Ramblings on a rainy day

Today has started off as a slow day. My husband’s working from home, meaning I didn’t have to do either school or nursery run, and I got to avoid the rain. It began its noisy splattering on our windows when the July baby* and I were upstairs, playing.

Now I’m sat under a cosy blanket catching up on my work. I have a little design project to do today, and I’m waiting for a client to send on the next pieces she wants written for her literary blog. In the meantime, I’m admin-ing and, it would seem, blogging.

I’ve not yet worked out 100% how I want to share my portfolio work. Likely at some point in the future there will be a downloadable PDF for prospective clients who want to see more. In the mean time, here is an article on 10 Fun Things to do in Glasgow When Traveling with Friends which I wrote for a repeat client in Canada. And here are 60 Icy Snowman Jokes for another repeat client, given it certainly feels like autumn and winter are imminent here.

It’s taken me a good while to get to a point where I feel like all my work is actually somewhat cohesive. I used to work all sorts of fairly random office jobs before I had my first son (the September baby). At this point I just wanted to be at home with him, so I started my Etsy shop, which soon took off with a little cartoon portrait I was offering. However, I really didn’t enjoy making the cartoon portraits. There were a lot of occasions when customers wanted things to look different from the actual photos they provided (bald men who wanted to be portrayed with hair, made up outfits that weren’t in the pictures, totally new outfits, etc) and it made it hugely time-consuming and essentially not worth doing, which was a shame.

Nowadays I pretty much focus solely on making literary art prints, some greeting cards, and writing, which is my first love anyhow, see The Tree of Nine Worlds. It’s enjoyable, and means I can play with the babies without having to check in with a boss first. The dream is to eventually be just a wee bit self-sufficient (is that a paradox?) in our garden as well, which I feel would save us a good amount of money. So that’s a little bit about me on a rainy day in veryyy autumnal Scotland.

*if you’re new here, I’ve taken to referring to my kids by their birth months, per Elizabeth von Arnim. Silly, perhaps, but I like it. Read Elizabeth and her German Garden for my inspiration.