What happened in March 2017?

Begin March, there are 2 birthdays to celebrate: Cindy, my sons girlfriend and Andrea, my goddaughter. I took the 3-hour train to Andrea's place; she's the daughter of Pieter, my second last brother and Gudrun, my capable sister in law. (You remember her from a previous post. She owns Concept Smalle.) Andrea is an athlete, dancer, sailor and we were going to celebrate her 17th birthday. Since I don't see her a lot, I started a couple years ago to take her out for dinner, just the two of us. She loves the attention and (I think) feeling grown up. I let her choose the place. We decided on leaving at 18.30; at 18.00 I called her to get ready, but I needn't to worry, she had already done her hair and was putting on some make up. She had chosen a nice Italian place and the food was nice and good.

The next day, Gudrun and I had the place and the time for ourselves. We talked about my new passion, leather accessories and she pointed out some things I had to brainstorm about: name, logo, website, domain name. Gudrun told me about her upcoming project: she met a steam-punk wedding dress designer, Gabrielle Détry.  For a week, they disposed of a window in a men's clothing store, Schmit Beaufays Men's; Gudrun would display the dresses in a fitting window display and one day the dolls would be replaced by models who showcased the wedding dresses and 2 couples would dress up and walk around in the neighborhood. Gudrun thought that some of my jewels matched the steam punk style and indeed, one of my cuff's was used.

Steam punk style wedding dresses by Gabrielle Détry

Steam punk style  leather Cuff by Lovelea

Back home, I had a week to find a name, create a logo, print the logo out and sent them to Gudrun. The name should cover my new project and I choose LoveLea. Isn't it about my Love for Leather. Once the name found I could think about a logo. My husband Suat (who is a musician, playing the 12-string guitar, writing and composing his own songs) is rather good in this kind of things and he made this beautiful logo:

This is the front of my logo

         and this is the back. I want to share my leather love
 with everybody,  hence the "we" love leather.

 I went to the print shop and had my logo printed; wow, how pride I felt with the printed logo's in my hand. This felt real! The only thing left was to mail them to Gudrun. Whew, everything ready right in time.

The exposition in July had drained me: the distance from home, the hot and humid weather, a painting  to give as a present to the city of Bergama still to be painted and little time, overdue work at home. No time and energy left for my leather projects. This week I really felt the urge to start again, but my hands and my brain  were left idle for too long and all I had was a blank mind. I went through my finished products and noticed I had not very much earrings. There were some white beads layin around  and, very important, their whole was large enough to get a leather thread through. I made some dressy and some sturdy earrings:

Dressy leather earrings by LoveLea

Sturdy leather earrings by Lovelea

Sturdy leather earrings in 60's colors by Lovelea

The earrings made, my inspiration came back; my love for tassels and chokers produced this:

Choker with tassel in nude colored leather

I want to finish this post with one of my husband's songs;  this is one of my favorite's; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijpncAP3hjQ. You can find the same link on the page My favorite Music on the left. Enjoy!

A mission and a vision?

I am reading "The Fire Starter Sessions: A soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms" by Danielle LaPorte. In session 11: how you show up in the world, she says .... its all about: the mission and the vision. When reading that, I had my aha moment: I have no mission and no vision. Well, not exactly true, but it downed on me that I had it the wrong way: I am creating my stuff and then I think: can there be, is there a mission in making a leather choker? Truly, it sounds very poor, comic, superficial, worldly.  I am a spiritual person and need a justification of my worldly, frivolous creations. The only justification I could think of is: I can make a girl, a woman, a child happy and when that person is happy, when that person feels good because of my choker that person gets more confident and eventually confidence becomes an attitude and you are confident with or WITHOUT my choker.

And this morning, when quietly sipping my morning coffee, something came into my mind: I was thinking about an acquaintance and how that person reacted to a situation.  In my opinion, he had reacted poorly, but is it possible to behave different than you are? In my native language, there is a saying: iedere vogel zingt zoals hij gebekt is. Translated it goes like this: every bird sings so as his mouth/muzzle/bec is. Can you expect or do you expect a sparrow to sing as a blackbird? No, we can't, we don't do that. So why would I expect something like this of myself? I am a spiritual person, I do a lot of thinking, I've been through a lot of things; I am interested in a lot of different areas; I have some life experience AND I have this big need to create stuff and finally I found what I truly like: working with leather, feeling the softness and the sturdiness of leather, seeing and feeling the grain of the leather, detecting the small imperfections in the skin being the places the animal has been injured. 

I started a facebook page LoveLea for my leather business and it didn't work. Oh, I had some 50 followers, but I couldn't keep up the traffic. Last month I exposed my oil paintings and I had warned my fb readers that during the time of the exposition, I wouldn't have time to post anything. When the exposition was over, I realized I had no feeling to continue my fb page. But I didn't want to give up totally and after a couple days of ruminating I thought that combining my fb page with a blog might work. Lets say: promoting the leather accessories I make, is not my mission, but LoveLea  linked to a blog becomes a path to get in touch with people on another level. People would see my spiritual side and my creative side. My mission is to show my way of living, thinking, how I coop with life and hoping my words  can make a difference  for some people out there. My vision is: you can be a spiritual person, a deep person and still love, have a need of nice, beautiful, superficial, frivolous things.

Myself with a punk style set I created, ready for a wedding.

Today is a very busy day: I have to finish this post because Thursday is the day I publish my post. Today, July 27th, is my daughter Halise's 40th birthday. Today, 40 years ago, I gave birth to my lovely and sunny daughter Halise.

My daugther Halise, aka Lis

Today, our beloved brother-in-law, Robert Freedman, my sister Katrien's husband, passed away, transited as she calls it. He was so gentle, lovable, funny, R.I.P., Robert.

Robert Freedman