"Room to Bloom" with Amanda!

Welcome to my blog series "Room to Bloom"! Some amazing women from around the world will be sharing their personal creative spaces with us. No matter if our space is desk in a corner of our kitchen or a spacious loft studio, we all need room to bloom, don't you think? I know you'll find these sanctuaries as inspiring as I do.

Today's guest is the amazing Amanda ..... she's so inspiring to me. She's squeezed a little creative space into a corner of her bedroom and says it's there that "the whole universe opens up to me as I dance with my Muse." Don't you love that? Sit back and relax as we take a little peek inside her "room to bloom".

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Welcome to my little side of paradise. I spend most of my time here playing with art journals, mixed media, painting and anything else my little self wants to come up with. A lot of times I like to take different kinds of paper and throw things at it just to see what I can come up with.





There are 2 things I need when I'm in my space. One you can almost see peeking around my easel. That is one of the fur-babies of the house. It is usually one of the two cats or my puppy girl. I don't know how they work it out, but there is always one of them with me. The other is music. Walk in when I am playing and you'll hear anything from Metallica to Joanna Newsom to Eminem to Britney Spears to Anthony and the Johnsons to me having a Classical music station on. To me, music and art go hand and hand, and it is hard to have one without the other. I actually have two ipods so if one has a dead battery, I have the other to back it up - lol.



You might have noticed that it is kind of a tiny space. And it is. But sitting at that tiny space, the whole universe opens up to me as I dance with my Muse.

My space is in my bedroom, which led to some serious storage problems at first. The first thing that I got was those storage drawers on wheels. I have 3 of them filled to the brim and I just move them around when I need to. It might not look like it, but I can tell you where everything is!



The second thing is dollar store baskets! I use them for everything. My butterfly baskets hold my brushes and must haves, the other holds my most used mediums and gesso. And some of the others hold my paints . . .



When I start a new project, I fill a basket with everything I need for that project. Everything is in one spot, I take up less room and if I want to change places, I just have one basket to take with me. Sometimes I'll have two or three baskets going at once. If I have a huge project going on, I'll just use two baskets of the same color.



I think I'm like most of us and have this idea of a dream studio in my head. My dream space isn't huge, it's cozy and it has lots of windows and warm breezes. But till that day when I have my dream space, this is where I'll gladly spend my time!



Amanda is a 30 something day dreamer from Montreal Canada. When her hands aren't covered with paint and some sort of medium she is either reading, playing with her dogs, or looking for found items to add to her collection. Garage sales and thrift stores are like candy stores to her and she can't help herself - she stops at each one she sees.

Visit Amanda's blog here!