We are Back

And sharpening our pencils after time away from Substack this summer

Dear Readers,

Thank you for bearing with us during our absence. This summer has been a time of letting go, a fallow period that has been restorative but also challenging so we are delighted to be back here with you in this beautiful autumn season.

In this letter I want to look back on summer and let you know what we have been up to on the land and in the studio, which I will write more about in the coming weeks. I also want to look forward and share what I’m doing to gently regain my energy and explore ways forward in the autumn. If you are looking for ways back into your creative work after the intensity of summer, this letter is for you. I’ll share my evolving micro-habits for renewal and invite you into the studio for a sneak peek at upcoming projects.

Looking Back: Summer Residencies

This summer we were very fortunate to host our first two residencies. Our first writer is novelist and activist Rebecca Stonehill. Our second resident was music broadcaster and BBC Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch. I’m going to introduce them properly in upcoming letters, and fill you in on both their fascinating projects, but for now I just want to say what an honour it was that they would choose to spend their valuable creative time at the studio. It was also a delight to share with them the beautiful place that we call home and where we work from. The meadows were in full bloom, there was much sitting around the fire, swimming in the pond, and drinking in the silence and wonder of a summer in Devon. A huge thank you to both of them for trusting us with their time and creative process. You will hear more from Becca and Sara soon.

Looking Forward: Autumn

I don’t know about you, but although autumn is a time when nature goes inward again, preparing the ground for winter, I feel paradoxically jazzed up. Maybe as life gets more muted on the surface — the colour draining out of the garden, the sun lower in the sky, the once green grass tipped with silver frost — my inner-landscape can wake up a bit. It’s like listening to a song in a minor key. Weirdly, it makes me really happy.

Coming up in the Studio

In October I plan to have a bit of a clear out of the garden. I love this bit —preparing the polytunnel for winter and planning spring plantings. Somehow as I do that, it quiets my mind, and I begin to feel my energy going back indoors and into the studio. To get ready for this season, I will be visiting Princetown Press on Dartmoor for a much-needed MOT of our Adana, a tabletop letterpress from the 1920s. We have recently had some polymer plates printed with the Apple Barn logo that will be used for our second season of correspondence cards (our first soon to be released cards include an antique typewriter block). It’s the first time we have worked with polymer plates in the studio and it’s really exciting to be able to visit experts and find out more about how to improve our technique. I’ll be posting more about this in upcoming letters too.

And finally, before I sign off I want to share with you a few small things I’m doing to come back to my practice after some time away.

My Three Micro-Habits for Renewal this autumn

1. Morning Pages

The first thing that I did was get back into my morning pages routine. My last entry was from April. This was a big deal for me since I have been doing morning pages consistently for the last seven years. If you don’t know, morning pages comes from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and the basic idea is that you write three long hand pages every morning before you do anything else. It doesn’t work for everyone and I have had periods where it hasn’t really felt like the right fit for me either, but on the whole it does what it purports to do — gets out all the junk in your head so that you have a more clear sense of your creative goals and instincts before you start the day. My routine is so valuable to me that just the act of taking 45 minutes every morning to do this makes a huge difference. If three pages feels too long I’ve also sometimes put a 10 minute timer on. Even one page helps. I’m also not a stickler for the “first thing in the morning” part either. I often do it after the kids go to school. It’s just a nice way to touch base with myself and my priorities before I get lost in the “to do” list of the day.

2. A small drawing project

I really wanted a small project to get myself back into the head space of being creative. I wanted to calm my nervous system and to reclaim the quality of attention that makes space for good ideas to come through. Having said I monitor my online content so carefully I do love to go to YouTube for inspiration and I found this video from Rajiv Surendra on positive thinking, and this video from embroiderer Louise Watson about her sketchbook practice, really helpful. I feel like I mashed together their advice. Essentially to hand a project that you can do in the little gaps in your life (rather than scrolling) and to draw inspiration from the garden. So I took myself to the book store (of course!) and bought myself a book of flowers throughout the year and a small blank notebook. My plan is to have a section for each month where I draw flowers from the garden so I can look back next year and see what was in season when, something I’m not terribly good at, and often end up looking up again and again. I’ll write more here on Substack about whether I followed-through on this or not!

3. Tulip lasagne

Finally I’m tackling a very small garden project. (I think if there’s a theme here, it’s starting small and not overwhelming yourself.) I am going to make a tulip lasagne. If you don’t know what it is, it’s basically layers of bulbs that all flower at different times giving you a pot or flower bed full of variety and colour when the spring arrives. I have done one before but I’m hopeless at remembering instructions so I’m a little nervous about tackling it again. Hopefully it all goes to plan though and I can share photos of the process here as it unfolds.

That’s it for now. If you have gotten this far, thank you so much for reading. Looking forward to continuing to share the messy but rewarding creative process both on the land and in the studio.

Until next time,

Natasha