific art tasks and then hand them in while the faculty looked over your portfolio. Two schools had us take the art test on location at the school with a bunch of other hopeful bushy-tailed candidates (Pratt, SVA). We had to do things like draw a crumpled up piece of paper and take off our shoes and draw them. I won full scholarships to 2 of those schools and the Parsons guy told me my portfolio was in the top 3 portfolios that he had seen that year.

Again, I’m not telling you this to brag, but on the contrary, I’m mentioning this because it’s funny how little it means, then and especially now. Talent might be a gift, but if you don’t keep at it, you risk squandering it away. As I struggled to finish my first year of bootcamp at Cooper (we had to enroll in like 8 or 9 different classes a semester. Yeah, you heard that right), I realized deep down that while I was technically proficient, I lacked a certain passion and uninhibited creativity that many of the other students had. I just didn’t have it and the work that I did was not good. Some of you may already know my struggles with art, but while it’s true that I lost interest in art that first year, I also gave up on it and myself. I felt totally uninspired and deflated (though I would later gain it back with music).

I have this problem, see. I’m both cursed and blessed with being a perfectionist and I tend to give up on something if it’s not turning out the way I envision. It’s incredibly frustrating and I know it’s stupid. I tend to focus on the goal and not the process, even though I like the idea of process and it seems that I *should* like the process of, well…process. So I found myself reverting back to these unrealistic expectations that I set out for myself. I did a drawing and it wasn’t good. I shouldn’t have cared so much about the way it looked, but should have been encouraged by the fact that I was trying to draw again. And instead of getting upset with myself, I should have just kept going, working at it and doing it over and over and over again. But the perfectionist, Type A with a capital T, control freak in me didn’t make that happen.

I’m starting over again tomorrow. The good news is that I have a lot of ideas right now. The bad news is that I have a lot of ideas right now and can’t focus on anything. Seriously, I’m all over the place, but I look over at the girls and see how freely they draw and paint. They will both literally draw the same person figure over and over, day after day. I have whole sketchbooks and piles of loose papers with these people, but there’s a lesson in there! Focus and perseverance will get you to the place you want to be.

And before you say it, I know. I get it from Claudine all the time. “Chill out! You have to chillax, mommy!”.

Claudine’s potato people drawings are evolving. She’s been drawing them much like the above for awhile now. As you can see, she’s added hair, ears, fingers and shoes from her early versions. She’s also learning how to write and spell (”mina” is supposed to be “mia” with an extra “n” thrown in there). The sad person (I think those are tears?) is supposed to be her Aunt Lara who is sad because she is not here visiting NY. Claudine drew this last month. But then…

…all of a sudden one day, she started drawing people very differently. The heads got much smaller and suddenly had elongated bodies and noses, sometimes even eyelashes and really long hair (though we seemed to have lost the ears).

I love this drawing above. It’s gotten a bit abstract and even a little goth, but it KILLS me that she drew tufts of grass under the people’s feet. I mean this kid just turned 3.

Mia’s people have evolved since school started too. It’s gotten less “sweet” but there’s more expression here. The figures almost look a bit Tim Burton-esque (why yes, I *am* analyzing my kids’ art).

The girls will draw for quite a bit of time sitting side by side next to each other at the table and I’m sure that is how Claudine has picked up on drawing bodies for her faces - by watching her older sister. Mia’s also helping her to spell her name since unlike “Mia”, “Claudine” is a handful of letters to remember. I watched them tonight playing a game called “mail” where they will draw or write each other letters and put it in the “mail slot” (usually through the open bookcase or under a door). They’ll then call each other on their “cellphones” and discuss the day’s mail like little old ladies. Wouldn’t it be nice if life were that simple and pleasant?

No, not that kind of dwell (though truth be told, I do tend to dwell on things. Just a little bit). I’ve gotten so many questions about some of the placemats and table linens that I’ve used in our photos, as well as that beautiful bird duvet that is on our bed, that I thought a proper post was in order. It is all by Dwell Studio.

I’ve been a Dwell fan for a long time, going back to the days when I used to write about their baby bedding when I was running babygadget.net. They expanded their line of products impressively since those days, designing everything from bags to rugs to stationery, along with their gorgeous bedding and table linens. I was very lucky recently to receive a package of their latest tableware designs, a collection of striking geometrics that just happen to be in the same color scheme as our own company (see how it all coordinates so well with the blog?). Lucky, yes? Thank you Dwell, for sending us our first set of cloth napkins and placemats (yes, I do realize how blasphemous it is that we are the age that we are and have never owned cloth napkins).

By the way, if you live in NYC, the Dwell sample sales in Soho are the absolute best. Be on the look out for them!

I’m doing it, guys. Now that I’m feeling a bit better, I am getting out of the house and making good on my “get off my ass” New Years Resolution. I went to the Museum of Arts & Design to see large and small scale paper art at the Slash show yesterday (though I thoroughly enjoyed the Ghost Stories exhibit as well) and if you’re going to be in NY through April, I highly recommend it. It certainly made me want to pick up my xacto blade again and start working on some ideas that started percolating while I was at the show. Some of the miniscule, detailed cuts of those large scale paper pieces were beautiful, but mind boggling in execution, however, I know I have the patience for this kind of stuff. I once created a 20″x24″ pointillist still life drawing in high school using fine tip pens. For hours and days and weeks and probably months, I sat in my room after school everyday and obsessively made tiny dots after dots after dots. Once I realized how insane this project was, I knew I had to finish or else I’d feel like quitter (true), but when I was done months later I felt like I had earned some kind of superhero status on repetitive tasks and gained the patience of saint (not true, as evidenced years later when the kids appeared).

In any case, after a meeting this morning, all signs so far might be pointing towards making some art again.

But here, folks, lie the ever-ending vicious circle. Art making requires free time -> Paying bills requires working -> Working takes away from free time -> No free time means no art making. Uh huh.

The hustle for work and a subsequent meeting next week plus some interesting (and not really in a good way) news indirectly related, but crucial to the business has given me an anxiety migraine tonight.

As I joked to a friend today, I need to find a patron. Yeah, that’s it. Let’s bring that practice back.