It’s been a while since I posted on here, well a really long time actually! In fact it took me five minutes to figure out how to login to my WordPress account to write a new blog post! ha ha…

It’s not that I haven’t been doing gilhoolie ‘stuff’, it’s just that I got out of the habit of blogging I think, and found it really hard to motivate myself to get back into it.

I started this gilhoolie blog when I wasn’t working and it was a brilliant way of motivating myself to get on with my creative ‘journey’ as I was exploring what I could do when I didn’t have to go to the office for a while. I was really lucky and absolutely loved it; my head was buzzing with new ideas and I had so much I wanted to learn and do.

That was a few years ago now. Since then things have changed… a lot. I now work part-time at a job I also love. I work for someone else who has their own business, five minutes from my house. 🙂 Well 20 minutes at the moment as I’m trying to be good and cycling there. What is my role? Doing everything really… I recently redesigned their website and had to write a biography on myself and could have written pages! From admin to social media to web design and anything else I want to get involved with. It’s great working for a small company; I get to have a big influence and can easily see the effect my efforts have on the business. And it’s not all boring stuff like customer databases and PowerPoint! Plus I get on really well with ‘the boss’ and we’re visited by her two lovely dogs occasionally too…

So working has definitely affected my creativity but I feel as though I am getting back into it now, it’s amazing what you can do once you just get on with it and stop procrastinating! Actually, I probably haven’t written on here for so long partly because I haven’t done as much gilhoolie stuff but also because I do a bit of writing at work (I write some of the mailings we send out to clients) and I also write a blog for an Interior Designer now too. That’s great fun, really interesting and sometimes involves going to venues to look at the interior or visiting art shows, then going home and writing about it. So it’s understandably hard to find the time and motivation to write here sometimes. But I have decided I am going to try and write every other week; should be a doable target I think, don’t want to stretch myself too much!

So what is happening at gilhoolie right now? Well, I made a lovely big tartan lampshade this week for an Interior Designer in Henley. It’s really hard to photograph lampshades well I think – it’s not on a stand for a start but I did my best! It’s lovely, 45cm in diameter and 25cm tall, made from a soft wool grey and blue tartan fabric by Sheila Coombes called Hamish. I have a big soft spot for tartan as I had a much-loved pair of tartan trousers at university. I bought them on an outing with a good friend (you know who you are!) to Kensington market in London. Anyway, it was a bit of a funny experience as Ronnie Corbett was buying some at the same time, not to mention all the zips on them (which I removed as soon as I got back to my room!)

I am also making a huge effort to get back into drawing and actually doing quite well at fitting it in with job, school runs and exercise (and the odd coffee with friends). This is brilliant as it really helps me escape and I now realise how much I miss it. I’ll show you more of that on another post, along with machine embroidery and helping a friend design a logo for her new business. So you know when you think, I haven’t done much, just list what you have done and it usually adds up to quite a lot!

At least I can tick off ‘write a blog post’ now at last. And I really enjoyed it, hope you did too!