So it’s the 27th of December, which means, firstly I have already failed* at delivering my weekly emails every Tuesday, & secondly, that we are well & truely, smack bang in the middle of Gooch week**.
I hope you all had a fabulous festive season & delightfully quiet Boxing day. For me, the buildup to Christmas has been all consuming & exhausting in equal parts fun & work. My mum made a comment in our family chat about everyone “getting ready for Christmas coming in to land” in the lead up to the 25th & my god did I resonate hard with it (my dad proceeded you make jokes all week like “hope everyone has their seatbelts fastened & their tray tables away”) but bad dad jokes aside it really does feel like a similar weight to landing a plane, am I right pilots? Like buying the perfect gifts in an organised time frame & cooking a mushroom wellington is the same as safely getting a bunch of people from one location to another through the transport of flight (for those of you who don’t know me well i’m obviously hyping this up for dramatic affect & I do understand the difference between being on time for Christmas lunch & flying a plane) but why do we*** put so much pressure on ourselves? I must add here that I very likely put pressure on the people I love also as I believe I may be one of the hardest people to buy for & I put a lot of weight into gift giving.
As much as I enjoy Christmas, I have some lovely traditions with the people I care about, I truly LOVE the 26th. A day dedicated to eating mountains of leftovers & sitting in front of the tv (I binged the final season of The Crown, the costumes are just perfection & I managed to bring myself to watch Jones’s family Christmas for some festive cheer, I also fell asleep on & off for most of the duration) & now I find myself here, on the 27th, am I still on holidays? or should I be back to the 9-5 slog?****
I have a million ideas for The Sumner Collective in 2024, I really want to focus on opportunities with larger & more frequent murals, I’m hoping to build on my pet portrait portfolio also & I’m going to be learning the ins & outs of Adobe Illustrator so that I can draft my patterns on the computer instead of by hand & potentially sell these too. I have spent the 2nd half of 2023 collecting a range of wool blankets & vintage bedding for an up-cycled collection I cannot wait to sink my creative teeth into & I’ve got a couple of commissions to kick off the new year with. So where is my motivation right now? Why does everything seem so hard and complicated this week but once the 1st of January comes round I’ll be ready to hit the ground running? If you have the answers to my questions please get in touch, I’m really keen to harness how motivation works & use it to it’s full capacity.
In other news***** I think this year I may be going to the doctor to check if I do or do not have ADHD so you can all stop asking if I have it.
I think that’s all I’ve got for today, thanks for reading this far down.
Cheers big ears & stay safe
Elly Sumner of The Sumner Collective.