Home collage / Creative Freeze

This months collage club theme was “Home” and is hosted by  Deb who blogs at Sewcraftygoodness and has a cute little online shop too. Deb is one of my Blog with Pip class buddies so it was great to see a familiar face in the collage club when I joined.

So this is my collage and the interesting thing for me this month with the collage theme/challenge was that I found it much harder. It was harder to get started and I was way more critical of myself. I think because of a few reasons:
1. Home means so much to me, so I wanted to love my collage as much a I love our home ( I don’t )
2. I wanted it to convey too much and contain too much ( it doesn’t and that didn’t work out as I’d planned)
3. It was outcome based, I think when I have to an end result in mind it causes me to freeze.

But despite all of that, what I came away from this with was: It’s ok not to love everything I do. At the moment for me it’s about process. I think the more I just jump in, the more time I spend being in my creative zone the better I get and letting the ideas come, feeling the flow, choosing,cutting, placing, gluing and keeping going till it’s time to stop.
Also if I’m going to make things that I’m happier with, I know I need to put the time in, but I also need to be ok with the bit in between too. Which makes me think of the Ira Glass quote I read a while ago thanks again to Pip Lincolne, here’s the link to that over at Meetmeatmikes… The Gap by Ira Glass It is So!!! worth a read/watch.
Home is probably my favourite place in the world. I think at Home is where I feel most myself. Our home has been a wonderful place to be a family, and grow and live. I love our together times at home and I also love the solitude on my days off.

When we are away, home is wherever we are sleeping, even our camper trailer is a little home away from home. Sometimes I fantasize about living somewhere else, with a view, in a little place with less clutter ( not quite as small as a tiny house), but  I don’t know whether I’d be capable of that or not. I like things and I like having room to spread my messy creative stuff about.

My collage contains a snippet of the newspaper clipping of our house when we found it in 1995. That’s a long time ago, I never imagined we’d still be here 19 years later. Our parents thought we were crazy( it was a bit of a hovel), but we just had this instant reaction to it, it felt right. We renovated it a lot, probably should have done more before we had kids but I was impatient (Steve was hanging the door to the nursery the day I went into labour).  Then we outgrew it, but instead of moving,we pulled of the dodgy bits at the back and added a great extension to a wonky 100 year old front.

Every now and then I have a bit of a meltdown because it is just too full of stuff, people know to keep out of my way as I go through things, chuck out, reorganize, move things around until I feel that things are as they should be(or am too exhausted to continue!). Then I go back to my normal happy to be at home self and my family breathe a sigh of relief!

Thanks for visiting my bloggy home.

Emily