Jessica Takes a Sabbatical

Dearest friends,

It is with a sad, but relieved, heart that I am announcing a major sabbatical for Sweet Eventide. I have poured my heart, soul & wallet into my blog and Etsy shop for two-and-a-half years and it is time for a re-evaluation period.

I work Monday through Friday while my son is in school and trying to juggle my family and Sweet Eventide during the rest of the hours is not sustainable any longer. If I was making great strides in my creative photography business, I would be getting some return on the immense investment I have made into it. However, I am not. I simply am not, despite my best efforts.

The final straw was yesterday's artisan bazaar. I had such high hopes for this bazaar, what with finally being in Portland, where people love art and handmade and "meeting the artist behind the work." I was finally showing somewhere that had good foot traffic! That is what has been missing all along, I told myself for the past month as I prepared and prepared and prepared to show myself at my very best.

an iphone photo, not the ones documented with the rented Tokina 11-16 

I will be brutally honest here and tell everyone that I spent countless hours and over $500 preparing for this show and I sold $30 worth of merchandise. Yes, I even rented a fancy wide angle and marco lenses from my employer and took lots of cool pictures of my display. But it all ends with an iPhone snap.

My family gave up their entire weekend to help me because I was so sick. This is a business that has been bleeding the entire time it has existed. I may have a dream but I also know when I have hit my personal limits. I have only so much time and energy per day. I spend it every day as consciously as I can.

And I am done.

You see, lots of people did go to the bazaar and a lot of them came down and saw my booth. Most people l-i-n-g-e-r-ed over my display, oohing and ahhing over my work. I overheard wonderful murmurs like "beautiful" and "peaceful" and "calming" and other nice things. I even heard about my business cards -- "These are so gorgeous! You give these away?" -- as they took one and walked away without buying anything.

Why yes, yes I do. I give and I give and I give.

And I am done.

People respond so well to my work and some people have supported it with a purchase. Thank you to each and every one of my 64 customers who have supported my shop since it launched. But in a world overflowing with beautiful blogs and photography and handmade gorgeous goods, you don't really have to buy anything. You can get endless amounts of pretty for free.

And I am done with all of that. I've loved sharing my work. But it comes at a great cost to me. I know a lot of people don't talk openly and honestly about this stuff. I am going to talk about it. I can read every article out there about SEO and indie marketing and successful ads and social media and tags & titles and how to stand out on Etsy. I can, I have, I have tried and tried and tried.

And I am done.

I do not know what the future will bring. But right now I am taking a sabbatical and I am walking away. If you are here if and when I come back, that is wonderful. If you are not, I understand.

Thank you for going on this journey with me.

xo,
Jess

Jess Obsesses on Burlap Wreaths

Good afternoon! We had a different, but enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday here in our new city, even though I've been sick for going on a week now with back-to-back germ sessions. We thoroughly enjoyed having the Noodle home from school for an entire week. The house is lonely and quiet with him gone today. I'm distracting myself with Etsy searches for rustic holiday wreaths because I want one and I'm not feeling very crafty myself at the moment.

 burlap and felt wreath by AquaGirlArt

I couldn't stop at one of course so now there is a fun new pinboard full of wreaths for you to visit. 

FYI: I have completely opted out of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness on Etsy this year. I put my heart & soul into those events the past two holiday seasons and didn't get a lot out of it. It is so saturated with sales! I'm hatching up a different plan to show some appreciation to my customers this holiday season instead so stay tuned for details. I'm busily printing & shipping calendars plus preparing for the Winter Artisan Bazaar coming up this Sunday, Dec. 4th in Portland. If you are local, please come visit me!

If you have any favorite wreaths you've seen lately, please share it with me in the comments (especially rustic ones made with burlap, twine, wood, etc. ) Indulge a gal! :)

Delicato, 2012 Calendar is Available Now

is now available in the shop, 

$25 for 12 months of gentle, serene and dreamy images.

Delicato, 2012 Calendar is Available for Purchase

Delicato

A Variety of Updates

Good morning!  I am here with a few updates. I am still working diligently behind the scenes on my calendar and preparing my booth ideas for the art fair in a few weeks. In the meantime, I have a brand new product in the shop: greeting cards! For my first set, I chose one of my top-selling images, those beloved Ranunculus (up to almost 5,000 views on Flickr!).

A set of three cards is $10 and they are printed on luxurious linen paper, as shown in the second image. I will package them up all pretty and then put them in a plastic sleeve for protection. 

My second update can be seen over in the right side bar: I am exhibiting in Poppytalk Handmade for the first time. I'm over at Table 139 and in the lookbook on page 17! 

It is such a pretty page if you don't mind my saying so! (I had to crop my photos into squares for the market, and my Ranunculus photo looks so strange to me that way).

Finally, I know it's been awhile but it's time to wrap up my little giveaway from last month. This is turning out to be a pretty in pink kind of post, isn't it? Here are the titles I chose for the images, thank you Charlotte and Susanne for the help! 

Since there were only three entries, everyone is a winner! (I feel a little like Ellen and her games on her show saying that.) I will contact you all off the blog. :)

Well it's time to get to work. My Noodle had no school on Thursday and Friday last week so we are coming off a wonderful four-day weekend with him. We learned a little beginning embroidery, he went to a bit of a day camp and made a hand-dipped candle, he went night swimming with a friend whose parents were so kind to invite him along, we had a sweet visit with Jeff's grandma who lives just over an hour south of us in Oregon, we went out to a yummy breakfast yesterday, we took the Noodle to open climbing at an indoor rock gym and watched in amazement as he attacked 50-foot walls with ease five times in a row. We ended the weekend with a viewing of the third Harry Potter movie and pizza. Phew! We did a lot of stuff!

Wow, these posts get a little long when I only post once per week! Remember, you can find me tweeting and pinning throughout the week and I'd love to connect with you.

Leaves

Good morning! I must say I am excited about my new blogging schedule. I went photo walking so I could have some new images to share with you today and I got a lot of behind-the-scenes work done.

dancing in red

I am almost done choosing the images for my 2012 calendar! This is usually the hardest part of the process and the most time consuming. If you bought my calendars in years past, I would love feedback on them. Do you like the size or would you like it to be bigger? I am leaning towards a bigger calendar this year and making the photos 4x6 so after the month is over, you could trim and frame it if you wanted. Thoughts?

in transition

I also set up shop over at Poppytalk Handmade, who launched their Pre-Holiday Market today. Yes, the H word is upon us. I am focused on Thanksgiving first, although I am preparing my shop for the shopping portion of the holiday season. We started a daily family gratitude journal. My boys seem a tad unsure about the whole thing, but they are being good sports about it and supporting my idea.

I am also spending a lot of time at this incredibly cool site, Teaching Channel, that showcases innovative teachers in action. I learned about it from the charter school we attended in California and I'm looking for as many ways to support and supplement my Noodle right now. Check out Ms. Noonan's morning meeting with her 5th graders! Can you imagine if families or businesses started their days this way too? What incredible, positive energy!

Here is a bit of link love until we meet again...

a video about murmuration and there is a canoe!

a little cute overload to make you smile on a Monday

flaming foliage candleholders from martha, if you are feeling a little bit crafty (hey, I just noticed Martha has a "pin it" button on her site now)

adorable peg dolls for Thanksgiving, is it me or are peg dolls the cutest trend?

doing my part to buck the owl trend

Finally, if you want to connect between weekly blog updates, you can find me on Twitter  and Pinterest daily (or close to it!).

Happy Halloween

Hello and Happy Halloween! I know I have been absent from this space again, but before I elaborate on that, I thought I would celebrate the main color of this day with some of my favorites from Poppytalk's Autumn Color week.

1. dusk in the patch, 2. abandoned., 3. Golden sunrise over Higgin's Beach, 

4. Autumn colour week 2011- orange, 5. lights, 6. stormy , 

7. door, 8. poppytalk orange: iconic fall, 9. 9.11.10

So...as for that absence you have surely noticed and felt. I must say simply that I am overwhelmed by our school situation at this time. It is much more difficult than I care to go into in my happy place. It is consuming my thoughts and energy on a near-daily basis. Going forward, I think I will follow in Sam's lead, from Inklore, who recently redesigned her website and adopted a new weekly approach to blogging. I do not want to abandon my blog or quit. A weekly post is what I can commit to right now and it will appear on Mondays going forward. I appreciate your readership and loyalty and friendship and really, I need it more than ever but I do not have the resources to blog more than once per week right now. :(

xo,

Jess

Brown for Friday

What's not to love about brown? 

Brown is the earth, brown is organic, brown is full of depth and texture. Thank you Jan for another amazing week of color. I may be back this afternoon with a mosaic of all my favorites to share with you.

Grey Thursday

A country road in Helvetia, Oregon for grey Thursday.

This is a quintessential little town out in the country with sheeps, goats, cows, horses and giddy chocolate labs romping through fields. I kind of fell in love with it, yes I did.

There are a few more grey photos in my Flickr set.

Poppytalk + Autumn Color Week

Good morning! I'm trying my best to contribute to the Autumn Color Week pool because Poppytalk's color weeks are highlights of each year for me behind the camera. I get so inspired by them. I wish I could take a week off of work just to focus on color week! Alas, I can't. I did manage to put the Noodle and some of the his classmates to work for me yesterday for yellow Tuesday though.

I joined them for their first field trip of the year, a walk to Laurelhurst Park to observe and sketch. This was the best school day of the year so far in my opinion. I was really grateful I could basically take a half-day off of work to attend. The sun came out, it was warm and beautiful. I was so happy to be there for my boy.

I will add things to the Poppytalk Flickr pool as often as I can and you can check out the new and growing set throughout the week. Some images you've seen, some you haven't but in any case I love to see them collected together in a wave of yellow orange grey and brown. (I completely missed red on Monday).

P.S. On a totally unrelated note, I haven't completely forgotten about my little giveaway. I hadn't thought that all the way through with my traveling, etc. so I'm just a 'lil behind on life still. In fact, if anyone still wants to toodle over and enter, go for it! I'll catch up! Promise. :)

California Dreaming

Hello my long-lost friends.

Since I posted last, we went to California to our beloved beach house* with our family for our fifth annual unplugged weekend (well, I unplug, not everyone does). It was deeply wonderful to be with our family and I managed to see two of my closest friends as well. It was not nearly enough time. It went by in a blink. I have been terribly homesick ever since. In fact, I flew home* a week ago today and I was only now able to look through my photos.

good conversations with loved ones happen in these chairs

You see, relocating? It's a pretty big deal. I've been cruising along on a sort-of Portland high -- what with the amazing food scene here, meeting people from blogland, the cycling heaven and the nature, oh the darn greenery around here! In between, I've been supercrazybusy making this house into a home. In between all of that, I work a day job 25-30 hours a week! In between all of that, I have been homesick and felt it many different ways -- especially since school began here because it is not cool and I miss our charter school community something awful.

But going home* to California, and spending time at the coast with the people I love? I could faint with homesick. So here I find myself living in a city I have passionately loved for years passionately missing my people and community at home. I have simply traded places. Instead of dreaming and missing Portland from California, I am dreaming of my friends and family and missing them in California.

As for California herself? I miss her seashores. That's about it so far.

How have you been?

* edited to clarify that my in-laws rent the same amazing beach house for the family each year, but we all wish we owned it :)

* edited again, because my conflict is clear -- I called both places home.

Thoughts about Steve Jobs

Like many, I have been surprised by the depth of my reaction to the news that Steve Jobs has died. In times like these, I sometimes wonder what I am doing focused so much on the pretty, the beautiful and the magical all the time? Today, I feel I must interrupt my regular programming of dreamy photographs to share some of my darker thoughts.

© Jonathan Mak is the original source of this now-viral image
(as far as I can tell on two hours of sleep)

As the internet buzzes about Steve Jobs dying yesterday (I recommend the cover story over at Wired.com), I find myself struggling to sleep. The Noodle woke up hours and hours ago scared he heard something in a closet. I soothed him and then couldn't fall back asleep. My thoughts turned back to my sadness about Steve Jobs and I opened up my Twitter. I saw a link to this article about the absolute corruption at American Cancer Society and that was the end of my ability to sleep. 

I urge everyone who reads my blog to read that link. It is from the Cancer Prevention Coalition and here is a link to their Board of Directors for comparison.

 I really can only think about one aspect of Steve Jobs dying right now. This man died of cancer. This was a man so wealthy and powerful who presumably had every resource at his disposal and it was not enough. 

I am deeply saddened by this realization. It is not a new realization. But when you are in remission like me, you let yourself forget the realities that your fellow cancer survivors are dealing with every day. It is almost an obligation of remission to LIVE LIFE to the fullest and put the cancer stuff out of your mind. So I have let my anger at cancer's inequities sit in the kettle of my consciousness instead of boil on the stove of my daily life for the past few years. I know that people love to rally behind a ribbon or an organization. People have wonderful intentions and they run marathons and ride their bikes 100 miles in a day to show how much they care. But we need more.

There are millions and millions of dollars raised for cancer research every year. There are big brains at work tirelessly in research labs basically right down the street from Apple headquarters. (Hi Dr. Levy! Do you remember me?). Yet, there remains an unacceptable disconnect between the two and therein lies the lack of a cure for cancer.

It is 2011. Say what you will about Steve Jobs and his reputation for being caustic and perfectionistic at times, but you cannot argue that the world lost an innovator and a visionary too soon. We have lost too many people to cancer. You think 56 is too soon? Don't even get me started on the babies and children we have lost. The war on cancer is yet another failure of an American war. (That is a link to a book on Amazon about it, just go ahead and search Amazon for "war on cancer" and tell me if you are surprised or not).

There is disease and frustration and hopelessness around me. There are terrible, corrupt things going on in my country (are you following Occupy Wall St.?). We still have an unsustainable and downright frightening food supply (have you seen the latest Threadless design challenge about GMOs?). We have a broken system of public education, even though I know first-hand that innovative and progressive education exists now and yet, it isn't available to all of our nation's children (including my own right now). 

This may not be my most eloquent blog post in the five and a half years I have been writing in this space. I started this blog to chronicle the ups and downs of being a mom with cancer way back then. I have grown and shifted over time, as human beings ought to do if they are living authentically and consciously as I strive to do. I have ever more growing to do, and much more work to do with my own life. I get jolts of reminders about this from time to time. I guess this is one of those times.

As for the question I asked myself at the start of the post, I do know why I lean into the pretty and the magical so hard. It's because I have seen the ugly and the dark so hard so many times from such a young age. I sorely need to balance it all out for myself.

Thank you for reading.

Jess

In the garden -- green

It's all about the leaves today.

spider web leaf

pinking shears leaf

fuzzy leaf

a giant leaf (it lives near the hotel's Brazilian pepper tree)

Fun patterns, right? I love it. I also love the edges of color. It is like each leaf was dip-dyed or something. 

Don't forget to enter my giveway on yesterday's post! Help me name two photographs and win up to an 8x12 of your choice from my shop. All the details are on the post, and you can enter until tomorrow at midnight!

In the garden -- wild pink

Today I am going to perk you up with wild pink and a little challenge. I will often notice leaves and flowers when I am out, I'm drawn to color and pattern and where better to find it but flowers and leaves? Knowing that about me, you must understand that even though I was out prowling the gardens of the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe with a macro lens for goodness sake, these leaves really startled me.

"wild blush"

"blushing beauty"

So, are you perked up & ready for my little challenge? I would like help naming these two images. I am totally stumped. I'm not sure if it's the wild shade of pink throwing me off or what, I don't normally struggle so much to think of a title for a photograph. Leave a comment with a new name for one or both images (and please include the "old" name) and on Thursday morning, I will choose my favorite idea for each image. 

The winner gets any print from my Etsy shop in whatever size they prefer up to 8x12 (some of my work will not look the same at 5x7 and 8x10 due to the necessary cropping; I will let you know if that is an issue). I will order the winning prints next week after we return from our annual trip to Pajaro Dunes.

In the garden -- yellow

It's been a rainy weekend here in Portland and will continue all week. I am enjoying the change in the weather very much. It seems pretty grey along most of the west coast, how is it everywhere else? I thought a burst of yellow from the gardens in San Diego at our hotel would be a great way to kick off the week here at Sweet Eventide.

Also, last night I made a delicious risotto from food52.com (via gojee) for the family Sunday dinner that we host every other week. It was so amazing that I am going to make it again tonight. I have enough of the ingredients left over that I only need to replenish the pancetta and mushrooms. Yum! I love fall cooking!

An Ordinary Bed

I know I was rambling and hinting about the amazing garden at the hotel in San Diego earlier but then as I went through my images, I couldn't really move beyond this one.

It's just an ordinary bed in a hotel room.

It's just an ordinary bed, except it looked like more than that to me as I looked at it from across the room. It was the light that caught my eye, but it was the way the covers were strewn about that kept me staring. Then I noticed the creamy tones in the floor tiles and how it was all a little bit lopsided. And I loved it with my whole heart. So I used my camera to freeze this moment in time so I could always remember...this is the bed where me and Jeff and Jaden all crammed in, warm and snuggly, when we came to see Chris get married to the love of her life. And this is what it looked like when we all got up in the morning.

I mean, isn't this the whole point of me carrying around a camera all the time? There is simply so much magic in the ordinary, fleeting moments of our days. 

Purple Eventide

I couldn't believe the sky at eventide during the wedding reception. My cousin's colors were steel grey and purple. It was as if Mother Nature herself had been invited to the wedding.

bokeh-licious as they say

Tomorrow I'll wrap up the San Diego trip with non-wedding images. Keep in mind, I rented a macro lens from work and there is an amazing garden at the hotel. ;) 

It's the little things at a wedding

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time now, or if you know me personally, you know that I have an eye for the details. This is not something I have purposefully honed, it is just naturally how I see the world. I am forever lost in the trees, unaware of the forest around me. 

This is why weddings and parties can be thrilling for me, if the people hosting them are into details too. I was giddy to realize my cousin and I share a love of handmade details and of course, I love to catch people with my camera when they have no idea I am around. And sometimes, you get lucky and someone is not old enough to be self-conscious even when they are staring directly into your camera lens. :)

a hand-painted wooden sign, I think I squealed loudly

flower girls playing in the flowers

baby Sammy who entertained me during the reception

Meeting new relatives at a family wedding? One of the greatest joys in life. More tomorrow!

More Wedding Cake

Mind you, I didn't take any photos of the actual cake, oops! I was more interested in Christina and Brandon and not being the official photographer freed me to take the photographs most interesting to me.

"I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges."  ~William Albert Allard, The Photographic Essay

Going through my images is bringing me so much joy this week! It eases the pain of saying goodbye to my side of the family until who-knows-when-again. 

P.S. The cake was very tall with buttercream frosting in simple stripes going around and around the cake and their new, shared, initial as a topper.