Hi! Happy New Year,
I hope you have been having a restful, restorative week and that things are looking bright and shiny for 2023.
Here’s a new beginning: Starting this Wednesday, I will be sending out regular bonus newsletters to paid subscribers. Because you are part of my OG mailing list - I offer you the special option to sign up during January for a free three month trial so you can check it out before deciding if you’d like to join or not. After that it will be $5 a month, or $50 for an annual membership. You will be sent a reminder at the end of the trial. These weekly Sunday emails will remain free for all, as they always have been, but bonus content emails will include comics, process videos, works in progress, recipes, q+a’s, journal entries, sketchbook tours, secrets, gossip, crafts, studio tips, life tips, deeply personal illustrated poetry explorations of my darkest inner psyche... basically anything that I think you will enjoy. By signing up you will get lots of good stuff, plus you will be supporting me in my newsletter productions and other creative endeavours, and for that I will be eternally grateful.
Meanwhile, here are some things I am thinking about today:
Planning & Dreaming
This will be my 5th year of filling out Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year booklet. I like the excuse to reflect on the old year and set up some intentions and goals for the new year. Once you have a few under your belt, looking back over past years’ booklets is interesting and illuminating. The exercise is pretty long, so if you are looking for something along the same lines but way less time consuming, try The Year Compass. And here is an alternative that I have not yet tried, but also looks good.Treating Yourself
Clothes, fragrances, mimosas, massages, fine leather goods. Take a moment to watch this clip from Parks and Rec:Sounds like a pretty fancy day. Now take a pen, close your eyes, open your calendar or planner on a random page, and pin point a day in the year that is now your treat day. Or even more awesome is do this six times over - smaller treat days that pop up unexpectedly throughout the year. These can be the days when you give yourself permission to have that expensive coffee with all the extras, or buy that paperback you’ve been coveting, or run a bath and tell everyone else that your calendar is booked.
It doesn’t have to be a lot. Just this simple thing makes the year a whole a little more fun. I did it last year and bought a lot of fiction, now towering beside my bed.Reading more books
I swear I am not resolving, but most definitely hoping to make changes in my behaviour around reading. I read very few books in 2022, a realisation that made me sad and nostalgic. Reading was once one of my favourite pastimes. I watched this video and recommend it if you have a growing bedside-stack but feel like you haven’t got enough time to make a dent in it.Lasagna to bring in the new
Cookie and Kate’s Best Vegetable Lasagna is really good, and not hard to make at all. No white sauce shenanigans, and lots of nutritious things for a healthy new year. It seems to be a hit around here. Addendum: Add Italian herbs to the cottage cheese before whipping, it adds to the oomph! Thanks J.D. for the hot tip.Substack Love
I have been enjoying exploring Substack and its features, and discovering new newsletter/blogs that I enjoy. One of my favourites is the inspiring illustrator Carson Ellis. Her “Slowpoke” is fun and flavourful. Her partner, the musician and author Colin Meloy, also has a great Substack. Two of the best. Did you know their book trilogy “Wildwood” is being turned into a movie by the stop motion animation studio Laika? Some good news!Room with a View - WindowSwap
Tired of looking at the view out of your own window? WindowSwap offers window views submitted from people around the world. Created during the pandemic to “to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else's window, somewhere in the world”, it works equally well for those snowed in, or just a little bored and curious. In the time I watched, I had views from windows in Iceland, Thailand, Greece, Hungary and Scotland. - via C.H.RIP Vivienne Westwood. This is some very sad news this week. We all have our shortlist of favourite icons, and she was the top of mine.
”Tao spiritual system. There was never more need for the Tao today. Tao gives you a feeling that you belong to the cosmos and gives purpose to your life; it gives you such a sense of identity and strength to know you’re living the life you can live and therefore ought to be living: make full use of your character and full use of your life on earth.” - Vivienne WestwoodWatching
Matilda the Musical - fully worth it for Alisha Weir’s performance as Matilda (such great facial expressions). We missed some of our favourite songs… but it was pretty delightful. Little Alisha’s reaction to finding out she was cast in the lead role is priceless. I’m not crying, you’re crying.Anticipating
I’m looking forward to Showing Up - Kelly Reichardt’s film about creative life and artistic rivalry. ”A sculptor (Michelle Williams) preparing to open a new show must balance her creative life with the daily dramas of family and friends, in Kelly Reichardt's vibrant and captivatingly funny portrait of art and craft.” Coming in the spring of 2023. Variety has a good review (with a few spoilers!).A Secret Library
The Future Library Project: “A forest in Norway is growing. In 100 years it will become an anthology of books. Every year a writer is contributing a text that will be held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. The texts will be published on paper made from the trees, only to be read a century from now.” Contributing authors include Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Ocean Vuong. The Guardian calls it “The world’s most secretive library, currently housed only in the minds of its authors and containing books that will not be read for almost a century”.
That’s all for now. My special new bonus newsletter will be out on Wednesday - so please sign up or upgrade for your three month free-trial to sample the goods.
xo,
Claire
P.S. A correction from last week. The youthful photograph I posted was actually Diana Rigg with Helen Mirren - not Judi Dench. Oops.
Thanks Claire! So much goodness in here as usual. Going to put some 'treat' days in my calendar right away. I'm excited for the bonus newsletter too. xo