When I started Smidgen of Calm I never imagined we’d become a community of over 100 creative souls. ✨ So rather than celebrating me, I’d love to celebrate us. 🙏🏼🙌🏻❤️ Here’s the challenge… Create one tiny square of art ! It can be a doodle, painting, collage, photograph, poem, pattern, pressed flower… absolutely anything that feels like you. Keep it small. Keep it joyful. Keep it unapologetically yours. Once everyone has shared their square, I’ll stitch them together into one giant artwork that represents this wonderful little corner of the internet. One hundred people. One hundred different stories. One beautiful piece of art. I genuinely can’t wait to see what we create together. 💜

Today Holly and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and honestly… it never disappoints. 🙌🏻❤️ Every year I leave with a sketchbook full of ideas, a head buzzing with inspiration and a heart that somehow feels a little fuller. But this year felt different. For years I’ve entered work into the exhibition and, year after year, received the same email saying I hadn’t been selected. It would have been easy to let that convince me I didn’t belong. Instead, something unexpected happened. Over the last couple of years I’ve stopped trying to fit myself into one creative box. I’ve realised I don’t just love painting. I love printmaking, illustration, photography, writing, bookbinding, murals, theatre, sketchbooks… I simply love making things. ❤️🎨 Walking through those galleries today, surrounded by every imaginable medium, style and voice, I realised that perhaps belonging isn’t about having your work on the wall. It’s about finding a place that celebrates curiosity. ✨ The Royal Academy reminds me that art doesn’t have to look one particular way. It can be loud or quiet, polished or wonderfully imperfect. It can ask questions rather than give answers. So I left inspired, not because I compared myself to the artists on the walls, but because I was reminded that creativity is vast… and there’s room for all of us in it. I took lots of film so I have lots of editing to do 🙈 Keep making. Keep exploring. Keep being curious. You never know where that curiosity might lead. ❤️

I am very excited to welcome @Julia Russell and @Aoife O Donovan to our ever expanding community 🙌🏻 we’re very happy to have you here and your welcome to introduce yourself my lovely 🥰