Sleightholm Folk Art

 I’ve got a slight addiction, and you all know what I’m talking about 😉 it’s Tasha Tudor and her books! Lately the mail man has been dropping packages at my door….they’re old, well loved, usually library copies of Tasha’s books. 
   The latest one was eagerly awaited– a copy of Becky’s Christmas, which evidently spent many a well-read year in a library in Nova Scotia! I look on amazon from time to time to see if I can find a copy in my price range and lo and behold, one came up for under $20!
   As I add another book to my collection, I am always in awe of how prolific Tasha was. She illustrated and wrote books for seventy years. That is just amazing!
   And I love seeing how with each publication her work got stronger and stronger. Starting with the simple illustration of pumpkin moonshine to the complex and picture-within-picture illustrations of her last “The Night Before Christmas” it’s obvious that Tasha kept pushing herself and improving herself. That is something I greatly admire. She wasn’t happy to just stay where she was. She tried new things and honed her skills. I love that.

    This whole train of thought has me thinking about how I can push and improve myself, and new projects to try. When I first started learning to read and write, it became a natural extension of my love of drawing. I filled countless notebooks full of stories and illustrations.
   I loved to write in school, took several literature and creative writing classes in college, and even worked as a newspaper writer and editor for a while. That, sadly, burnt me out on writing. The daily newspaper world is not a kind place to the soft-hearted 😉 people only contact you about what you’ve written if they hated it or want to nit-pick. There were many a lunch hour when I’d just go sit in my car and cry. It probably didn’t help that I was pregnant then nursing and caring for a small infant during this time as well 😉 
  I think I’m slowly getting my confidence back though. And it will probably help to not be writing about county commissioner meetings or school board decisions 😉 Maybe its time to put pen and paint to paper. Tasha has me thinking this over 🙂

  Happy Tasha Tuesday, my friends!~
And to my US friends-— let us go to the polls in hope and dignity. This has been such a long and hateful election. The only way forward in a positive manner is to go forward together, putting aside our differences, and seeing clearly that the things we want are really not so fundamentally different. Let’s take joy and peace, not matter the outcome!~

~H