Keeping Sabbath - creativity

Today for my Sabbath day I pretty much relaxed all day. I had plans of working more than I did (did do some reading trying to figure out Sunday's sermon), and also of unpacking and arranging things. But that didn't happen. Instead I ended up with watching some DVDs of the sitcom Friends, eating, and napping for the larger part of the day with some blogging late in the evening (not sleepy because of the nap earlier). I guess I was just tired, felt lower energy today than I have lately, it was kind of strange, so I decided to just rest and do some self-care in that way.

I have recently been having fun being creative. I've found myself wandering for hours in the Joanne's and Micheal's stores in the last several weeks. I bought some ribbons of various red, orange, yellow colors intending to make a Pentecost banner that looked like fire, but ran out of time. Oh well, I can always do it for next year as I haven't returned what I bought.

My parish has a knitting and crochet ministry. I was so proud that I actually finished something. I crocheted a 10" x 10" square to be used with squares made by others to create a blanket. I did double-crochet, it seemed faster. I have a couple others started. We'll see where this revisit with needlework and yarn ends up.



While wandering craft stores I bought some notecards to try painting on and a couple tiny canvases. So one day on my Sabbath I got out my acrylics to play. You know for some reason mixing paint is therapeutic. Nope, not a light enough blue, it needs more white. This green is too blue, better try adding some yellow and brown, and maybe some white to lighten it up. It's kind of like baking... mixing things together until you get what you want. Maybe that's why the Top Chef show intrigues me so much on Bravo. But I digress.



I've never had a class on drawing or painting, except for the icon writing workshop I did February 2007. Afterward I'd bought some acrylic paint so I could try it again at home, only I only got one half-painted and now it's packed in a box somewhere. But I knew where the box was with the paint in it and also had bought a few new tubes of paint at the craft store to try, in case I couldn't find mine. I decided to start with sunflowers. I have a spoonrest with a sunflower and a painting with a sunflower. They seem happy, and also looked not too difficult to try. So I surfed the internet for sunflower images so I'd have photos to work off of. First I tried a pencil drawing. Then I decided to give it a go with paint.







I decided I needed to try and paint a hummingbird for my Mom for Mother's Day. She loves hummingbirds. So I went to the internet and searched for images of hummingbirds and saved them to my computer so I could flip through them. First I did a pencil drawing of a hummingbird and daffodils, another flower that had looked like it might be something I could re-create that I'd saved photos of. I had in my mind that I might send it as a card to my sister or grandma. Then I tried my hand at painting a daffodil and a hummingbird on notecards. Finally I gave the hummingbird a real shot on the tiny canvas. It actually didn't look half-bad, so I boxed it up and sent it to my mom along with the matching notecard, and one of the sunflowers (a "flower" for Mother's Day), along with a giftcard to Lowes, where she'd seen a few things she wanted for the yard.