This is the week of celebrating the miracle of light, and so the theme for my 51st card of my 52 Card Project.

Sending the light of peace and love to you and yours.

It’s the week of before Christmas and “all through house, not a creature is stirring not even a mouse.” (Now that we’re settled that is.)

Hannukah is now just beginning as I write this, and the winter solstice is here, and all in all t’s been deliciously quiet around here this week before festivities begin. So my theme for card #50 (!) of my 52 Cards Project is simply hygge. ‘Hygge’ as you probably know since the concept swept the internet in recent years, is a Danish/Norwegian word for that feeling of coziness and contentment you get when you’re all bundled up at home in the dead of winter.

Yep, that’s the feeling this week. I hope you are enjoying the same!

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As a sidenote, I am fast coming to the end of this 52 Cards Project! Only two more cards to go! That means that not only have I created a drawing for each week of the year, but I’ve also consistently written about each card on my blog here, week after week (which you might be receiving in the form of a weekly email).

Thank you so much for joining me on this little adventure! I hope my drawings and little stories about my life each week enriches yours in some way, and even more, my secret hope is that you start thinking about your own creativity, too.

I know I have been

Well, this is the week of coming back home so ‘landing’ seemed the right theme for my 52 Cards Project. It takes a week to settle back to the ground after a long trip. There’s jet lag and then of course there’s all the stuff of getting back—calendars, groceries, laundry, appointments, phone calls—and Christmas coming in fast. (Notice my symbolic use of red and green. So subtle, I know).

The theme could have been ‘retribution’ though.

If you have cats you know what I’m talking about…

The theme for this week’s card for my 52 Cards Project is Respite—which I think pretty much sums up the last week if not most of our trip to Australia.

By this last week I found myself feeling a lot like this koala bear up in the Eucalyptus trees outside of where we stayed on The Great Ocean Road in Victoria:

Another week and we’ve covered a lot of ground—and water—on our Australia tour. So this week’s theme for my 52 Card Project is simply ‘Layers’. I feel like I’ve been moving through layers and layers of experiences.

The week began on Hamilton Island in the Whitsundays, which was a gorgeous tropical few days on the ocean. I got to snorkel the very southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef—and then we simply hung out by the sea (okay, the pool) for a couple of days. From there we headed out by plane to Hobart, Tasmania—where we’ve been for six days.

Again, I don’t mean to bore you with a long travelogue but I will just say that this island, the southern most tip of Australia (not that far north of Antarctica)…is amazing. It’s

This week it’s been all about getting things in order as we get ready for travel and the holidays. The theme for my 52 Cards Project just seemed like an obvious choice!

I had in mind yellow ducks for this card—but it turns out that ducks aren’t yellow. I guess I should have known that…Some ducklings from some species (like the white Pekin and the Mallard) are yellow, and then change colors as adults, but not all ducklings are yellow either. It depends on the species of duck. Also, it seems that maybe this saying came from when they used to set up wooden ducks for old-time carnival shooting galleries—but I’m not sure those were yellow either.

I have to say I get a little kick out of learning new fun facts when creating cards (I’m a nerd that way). Hope it brightens your day too!

Healing is the theme of this week for my 52 Cards Project. My sister had back surgery and I’ve spent some time helping her out as she gets back on her feet. She’s doing as well as can be expected, but the healing process will take time—and this week, from the long anticipated surgery, to hospital to home marks the beginning of her healing journey. I hope any care I could provide—and my love—will aid in a faster recovery.

Or in other words, dear ‘Sis—Get Well Soon!

***Some fun facts about this Greek snake and staff symbol for healing, which I learned in making this card:

This week the theme card for my 52 Cards Project is Wonder. With nights growing increasingly colder, we (and our cats) are retreating inside more. And yet, the wild outdoors calls. I noticed Leo, our young tabby the other night standing up from the floor to the bedroom windowsill to look outside and I realized that I’ve spent a fair share of time lately looking up from my sketchbook, my book, my ipad—to stare out the window too.

Winter is coming. The sky is very dark (with just a crescent of a moon). There’s plenty of things to worry about in the world these days…and yet, I do believe the universe works in mysterious ways…the wonder of what’s out there calls. The birds. The critters. The wind. the deep mystery of all that is alive. That is what Leo is looking for, I’m sure, and I guess when I think about it, so am I.

And neither of us wants to miss one minute of it!

***

A note about long term projects. This week

I had trouble finding a theme for this week for my 52 Cards Project. It has been a busy week, coming back from holiday and catching up on all the things. We also had two birthday celebrations and I’m also aware that I’ll be away for most of November and part of December so I’m beginning to prepare for that.

So anyway. What would be my theme for the week? I usually sit down and brainstorm for a bit, but for a while nothing really came to me—except I kept getting an image of a spiral staircase but I didn’t know why. That is,

So I didn’t know what my theme would be for my 52 Cards Project this week. I had very little time to think about the card while traveling from weekend to weekend, Chicago and then Los Angeles, and by the time we arrived home Sunday I was spent. But on my Monday walk at Town Park in Corte Madera there they were.

My beloved northern geese, who had not been present before I left, had returned.

We don’t see them much spring or summer, but the northern geese love this park in the fall and winter (Do some fly farther south? I do not know).

ANYWAY, a handful of geese were hanging out on the asphalt

here’s something about the beautiful snowy egrets that populate our wetlands this time of year. I love all birds, but these herons are especially elegant and serene—and completely present in their watery environment— my theme for this week’s card for my 52 Cards Project.

All in all, it’s been a much needed quiet week. I spent a good amount of time hanging out my friends and family outdoors—but also like the snowy egret, I enjoyed solitude—reading and and working in my sketchbook.

It was a good week.

P.S. I did a little geeking out on egrets for this week’s card. I did not know that

Suddenly it’s September and just like that, I feel like the film clapper board snapped and it’s a whole new scene. This is Your Life playing now—and the theme for my 52 Cards Project this week.

Hmmm, so how do I explain this one? Well, thinking about what my theme should be for my 52 Cards project this week, an idea kept niggling. It came from someone new to me online, Andrea Scher, friend of artist Kelly Rae Roberts, who I have followed for years also because of her creative and joyful approach to life.

Both women are visual artists, writers and entrepreneurs and much younger than me, but honestly I just love the way they seem to fill their lives with color and friends, love, art, connection and deep, soulful Truth. So I listen when they write.

We all want more of that, right?

So I subscribed to Andrea’s newsletter and received a follow-up gift called

At first I was looking for a metaphor for this week’s card for my 52 Card Project.

It was a good week creatively. With time to play and experiment since the daily ICAD Challenge, I felt like more than a few ideas fell into place about what I want to make next and how I want to work. You always know when you’re on the right track when your heart starts humming.

The metaphor for all this, however, eluded me. What would visually communicate what I was feeling this week?

After wracking my brain with no luck, I started looking

This week my theme of the week for my 52 Cards Project is Connection—which is in no way the same as as the theme for week 4 (but ok, maybe they rhyme).

Sometimes I have to search for a theme but this week it found me. It was the first week of “normal life” for over a month (although I can’t say I believe in or even want “normal”) . But coming back from sickness and travel and as the calendar changed months, I was able to

Emerge is last week’s theme for my 52 Cards Project. I travelled to Asheville, North Carolina to meet up with my friend Diane for a three-day art retreat with Alena Hennessey. As a way in to the art one day, Alena guided us through a guided visualization through the seven chakras.

We began with the root chakra, where she asked us to “see” a particular image or color, and then in our minds’ eyes we made our way up the 7 chakras to the last one, the crown chakra. At that point, I saw myself emerging from under water, into the air.

“For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life,” says Amy Krause Rosenthal as quoted by Austin Kleon, “PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that’s pretty much all the info u need.”

Like Kleon, I take those words to the heart of

Ir’s hard to believe I’ve been making a theme card a week all year for my 52 Cards Project—and here we’re almost the end of July. It’s become a routine. Every Sunday I start thinking about the past week, I come up with a theme and then I start thinking about how to create that visually—and then somehow the card gets made on Monday.

This past week husband and I were recovering

I came down with Covid this last week so my weekly theme card for my 52 Cards Project is a little late—and a little obscure. For this personal project of mine I try to finish the card and post it to my blog by the Monday right after the week ends. However, while not life threatening because I am vaccinated and boostered, I had it pretty bad this weekend. I could not draw much. I’m still really tired—but over the last few days I could work slowly on my card and here it is.

So I chose the ancient Hamsa hand symbol for its universal message of

This week the theme is Mother for my 52 Cards Project—for a lot of reasons. My own mother’ birthday was July 1st, and while she’s been gone now for nine years, it’s a good day to appreciate her life.

My youngest daughter came home for the week—and I got to enjoy all the benefits of being a Mom—lots of hugs, good talks and, yes, the opportunity to take her shopping!

And on a much darker note, this is the first week in 49 years that women in many parts of this country are commanded to give birth when becoming pregnant, in some states no matter the circumstances including rape, incest, ectopic pregnancy, threat to their own lives…because five Supreme Court justices reversed the law of the land and handed over power of women’s lives to the states.

I sit in grief as mother, woman, and human. I wait for justice to prevail.

An owl hoots outside my bedroom at night. Mother Earth keeps spinning.

Slowly, in life and art I feel shift going on. Am I shape shifting myself? It’s hard to tell, but shapeshifting felt like the best way to represent my week for my 52 Cards Project. Also, I’m really into shapes lately and I’ve gained a new respect for what shapes can do. It’s an interesting spiral to explore!

The 24th card of the year—getting close to the halfway mark of my 52 Cards Project where I create one card each week to capture something that’s going on for me—a theme. This week, I spent a good amount of time drawing to prompts for the Index Card A Day Challenge, and also working in my sketchbook. I find that more and more I’m focusing not just on “how to draw” a thing—but how to draw what I see with my mind’s eye. Each time I make that shift from what I see with my eyes and what I see with that still place inside, I get this jolt of…hmmm…neon orange, pink, and teal? Yep, that’s what it feels like! And an understanding that this is how I want to see—and draw. It’s been a good week and I’m excited to keep drawing!