3 Hobby Books to make your weekends more creative

Either if you work full or part time, if you are a parent with one or more children or just single, life is not easy and the working week means very often a lot of stress. As winter and the cold weather decide to stay for longer in some unhappy parts of the world, weekends can be just grey and not-eventful, without too much to do outside. Instead of staying in the front of the TV most of the time, what about learning some new skills that can save your mind for something better during the exhausting days of the week? Here there are three books that can bring a pintch of creativity into your life:

Simple Calligraphy. A Beginner's Guide to Elegant Lettering, by Judy Detrick

In the age of digital writing, hand writing is greatly neglected. I used to study calligraphy in primary school and I still do a lot of handwriting every day, but the art of elegant lettering is not so widespread as it used to be. Judy Detrick, a calligraphy teacher and professional, offers an introduction into this precious art, with the help of a couple of exercises and various advices about the best materials to use. The exercises for acquiring basic skills for Italic hand writing, are designated for specific letters - including capitals and punctuation. 

For the beginning, it requires an investment of maximum 40-50 EUR. You can practice 10 insightful minutes the day and use this new skill for creating various 'Thank you' notes or invitations for events.  

The book will be available for sale starting with 19 April.

Wonderland. A Colouring Book inspired by Alice's Adventures, by Amely Shen

I am a big supporter of colouring books for adults and I own myself a couple of them. This one is a bit special though, because besides the beautiful graphics it features a story that I love even more as I love colouring books: Alice in Wonderland, celebrating 150 years since making the world a better place. Besides the colouring patterns, it also has some little story and an invitation to quizzes. The only regret is that there are not as many patterns to keep you creative at least for a couple of months. 

The title will be released on April 5.

The Flower Workshop, by Ariella Chezar with Julie Michaels

I spent most of my childhood in a house with a wild garden and I love flowers wherever they are. I am doing once in a while flower arrangements, but not that much as I want to do and not always with a plan. This book is meant to bring inspiration for creating insightful flower projects but also brings the personal story of the author, of growing up in a creative familly in love with nature. First and foremost it has beautiful pictures, but it is also well written and gives many ideas for the beginner or advanced flower designer. The learning is based on the author's workshops all over the world that I will be very tempted to attend at least once.

The book will be released the March 1.

Disclaimer: I was offered these books via Netgalley.com, but the opinions are, as usual, my own

Colouring books for adults. Why not?

I must confess, again, that I am not a creative person. Better said, I am not the artistic kind of personality, ready to make an outstading work of art out of nothing. I prefer to concentrate all my creativity and energies for my various writing projects. However, once in a while, I need to go out of my simple world and encourage myself to go beyond my limits. I do have a lot of crafts projects ongoing, I am into jewellery making and decorations as well as illustrations.

Nothing compares, though, with my first and big love for colouring books. As a kid, I enjoyed the quiet moments when with my box of pencils and the black shapes in the front of my, I was trying to find out the best combinations for filling up the design and giving life to the page. Many of my colouring books were inspired by various historical and cultural events, my favourite having to do with some old style fashion design.

I do not remember exactly when I gave up this rewarding hobby, but very often I kept fresh in mind the full feeling of freedom experienced during those moments. And also the pleasure of hours later starting, I was admiring how my page was changing. It taught me patience and the sense of colour as well as the capacity to retire for a good time and put my thoughts in order. All these habits helped me later in life when I had to do with various challenging professional and personal situations.

Especially in the last year, I started to hear more and more often about adults having as hobby colouring books. Due to my strict education, according to which, you do certain things as a kid and never after as an adult, I regarded those story skeptical but without too much criticism though. After all, everyone is free to do what she/he considers the right thing to do with her/his time. However, in the last year, the frequency of news - even the New Yorker considered it as a topic worth to dedicate a couple of good thousand of words -, plus a certain decision I took to try at least once the week to do something creative for my soul, determined me to just go to the next Idee shop and buy one of those colouring books for adults. I also purchased some nice colouring pencils and without thinking twice, I started to silently colour the white surfaces, just the way I used to do any years back. The difference is that now, my life got more complicated and I have to think about much more things than years ago. I also noticed how I can organise my writing life better, being able to almost write full posts in my mind and instantly put online after my colouring task is done!

The plan is to have a book done every two months. I already dream about my nexgt book, also from Idee, totally dedicated to travel. The older I get the more free I feel to be exactly what I want to be and to do exactly what I want to do. Good things, I mean. Some of them will be for sure announced soon on this blog...

Pattern design: suggestions from masters

Trying to get the best of my Pesach chol hamoed free time, while keeping up with my motto of learning something new every day I tried to day to use the opportunity offered by skillshare to learn for free about surface design and creating patterns. The video classes by Jenna Frye are very easy, illustrative and very useful. The program yo need for the practice is Illustrator, from the Adobe Family. The course is rather an introduction into the topic, with some good examples to practice but if really interested in improving the knowledge, more skills and practice is needed.

As for now, I decided to move on and improve my visual knowledge about the topic, and did some research about some of the masters of patterns used as examples during the class. 

Cath Kidston

Cath Kidson brings into your home, at your table or on your body the charm of the British countryside. Her website offers regularly various discounts and the diversity of her motifs, built around a smooth base of mild colours brings peace to the eyes. Her products can be also ordered online and delivered in specific countries all over the world, including outside Europe.

Joel Dewberry

Joel Dewberry is another example of praising simplicity and classical beauty. His elegant collections cover clothes, interior design, upholstery, wallpapers. 

Flower: Eucalyptus Bazaar

Johannes Itten

We are entering the hall of art, as Itten is an expressionist painter, close to the Bauhaus movement, which developed an elaborated theory of colours. 

M.C.Escher

One of my favourite artists by far, Escher is the master of creating special effects through repetition. He combines architectural elements, with stylish fragments of nature and the inspiration of the Italian art and architecture.

Convexe and concave

Presents for friends: Jewellery and a special box

Every time I should buy a present for a friend, I cope with the same question: what will it be the best idea? Especially when it is one of my girlfriends, there is quite a big problem to find something she will really enjoy, because in most cases, they are persons having a lot of nice things and makeup and almost everything you can dream about. So, the question will be to make a very special present, eventually something made by my humble own hands. 

As I am working a lot of DIY projects lately, I spent some good time at the IDEE shop trying to figure out what I am about to do. I set up for making up a box, with some mosaique tiles - mirror like, two sizes. The box looked very poor, calling for a dramatic redo. Although the small mosaique tiles can glue themselves, you better buy a wood glue too - actually, it was the most expensive item from the basket, around 5 EUR. The whole price for the entire shopping was around 8 Euro. As I do have water colours at home, further investment was not needed. 

The remaking of the box was slow - around 2 hrs.30. I was trying to be very careful to the small details, keeping the tiles clean - the best is to try to fix some dirt on the spot and do some more serious cleaning at the end of the project. 

I tried to be as creative as possible, but also to keep in mind the need to cover as much as possible from the wooden part. To be honest, maybe it was better just to paint the wood blue before applying the tiles, but this will be the lesson learned for the next time.

The blue interior looks really better, not only because I am a fan of the blue colour. For the tiles and for the colours, some waiting time is needed before everything is fixed and dried up.

Looking from all part of the box, everything was nice at the end, and I was very excited to finish my first complicated DIY project in a long while.

Now, it was about time to create some surprises in the box, using one of the kits made by Rico Design. Guidance for creating the pieces of jewellery are provided online and thus, if you are out of imagination - not my case - you can simply use the models recommended by them. In my case, I tried to be a little bit more creative and although I followed some technical steps, I preferred to make my own models.

 The jewellery creation process did not took too much time - around 1 hour of quiet work. As in the case of writing, I love how things are well put together out of very small little pieces.

Sometimes, the results can be beautiful but even more beautiful is the feeling of doing things with your own hand. Plus, making other people happy too!

A very simple DIY project: colouring the owl

Although I keep learning about cooking and food, and even took an awesome class of food writing lately - more details as soon as possible - I am glad to be back to one of my oldest hobbies: DIY projects. As a kid, I learned a lot of very useful women skills: from tailoring to knitting, and how to make my own jewellery. By growing up, I gave up such hobbies, more focused to make my way through complicated schools and sophisticated exams. After all, with my education I am supposed to pay other people to do a lot of things for me, from cooking to jewellery. 

However, a couple of weeks ago, while entering the Idee shop, I discover that it's never enough to feel creative and free again and since then, I keep working a lot - since the silence on the blog and on social media - learning again - how to work with metals, objects and colours.

This funny bag, ready made from Tiger and coloured by me, is just a small distraction from a generous sea of many projects in the making right now.  

I bought and finished it having in mind the daughter of a friend of mine who is quite a little lady. It took me less than 15 quiet minutes to finish it. All I had to do was to coloured the white shapes with the textile proof colours. The result is great and can't wait to keep working more projects of this kind.