I began pressing flowers from the garden this summer. Here’s a sample preserved in my notebook for future color reference. The foxglove blossoms washed out colorwise. The pansies — those crazy stalwarts of the garden — popped, as did the penstemon and the nasturtium. The color wasn’t great, but the shape of the fuchsia made me pretty happy. So, this fall as I was making cards with pressed flowers, I played around with that blossom particularly. Here’s the result:
Crafts, like this and my embroidery practice, remind me that being in the messy middle is the biggest part of living. Finishing, that’s just punctuation. The messy middle really is the stuff of life, and yet it’s the thing how-to TV shows and videos often fast forward through.
Learning to be patient, to keep going, is its own practice.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 