Ganbatte ne!

I have been working away enthusiastically in my evenings recently and without distraction or interruption which has been great. I feel much more committed to achieving goals and making some progress with my Etsy shop. It is always a struggle to juggle time between creating new work and also maintaining the shop and the admin side of photographing and listing new pieces.

I desperately want to produce new work at the moment and have lots of ideas, but sometimes the ideas in my head don't want to translate to paper and that is when I hit the brick wall hard. That is when the doubt creeps in and everything I do feels not good enough. I have been having one of these weeks I think and after a couple of hours of not getting anywhere with a new design the other night I was a bit deflated. It was hot, it was 1.00am in the morning and it was when I realized I had not made the bed after washing the sheets and quilt cover earlier in the day. Gathering the energy to stuff the pillows back into the pillow cases, I sat on the edge of the bed and noticed a little white sticker stuck to my foot. My little girl has been receiving cute stickers as a prize for using the potty, so we have a few lost stickers making appearances all over the house at the moment. I peeled the sticker off my foot and read the word, "ganbatte ne" written on it above the little picture of a cute cat. "Ganbatte ne" is a term of encouragement in Japanese used commonly to encourage one another to keep going or keep enduring or trying to do something. It was a much needed little message for me at that hour of the morning.

And so I have changed direction for a couple of days and left the new design alone to concentrate on taking and editing some photos of some bangles I made before Christmas. While photography is not my forte, I had fun taking these shots and it felt like a little progress was made. And so I am moving around that brick wall to move forward saying to my little girl by day, 'ganbatte ne' and to myself at night "ganbatte ne mummy".