So, it snowed this week. I know - I've been going on about Spring for a while now, and then here we are, cold again. But the daffodils and pansies are still holding their bright heads up, which feels like exactly the right amount of stubbornness for this time of year.
From my garden!
What Do You Call the Place Where You Make Things?
I know someone who's starting a new creative venture and hasn't named their space yet. Maybe "studio" doesn't feel right - but there are so many other ways to name a place and the work that happens there, even one that exists more in the mind than on a map. Forge. Atelier. Workshop. Laboratory. The naming isn't just decoration. It defines the space, makes it real, gives it weight.
Words do that. They locate you.
Do you create or dabble? Are you an Artist or just a crafter? Do you have a studio or the desk where I do stuff? These aren't small distinctions. The word you choose tells you, and everyone else, what you think you're allowed to be.
I say: take the bigger word. You've earned it.
New Book: Spring Emergence, Ready to Cut Apart and Create
The newest collage book is live on Amazon, and I'm pretty excited about this one.
Wild Creation: Spring Emergence Collection is 135+ individual collage elements- botanical forms, seed pods, vessels, painted marks - plus 12 richly layered background papers, all built from actual studio work. The palette is the Zorn palette threaded through with cool spring greens and mussel-shell neutrals. Everything is printed letter-size, designed to tear out, cut up, and use without ceremony.
There are also 12 short provocations scattered through the pages. Not instructions. Just prompts from the studio.
This is for the person who makes art for their own reasons, not for validation or trend or anyone's approval. It's not for decorators looking for pretty papers. It's working material: made in the studio, released without permission.
A Space Where Someone Is Already Doing the Thing
Members got a first look at this book, both while it was still under construction and again on release day. That's part of what Walk With Me is: proximity to a practice that's actually happening.
But here's the other part, the one that's harder to describe.
When you're trying to claim a bigger word for yourself - artist, maker, creative - it helps to be somewhere that doesn't question whether you belong. It helps to see someone else showing up, naming the space, doing the work without waiting for permission. Not as a teacher. Just as evidence that it's possible.
That's what this membership is. A place where someone is already doing the thing, and where you're welcome to stand alongside it and call yourself whatever you're ready to be called.
Spaces are limited. Come see if it's for you.
What are you calling your creative space right now, and does the name fit? Reply and tell me. I read every message and I write back.
Be the Light,
Monette
PS Wild Creation: Spring Emergence is $14.99 on Amazon. Cut it apart. Use it. That's the whole point.
PPS The pansies outside just came up yellow and purple and danced around in the snow and were entirely themselves. There's something in that.