all the adorables

I thought I’d start with an extract from a message I texted to a friend this morning:

“….It’s going alright here.. Better than I thought. My life is basically looking after children, eating, drinking, the occasional shower, and then going to bed at the earliest opportunity. Our sky plus box is very full of unwatched programmes and I spend quite a lot of time looking wistfully at my laptop, wishing I could make real one of the million design ideas whirling around my head… But it’s all good. Apart from I’ve been up since 4am. That’s not a good thing. And now it’s time for me to get Zeddy up for the day, Bibi has decided she will go back to sleep now, rather than 2 hours ago. Yay! …”

A few very sleepless nights these past few days. Taking its toll on my sense of humour…

Anyway, I’m thrilled to share the news that our perfect little baby girl was born at the end of March. Another emergency c-section (which had been a huge fear of mine), and i had another massive 2 litre blood loss during surgery. So my recovery has been much slower than I’d have liked, but we’re all alright. I will eventually get better.

We’re very happy though. This isn’t intended to be a gloomy post. Our girl was a healthy 9lb7oz and I’m delighted to be feeding her myself. She seems like a really happy person – I’m pretty sure she was born smiling! Zeddy loves her too. Yesterday when she was in her bouncy chair, he gently took her little hand and showed her how to spin the flowers around on the toy attachment.

I totally teared up. Love those little joyful moments!

JB has been a saint. He had a month off work, which has now sadly come to an end. He had to take on the entire house, plus toddler boy, as I was unable. I couldn’t wish for a more supportive, brilliant husband!

So, sleep deprivation notwithstanding, life is good. But good grief I miss painting and designing. I miss my shop too! Wouldn’t it be nice to have more hours in the day? :)

I’ll be blogging when I can, probably on my phone (which limits what i can do aesthetically, so… apologies in advance for that) and probably mostly about what I’m doing these days (eg raising a family) and hope to have a bit if design chat in there too.

See you soon!

** This is a very long, photo-free and (for me) a very personal post. So if you’re not into that kind of thing, I won’t be in the least bit offended if you choose to skip it & if you do read to the end, well.. thanks for listening :) **

Hello everyone!

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a little while. In fact, I could’ve split this into many smaller posts, but I think I’ll make do with this one. For now!

The bare facts are I’ve not had a lot of time lately, because loads of things have been going on. So the blog and other social things like Twitter have had to take more of a back seat.

I thought it was time to make a little round-up post, summing up what’s been happening around here. Some of it good, some of it not so good.

First of all, let’s get the not so good thing out of the way: Back in November, after a couple of difficult weeks, we lost our cat Ollie to illness. We’d had him for around 6.5 years & he was (we were told by the shelter) two years old when he came to us. 3 months have passed and he is still very much missed today. My ears are still fooled when I hear noises around the house, I find myself thinking “oh, that’s Ollie in the bedroom” and other similar thoughts. He had a good life with us, he was much loved. Bless him.

After this happened, I felt very low for quite a while. Grief, I guess. I didn’t really want to be ‘out there’ online talking to folk and majorly retreated. Time is a healer for sure, but I haven’t really gotten my online mojo back since then. So I’m going to try giving myself a little push. Hence this post, I have lots to share…

Toward the end of 2012, we took our house off the market. It had been for sale for around 7 months and despite a good stream of interest and viewings, we hadn’t been able to sell. To ensure our sanity, we took the decision to put off selling for a little while longer, until the baby arrives and we all settle as a family into a new rhythm. JB and I lean toward the ‘attachment’ style of parenting and we are very mindful of the impact of the disturbance on little Z that a new sibling will bring, he will have to adjust as much as anyone to a new life where he shares his mummy and daddy with his little sister. We figured that a house move and the associated flurry of activity around that seemed too much for him and maybe for me too (physically at least) in the later stages of pregnancy.

So we have had to make lots of changes around the house to accommodate our new little person. We live in a 3 bedroom house where one bedroom is an office, but not for much longer!

We also thought it a good time to generally freshen things up around here. When bought this house, we moved in and set down our stuff and that was about it. Until quite recently, not much has changed over the years. We were too busy working or having children. So a little bit of house-based-TLC was long over due.

We have had a lot of change in the house in the past few weeks. We’ve had the whole house painted. White. Bye-bye new-build magnolia that we’ve (mostly) kept as-is since we moved in nearly 8 years ago! Things were looking very tired, so a freshly coat of bright white really cheered everything up and makes best use of the light in this house.

We’ve also gotten rid of a lot of clutter. A lot. And there’s still more to go. We’ve had to clear our study to turn it into a new nursery. The study was where JB and I kept most of our belongings. Things that we’d hung onto but didn’t use often, or ever in some cases. So a lot of this has been cleared, but we still have more to go through. It feels weird – we are literally stripping down our possessions to the bare bones. We just can’t hang onto things, there is no-where to put them!

Continuing on theme of creating space, we’ve had to think very creatively about how we use our current living space. The office was where I worked on my graphic design during the day. And All the Adorables is not going anywhere (except up! ;) , so a workspace is still a must, even though there’s no office anymore (sob!) so after a false start with a bureau desk (long story), we decided to move one of our two sofas out of the living room and install a huge Ikea Expedit book-case for our books, technology etc in its place. It also holds the many toys that Zeddy has in here, in a much more organised fashion. To make up for the lack of seating, we’re planning on investing in a couple of armchairs. We have ordered a fold-away desk to solve the work-space issue.

We still have the nursery furniture to set up, and the pretty-ing up of said nursery (looking forward to that bit!) so that we’ve made a special space for our little baby girl (who I can’t wait to meet!), the rest of the living room stuff as mentioned above. Oh, and also the entire house is getting new carpet.

Like I said, BUSY! And still so much to do. And less than 7 weeks left until my due date. Eek! And I have this weird feeling that the baby is going to be a couple of weeks earlier than planned.

We had better get a move on!

The situation is far from the ideal we’d hoped for – we had rather hoped to move house and be settled by the time baby arrived. And the upheaval is causing mixed feelings for JB and I, not to mention more than a touch of stress as time ticks ever nearer to B-day. But we are believers that things happen for a reason. And we are happy – happy with our little family in our little house.

Over and above all of this house-related change, there’s our children. I’m super conscious of my remaining time with my little boy as an ‘only child’. Ultimately, he’ll really benefit from a sibling. I hope he will be okay with the transition once his little sister arrives… and finally, there’s the special time I put aside without fail every single day, amongst the day-to-day hustle and bustle and associated chaos, where I have some quiet time and really focus on the little baby inside me. I truly believe that these connections start long before birth. ..

Anyway, what a massively long and personal post this has been. I certainly didn’t intend it to be a moan, and I hope it’s not sounded as such. It’s more just letting a few things out of my head. Everything is okay, there’s just a lot of everything going on!

As I said at the start – thank you for reading to the bottom. Feels a bit weird putting all of that ‘out there’…

I’m so excited to finally be able to share this with you! Kari is a seriously talented wedding photographer, and I was honoured to be approached by her to carry out the graphic design work for the redesign of her site Kari Bellamy Photography. And here it is!

For the brand identity, we have the main logo which is hand-lettered and painted, with custom illustrations, sub logo and repeat pattern tiles.

For the blog & website makeover, I also made a textured watercolour background, as well as all site navigation buttons.

One especially fun part is the watercolour navigation bar, with little illustrations that pop up when you roll over them – go take a look here – it’s fun!

I have such a great time making a full suite of web & print graphic elements, which totally transformed Kari’s site. Especially because I got to do lots of drawing and painting :) I do love making things out of paper, paint and pixels!

Thank you Kari for being such a pleasure to work with. I think it’s so important for  small businesses to have a brand and identity that reflects the personality and nature of the business, as well as the person behind it, and I’m so pleased with the outcome here!

Today my little blog graphics shop was featured on Holly Becker’s blog Decor8! There is a regular feature called Etsy Take Five Tuesday, and I’m one of this week’s five. What an honour, I really can’t believe it’s happened, I’m absolutely stoked! Decor8 is one of the first design blogs I discovered and followed several years ago, and still remains a firm favourite.

So.. Hello! *does a big wave* to anyone who is stopping by after linking through from this feature. I love blogs, and making graphics to help others make their blog look pretty and unique. I also make digital paper printables, several of which I’ve added to this site as a freebie.

You can learn more about me here and If you are interested in working with me on blog or site branding and graphic design, please get in touch in whatever way suits you the best, I’m very friendly :)

&hearts: ♥ And in the spirit of goodwill, as it’s nearly the Christmas hols, I’m also offering until mid-night (UK time) on Sunday 16th December buy one get one free on all items currently for sale in my shop (lowest price item being the freebie..) get stocked up on your blog goodies! I hope to see you there…