Posted on February 2, 2012 by laura
I have the best customers on earth at Heartsong Fine Art. They are so creative and are constantly delighting me with cool ideas that I love pulling together!
Just take a look at some of the custom creations folks have requested from the past month:
This lovely customer wanted me to make four cute little vintage birds so that she could create a mobile out of them for her vintage styled nursery.
They turned out so cute in a flock!
I had lots of custom family nesting doll sets… some I can’t show here in case their loved ones happen to see this blog! One creative customer had me paint a “Will You Marry Me?” doll set and put a ring in the center of the dolls where the last doll would normally be… One mama had me paint her family on each doll with a baby on the very middle one… she is going to break the news to her family that she is pregnant by having them open the dolls… how amazingly creative is that!!!!!
One sweet mother created a custom set for her son… she had me paint all his favorite animals to live inside a cute little wooden cottage. Dog, pig, cat, fish and mouse… happy sweet little pet family!!!
The creative customer from above inspired me to create a spring baby animals set of wee little babies to live inside a forest cottage… bunny, kitten, mouse and chick… in my shop here!
And then I decided to do an easter set as well!
My most recent custom request, these aren’t totally finished or up in my shop yet… but I had one clever customer want me to put the bottles from my bottle garlands on reclaimed wood in a vertical format… so cute! I just need to attach hanging hardware and will post these to my shop soon….
…and here are some individual bottles on reclaimed cedar planks that I enjoyed painting and distressing… up soon in my shop as well!
In totally unrelated news, today is groundhog day.
We call it groundpig day at our house because we put our guinea pig outside to see if she sees her shadow.
Want to know if Emmy our guinea pig predicts spring is on the way or 6 more weeks of cold? Like my FB page and I’ll post the exciting results there later this afternoon!
xoxo, Laura
Posted on January 30, 2012 by laura
Wow folks. I just had an amazing experience (which I can’t wait to blog about in detail next Monday) I had my aura photographed! One of the coolest parts of this is I was able to see what types of things had an immediate effect on my aura… I had a huge response to rose quartz (a long time fav of mine!) and to scents.
Now the scent thing I would never have guessed. I’m not big on scents, to be honest… they usually give me a headache after a while. I never wear perfume, no artificial scents of any kind for me… no artificial house cleaners or fabric softeners.
My life is quite bland, scent wise! The only scent-related thing I do is I walk around my home with an incense or sage stick every few weeks to give the energy in our home a fresh slate. So I was very surprised to see what an immediate and large response I had to breathing in different essential oils.
My new commitment is to remember to light a pure EO candle at my desk when I am working. And also to just be more aware of the lovely scents around me every day. I am likely turned off to (and get a headache from) artificial scents precisely *because* I am so affected by them. But instead of nixing scents from my life and not focusing on it, I’d like to harness this gift and specifically breathe in the scents in my life that I love love love.
My children’s natural hair and scalp smells… yum.
My husband brewing coffee… delish.
The smell of crisp fresh winter air blowing across my front yard… yes!
The smell of a crackling fire in my wood burning stove… ahhhh.
Recently my daughter made me a candle that was scented with bayberry, and I am so excited to burn this more often.
We read that bayberry candles were treasured in colonial times because they were rare. We felt so fortunate to be surrounded by wax myrtle trees all throughout our property. Wax Myrtles are native to the entire east coast and are the bayberry plant most often used in creating *real* bayberry candles.
Most bayberry candles on the market now are made of paraffin and bayberry scent. But you can make your very own, authentic bayberry candle today!
Anyone living here in the lowcountry likely has one in their very own yard, and if not, right down any road you walk in any direction. They are abundant, growing all over and free for the foraging.
Here is all you do:
1. Pick as many bayberries as you like. We got about 1 1/2 cups of berries in about 15 minutes…
2. Boil them in a small pot of water until the wax is released from the outer coating of the berry. I boiled my bayberries for about 30 minutes, which was probably overkill 
3. Let cool, then lift the wax rim from your pot and let dry.
4. Don’t worry if it isn’t too much wax… I got this thin rim of wax from the cup and a half of bayberries… and it is plenty to create several scented candles. Just break off a chunk to add to your beeswax as desired. Here I am melting about half of our bayberry wax into beeswax beads.
5. Affix a wick into a recycled glass jar (I’m using an old jar that had our bread-making yeast in it) and pour the bayberry scented wax in.
6. Trim the wick (if needed) and enjoy!! Light and inhale deeply… ahhhh….
xoxo, Laura
Posted on January 26, 2012 by laura
Nothing soothes the mid-winter blahs like delighting in Baker’s Creek heirloom seed catalog, planning a spring garden that is just around the corner (or so I keep wanting to believe!) The earth awaits, my friends!
Thanks to saving seeds from last years crop (tutorial here) I had all our standard seeds stored and ready for use for free this year, which left me some extra wiggle room to expand our garden and try out some fun new crops I’ve never tried before.
I might have gone a little overboard, but I just can’t wait to get started. In fact, I plan to start some of the very early crops indoors this week… using my free and eco-friendly recycled greenhouse set up!
Here are the crops I’m going for this year:
1. beans (old homestead)
2. beets (detroit dark red)
3. carrots (danvers)
4. corn (strawberry popcorn saved from last year and golden bantam)
5. cukes (saved from last year)
6. pumpkins (saved from last year)
7. lettuce (saved from last year and adding miners lettuce, gentilina, big boston and little gen)
8. melons (watermelon saved from last year and adding on bidwell casaba)
9. onion (saved from last year and adding sultgarter)
10. snap peas (sugar snap)
11. red pepper (quadrato dasti rosso)
12. tomatoes (paste tomatoes and cherry tomatoes saved from last year, and adding on raspberry lyanna)
13. potatoes from organic potato tubers
14. herbs (basil saved from last year, adding dill, feverfew, cammomile and stevia)
15. flowers (zinnia saved from last year, adding balsam mix, romance carnations and marigolds)
I want to give a nice shout out to Baker Creek’s new seed book The Heirloom Life Gardener… and a big thanks to my hubby who gave it to me as an awesome Christmas gift.
What I did was have fun picking out some new seeds from the seed catalog… ones that I’ve never tried before… wrote those all down in a wish list and then turned to The Heriloom Life Gardener book to look up the specifics of how to grow them (i.e., direct sow or transplant seedlings… full sun or partial… those kinds of things are all addressed in this gorgeous book) so that I could plan where everything would grow in my garden this year.
If you haven’t started dreaming of your spring garden yet, the last week of Jan is the perfect time to get out your seed catalog, drawing yourself a nice hot bath, and take plenty of time to look through it and dream. xoxo, Laura
Posted on January 23, 2012 by laura
What do you do when your kids want to sled in the middle of winter, but you live in SC? Well, you grab an old cardboard box and head to your nearest hill, of course! It’s not exactly like sledding in snow, but it is still a ton of fun… and no frostbite!
What is the number one question I hear from my patients (and friends and family too?)
It’s “How do you have all that energy?“
I don’t have any extra energy. I didn’t get any more than you did. I’m not a particularly young parent (I didn’t have my kids until after I graduated from med school and finished my medical training…) but I do love to go and have fun with my kids and I don’t hold back.
This energy flow that I’ve got going? It can be yours. It *is* yours, because it comes from the same stream of life that your connection comes from. It’s called Well Being and it is our natural birthright.
We are living beings that channel energy into our bodies continuously… it is this energy stream that animates our body and creates life.
It is very easy to see this… easiest of all to see this when looking at a person who has passed on… shed their earthly body and no longer channeling energy into it… it becomes extremely obvious that it isn’t the body in and of itself that gives us life — it is the soul that illuminates the body… creating the *appearance* that these earth suits we are wearing are alive.
It’s not our bodies we rely on to give us energy. It’s our souls.
It’s that *we* are life itself.
Your soul is pure positive energy. I have an energy stream and you have an energy stream and we all enjoy living life connected to this stream every single day.
When your energy feels low it is due to resistance. It could be a physical resistance keeping your body from feeling it’s best (a nutritional deficiency, a hidden environmental allergy, low-level inflammation, chronic infections) or it is a resistance on a soul level.
More accurately, even if you have a physical resistance in your body, it is manifesting because of your resistance on a soul level. To heal the body, let’s invigorate the soul.
If you can drop your resistance, if you can stop swimming against the current of where life wants to take you and instead pick up your feet and let the current take you where it is you need to go… then you can feel the full force and power of your life stream. You can feel it’s power and its never-ending strength, and you can enjoy the ride. Your body responds by feeling it’s best and resolving health issues as the energetic dynamic behind these issues shifts.
If you are feeling tired… if you are feeling uninspired… if you are feeling out of sorts or stuck in a rut or like you are stuck in survival mode instead of in thrive mode… I have a new program that I’m very excited to reveal to you!
I am opening up a new course… and it’s all about accessing your innate energy flow. It’s all about trying less and feeling it more. It’s all about getting excited to drop your resistance and reconnect with Well Being. It’s my answer to all the questions I get about how I get so much done and how I have so much energy.
Want to join me? I am going to have limited space in this new program, so if you’d like to have first dibs on a spot in the course, email me at heartsong@primary-plus.com and I will unveil the course to you first before opening it up publicly.
The program will be a one month experience that supports you in finding your energy flow on many levels. From a fun online creativity class to weekly live group phone coaching to inspirational emails finding their way into your inbox all month long, this is a fun dynamic program that will have you accessing your flow and releasing your resistance.
Ready? I’m in the final stages of pulling it all together and will be unleashing it soon, so email me to reserve your spot and stay tuned for all the details! xoxo, Laura
Posted on January 19, 2012 by laura
Whew! I just finished it. After spending months and months dreaming, writing, designing, sketching and painting it, my second children’s book is now off to be published!
And not a nick of time too soon, as my house has literally fallen apart around me (we are talking dust bunnies that have built their own little hutches in every corner of my house) and orders in my shop have back up slightly (sorry peeps! Working on them right now!!!) my house feels strangely sad with all of this clutter cleared away:
But the book I have been working on is such an important one. It’s all about sleep, from a Heart Centered Parenting perspective.
It’s funny that most of the world shares sleep as a family with their little ones… certainly it’s the most natural thing in the world to most mammals… yet my publisher Lisa Bently (of Do Life Right, Inc.) and I could not find a single picture book that parents could share with their children that included pictures of families sleeping together.
Yes, there is a ton of literature out there for adults to read… but picture books? Nada. Some of my favorite books for parents on the topic of sleep come from Dr. Sears, who first coined the term sleep sharing. He is fabulous about coming at it from a medical perspective and writing about the benefits of sleep sharing.
(And if you are interested, this another good read about why some children may show resistance to bedtime…)
Lisa and I aimed to produced the most adorable picture book ever, one that shows gentle and sweet pictures of families all around the world sleep sharing… from a graceful pod of whales in the sea to a troop of monkeys in a tree to families in tents and in hammocks and in RV’s and in boat houses and in neighborhoods, villages, apartments and homes all over the world… I can’t think of a better book to soothe your little one to sleep then this.
In the back of the book are several “Dr. Laura” pages, where I talk about sleep from a Heart Centered Parenting perspective and give some great ideas to incorporate a little nighttime connection in your own family. No, you don’t have to share the same bed to foster a nighttime connection with your littles. There are lots of things you can do as a parent to make sure nighttime is a time to reinforce your family bonds and help your little one feel secure as they sleep.
Restorative sleep is so important to the cuties who are growing and learning all day long… allowing their bodies to fully relax and their brains to cement the neuronal connections they’ve made during the day ensures that the next day begins as a fresh start, a new platform on which to leap forward. Part of falling into that deep restorative sleep involves creating a safe and supportive sleep arrangement that benefits everyone. It doesn’t have to be in the same bed, or even in the same room, although it could be. In my book I talk about my very favorite ways to strengthen a nighttime bond with your child, regardless of where you sleep.
It’s not about sleep. It’s about connection.
After all, night-time is soul time.
This is a great book to support any parent who seeks to strengthen their child’s restorative sleep and is a lovely picture book to read to every baby. All babies intuitively love to see pictures of animals snuggled up as a family and people snuggled up with their children. This book fills a much needed void in the gentle world of heart centered parenting.
It should be available in about 3 months, and I’ll keep you posted right here as soon as I see it! You can also like Do Life Right’s FB page to keep posted on their latest books as they release, and/or sign up for my blog alerts by entering your email in the email box to the left.
xoxo, Laura
