As one of the earliest blooms of the season lilacs symbolize spring & renewal. It’s heady fragrance is unforgettably sweet, spicy and intense and it’s a cause for celebration when it returns to my garden.
“The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.”
Margaret Millar (1947) Experiment in Springtime:A Novel, New York:Random House
I’ve been procrastinating writing about our trip to Japan – where to start? A place of contrasts and beauty couldn’t be contained in one post.
There is intricacy and simplicity.
A riot of colour and then a tonal quietness.
This morning I decide to start with the leaf sweepers at Meiji-jingū, Tokyo’s largest and most famous Shintō shrine. The sprawling forested grounds contain some 120,000 trees collected from all over Japan.
I was facinated by the simplicity and make shift look of the brooms, they reminded me of the ones I’d seen street sweepers using in Venice, Italy.
They obviously do the job they’re designed for well – perhaps a reminder that sometimes we can over complicate things.
Besides they have such charm don’t you think!
Here is a link for making a Japanese broom for sweeping your own cobblestones, gravel path or moss garden.
http://japanesegardening.org/reference/bamboo_broom.html
I was excited for our lapel pins to arrive, just in time to wear at our upcoming trade fair in Melbourne!
Have you heard of the Just A Card Campaign? It came about when British artist & designer Sarah Hamilton saw the quote “If everyone who’d complimented our beautiful gallery had bought ‘just a card‘ we’d still be open” by store keepers who’d recently closed their gallery.
This prompted a call to action! Designer/Makers and independent shops and galleries needed a voice and so in 2015 Sarah started the wonderful Just A Card campaign.
Sarah says “when you buy JUST A CARD, just a book, just a gift etc from an independent shop or creative business you’re not just buying a card…you’re supporting passion, skill, creativity, originality and community” – I couldn’t put it better myself!
Many of the shops that sell my work are small independent stores with passionate owners, so my sucess is also linked to their sucess.
While the Just A Card Campaign started in Britian it’s message has resonated globally with designers, makers, and independent shops and galleries and next week is a 3rd Birthday celebration of just how far it’s come.
Coming from a small island off an island (my old atlas doesn’t even name it!) by necessity gives me a “there’s a whole world out there” focus on where I’d like petal & pins to be so I’ll be participating in their Five Day Instagram Challenge and I invite you to follow along – @petalandpins
How can you get involved?
And finally as Sarah says – by all means compliment people, it makes the world a far sunnier place, but if you can, please, buy ‘just a card‘!
I must confess I had to google Galentine’s Day to know what exactly it was when it started popping up in my instagram feed and on the artwork of fellow card designers.
Was it a fancy pants way of saying Valentine’s Day? a Galician or Gaelic tradition?!
Having never watched the television show Parks and Recreation I was in the dark to the 16th episode of the second season (first aired in 2010). Amy Poehler‘s character Leslie throws her annual “Galentine’s Day” party for her female friends, celebrated the day before Valentine’s Day.
Like so many things Galentine’s Day has apparently transcended from the television screen into everyday culture. While it started out with the character Leslie going to brunch with her female friends, the unofficial holiday is now not just celebrated by fans of the show, it has turned into an optimistic celebration of friendship to be celebrated on the 13th February.
Yesterday I received a Valentine’s card in the mail from an admirer – a fabulous female friend, I doubt she’d heard of Galentine’s Day either and I love that over the years we’ve found our own ways to celebrate friendship with no popular culture prompts needed.
So happy days of love and friendship to you, whether you’re choosing to partake in old traditions or new or blissfully ignoring them!
Sandra X
I discovered this postcard amongst some things at my mother’s house last year.
Sent to my grandfather when he was five, it’s postmarked December 23rd 1917 and the handwritten greeting from an aunt is delightful.
With good intentions of letting those playful kittens deliver a Christmas greeting again I photographed the card so it could arrive in a very different type of mailbox via this blog – 100 years after it was first sent!
I pondered where one of our petal & pins greeting cards may turn up a century on from now and thought it was the perfect example of why a handwritten card will always be so much more meaningful than tapping out a text.
So my apologies for it being belated – I hope you had a jolly Christmas and Best Wishes for 2018!
Sandra X
On Saturday it was my 5th blog Anniversary! A big thank you for following along and a warm welcome if you’ve just joined me.
If you have your own blog you are likely to agree the enjoyment can be twofold – spending time composing a post and the interaction with your readers and other bloggers you follow.
The raison d’être may or may not change over time but written with your own authentic voice there will always be a thread that strings it together and connects you to a reader somewhere else in the world. But keeping a blog going can be easier said than done, sometimes time and topic conspire to stay a suspended idea in your head. (I have many of those but Butterfly Wings & Other Things was one I didn’t let get away!)
Last year I was invited to write a guest post for Create & Thrive and I gave a couple of my tips for blogging – and I’d like to add this one to the list.
It sits on the mantlepiece in my studio and I’m finding it a good reminder that there are times when you need to get things perfect and times when done is better than perfect.
It is beautifully written by calligrapher Tetia Stroud from Letter Bliss, one of the great women I met at Paper Camp earlier this year (you can get your free printable copy here!)
So start that blog, write that post, act on that idea because as they also say – “Practice makes Perfect”.
petal & pins celebrated a birthday yesterday! It was the third anniversary of starting my petal & pins blog and about four years since creating the very first dress for my Garden Fairy’s Wardrobe.
When I made my first garden fairy’s dress it was on a whim on a sunny day in a moment of daydreaming in the garden, a break from cutting or sewing a real life creation, and then the next day I made another … and kept on making them!
I started my blog as a ‘home’ for my Garden Fairy’s Wardrobe and other musing from my studio and garden. My first blog post featured a dress made from a peony flower and very few words so I decided a new peony dress was perfect for this birthday post.
Three years on and I’m pleased that I’m still blogging. Like most people who start a a blog I wasn’t exactly sure what I was starting, where I was heading or who would be reading but it has been so much more than I imagined when making that first post.
It has been a lovely journey of finding people with shared passions and an interest in what I do, discovering other blogs on everything from the travel adventures of a boat dwelling cat, vintage glamour and the joys and tribulations of gardening in a different hemisphere to me.
To my surprise I also found great enjoyment in writing to accompany my photos and something I never expected – some solace when my father died.
I had dreams for my Garden Fairy from the beginning of my blogging journey and it has been fun bringing some of those to life and dreaming up new ones.
The first was creating a range of greeting cards featuring flower dresses from my Garden Fairy’s Wardrobe. There have been twelve collections to date, five of which are currently available, with the newest being my Christmas collection of five holly dresses.
This year Mr Petal & Pins created my gorgeous online shop, I was commissioned to do a life size dress for a wallpaper panel and the local weekend magazine asked to do a feature on me!
It’s been great to meet some of you at the local design markets and to see my cards available through a growing number of retailers.
So thank you for your part in it all – your comments, encouragement or just following – and now I’d like to be bold and ask a favour.
If you have a moment, please visit my online shop – take a look around, give me some feedback, you may even see something you like! Perhaps you could share a link to my website or blog with someone you think might enjoy discovering my garden fairy’s wardrobe because that would help the dreams to continue to grow!
Thank You
Sandra x
P.S. To celebrate petal & pins’s birthday I’d like to give you a special offer of Free Shipping worldwide until the end of September 2015 on any purchase from the petal & pins online shop.
Visit the shop here and enter the discount code HAPPY3 at the last step of the checkout.
Petal & Pins 