Jumping into the lake with all clothes on was the cherry on top of a math-filled, novel editing/illustrating, cosy keep cool kind of Tuesday here at Rose Cottage. Tomorrow will be an oil painting, salad mixing, garden green bean & blueberry picking sort of Wednesday.
What lovely littles fill your days this week? Love for all the fun little things! Love, ~Amor Milagre
Then on Wednesday…
Good afternoon, Love Doves…
I am taking time this week to fill up my new Etsy Shop. For my customers who are already over on that site, this makes it a little easier to check out. I will be adding in a few products a week. This is a curated core collection of my art, books, stationery, wax seals, and home gifts, so to shop the full range of growing collections stay here on my official site at amormilagre.com
Wishing the August babes an early Happy Birthday! Love, ~Amor Milagre
Coming Soon: An Original Wax Seal Stamp Sticker Design for Summer
We have a family sticker box. We also have sticker tins in our rooms. Everyone has a journal. Voila! Express, when you like, how you like. Today was breezy. I actually got to open our back windows, and memories of a special summer mood whooshed in. We did laundry and lessons. We wrote stories and read. Air. Openness. Beauty of the soul…endless rooms to explore.
One of my upcoming projects is a collection of unique Amor Milagre book illustration stickers. It will grow each season along with my current wax seal designs, art prints, bookshop, and stationery. We love stickers, so this will be extra special to use our very own artwork with our daily journals.
Amor Milagre Mini will have fun with this medium as an ongoing homeschool project. This week, we’re scanning piles of beautiful original artwork. I save everything. We just sorted and filed all of the new paintings. It’s quite the library to choose from so I’m excited to work on this collection.
Do you practice calligraphy? Do you enjoy the simple joy of stickers? Do you keep albums or scrapbooks? What kind of art, stories, days, and weather do you love dearly? I like to use stickers as gentle inspirational reminders. View some of our daily goals below.
Happy expressing life! Love, ~ Amor Milagre
These stickers were collected from various shops over the years… We like cosy interiors, baking, and garden ones the best. I can’t wait to introduce my own!
July has arrived, whether we like it or not, complete with sky-waking fire hazards, biters, and boiling suns. We happily chill and work through the heated months in our newly renovated Rose Cottage. I have much to list! My shop will soon refill with new photography, stationery, artwork, and darling books. In the coolest hours, the last bit of exterior boards swiftly change from dirty old blue to cosy fresh heavy cream. Cabinets assemble in the evenings. Sweet tiny bird families build thyme refuges in the shade. We redo old gardens, spreading anise hyssop seeds all along the pathways. My imagination scribbles away all day, all night. It is such a relief to have a new writing tool, see below, to translate my loving stories into printed books with less strife and pain. There are worlds in the hearth of every soul. Express love and peace. There and then, roses bloom ever so sweetly.
I am so happy to finally have a piece of technology that serves me, at least in the recording stage of my stories. Aptly named, reMarkable reduces my arthritis pain and migraine aura, and it quickens my writing process. I write nearly 24/7 so this little lovely, unlighted, non-screen screen helps me out. (Unsponsored review, as always.)
It’s not yet ideal because I still have to transfer this wonky text and edit it fully on a computer in two separate programs to make the lines into books. This step does help more than the inept vocal recording systems out there or just plain notebook copy-typing myself into a blind state of exhaustion. It is pretty good at getting most of my handwriting into text. I do have a lot of spaces to erase and quotes to redirect, a bug for them to work out for the next version. We do love the note pages and being able to practice our calligraphy without having to borrow back our blotting paper from our Borrowers.
After a week of use, I’m grateful for how it allows me to work more naturally and in my own handwriting. Not having to look back and forth whilst typing makes me less dizzy. I write more neatly again because there is no ink and less pressure on the hand to push onto the page. Also, one really does want to get it right the first time so there is less to decipher/edit. I never had to charge my pen or notebook, but I can buy way less ink refills and bulk sets of notebooks, which are two of my biggest expenses. This item wasn’t inexpensive either, so I hope it will last a very long time. It feels good to be once again in the proofreading stages. I predict that I will be able to publish more books in the next year. Too bad the cost of printing hasn’t gone down, though. In the meantime, I’m thinking about self-printing again to solve this issue. We’ll see. Printers are highly irritating creatures. Please fix those bugs soon, Techies.
This new process gives me less mass to physically store, which is good in a way, but I’m not sure if I like not having the first books. I will still keep printed copies of both the originals and the last proofread drafts to look back on as the archival rough drafts for each story. I feel like I can’t truly count on paper or digital files. They’re too fragile. If only I could store my words and pictures under the bark of a tree. Never in some organized, no-so-private, faux cloud. Even my own mind’s translation is muffled from its original spark. And, with so many new stories coming in, my best bet is to hurry up and get all of the books made. Translating ideas is an odd one. Illustration is even trickier for me. At least with writing, I just record the lines in my head. It’s hard to keep up. Painting depends more on my physical arm, back, tailbone… and how long they will be in the right frame of mind to try. The image is more specific, elusive, and more difficult to capture. It’s fleeting. So are the words, though. A steady home set up with a dependable timed-out routine helps allow both aspects of my storytelling to be themselves. I can listen well in the silence. This isn’t easy to balance with a family, homeschool, or exterior pollution, but I’ve just now been able to set a pretty good schedule. Stories ramble out. They speak to me just as people can stroll down many routes. Images are more strict on me. I let them be free to emerge and show themselves. I don’t feel that being a human makes sense for translating the senses. It’s difficult to find that one moment of alignment where things hurt less and you can breathe it out. Any tool, or made-up process, that I find to help me is a gift to the creative process. I like to keep things going…because ideas never stop…
Author Process Note: All illustrations will still be done by hand. Also, the next ~400 books to release were all hand-written. I’ve written about 4 this week on this tablet. It’s not as organic or free, but the editing stage is less consuming. It feels ever so good to move on and to add more Amor Milagre tales to my bookshop! Revisit my shop soon for all kinds of love stories.
*Update about ReMarkable 9-7-25. I’ve experienced a lot of restarting and dysfunctional non-operating moments with this device. It doesn’t send emails as it says, it doesn’t convert text consistently, it needs too many factory resets to even function or turn on as it stops working and goes to sleep often now. The company is not helpful. They have many bugs to sort out, and after system updates more issues occur. It’s frustrating because this would be helpful to my process if it worked well. Ugh…
Like a writing or painting process, our new rose-clematis trellis is a good structure to hold strong, allowing beauty to sprawl about as naturally as it buds and blooms up to be adored.
New nature photography, books, oil paintings, notecard-wax seal sticker sets,
and artwork will release this season.
A happy, safe summer to you and your Dear Ones! Love, ~Amor Milagre
On this cosy rainy Saturday, we: praise the clouds, stir up our weekly cooks and bakes, organize a new homeschool bookcase-locker tree, work on installing our handmade custom-designed kitchen pantry cabinets and mutter puzzle-figures for three other woodworking projects, and try to unglue our exhausted senses from the various terrible news sites. While we all protest the injustices attacking our world, we also need to nourish and appreciate all the goodness that is in our control. A weekly soup to sustain our immune systems, an effortless annual routine in the way of a handy rotating locker to easily find weekly lesson resources, a fresh uncluttered storage space to walk in, and a cosy preciousness of our own making are all easy ways that we take care of ourselves. Pineapples for luck, Love~ Amor Milagre
Airy soft dough relaxes me…
I’ve been sewing up some pretty, breezy clothes that can also be layered up on snowy days. Here is a recent women’s design in a French black floral. I prefer high-waisted A-line vintage silhouettes as they are the most flattering, comfortable, and easy to wear with a variety of top styles.
My early comfort food is homemade pasta. I rolled these delicious little squiggles up for lunch a few days ago. Chef’s kiss…mmmm.
I designed three new pieces for the kitchen and bathroom, and my talented husband is already counting up boards. I like to keep things off of the floor for easy cleaning, and in the case of our endlessly dividing houseplants, they will be closer to the sun this way, too. A little narrow kitchen linen sideboard will go sleekly by the door to house aprons, napkins, and tablecloths. We can place a sweet selection of seasonal decor on top! In our art class, we are making some autumnal pieces now with clay and fabric.
By separating the fridge from the main kitchen area with a glass door, we have extended the kitchen into the back mudroom and this keeps that certain wearing buzz away from us as we enjoy our cooks. All of my designs are for sensitive people. Soon, there will be a counter and upper cabinets for dried foods in here. The base stores bigger pans, pots, pie plates, and glass storage containers. The counter will be where the blender and toaster live, freeing up our main counters in the kitchen for rolling out dough and just a general uncluttered clarity. The fruit bowls will lounge on a bistro table in here as well. We changed this design a bit back here to finish these spaces sooner and to allow for other types of storage to live here, too. It will be so lovely to be finished with our complete kitchen renovation, and I will post the before and after’s soon.
It’s hard to believe that ten years ago we only had a few shelves-worth of books, some of which had to be discarded after a leak. Now, we have so many school books that we chose this carousel case to organize our weekly lesson books. Each area is designated for a specific class. They are in order of the days of the week, from top to bottom, with extras to pull from when one is finished. Our lessons cover everything, so it’s fun and easier to set out a small collection to take over to the library each day, no harmful back packs needed. Later on, we will place this piece in the library and spiral our most beautiful smaller novels all around. It is a bit tricky to get the taller school books to fit, but they can be tipped sideways. Less visual clutter eases the senses, so this will stay in the back room for now. We designed and made beautiful ceiling height bookcases for the library which are now full and need reorganizing. Moving the current school books over frees up a few shelves. We’ll put on an audiobook and shift things around. We love to be surrounded by loving stories. It feels like we have a bookshop in our home. I’m excited to share that my Amor Milagre bookshop will greet a few new novels this year! I’ll be working on the treasuries over the winter, all cosy with my paints and cup of tea. Note to self- Don’t dip your brush in the teacup!
Wishing all the love to those who need it most.
Music of the Moment: The Very Thought of You, Ray Noble, Al Bowlly
