Colours to Inspire – Metallic – What’s Your Favourite?

I’ve blogged about my favourite jewel colours and neutrals,
so today I’m looking metals…

Metallic colours are striking, bright, crisp, and shiny. Any colour can be metallic, but I’m sticking with traditional colours of metals – silver, gold, brass, and copper. Bronze and brass are both alloys of copper, brass is copper and zinc and has a more yellow colour, and bronze is primarily copper with stronger reddish tones. I have a love of antiqued jewellery, or silver with a patina, and I love how these colours are rich and diverse, and as accessible in the natural world as they are in sleek modernity.

Sterling Silver © Lisa Shambrook

Silver is my colour of choice for metals, and not just because I’m embracing going grey!
I love silver jewellery, and enjoy wearing greys, pewter, slate, and silver colours.
Silver is enchanting, magical, mystical, and sophisticated…

Glowing Gold © Lisa Shambrook

Gold is the colour of warmth, not one I wear often,
but it embraces the sun and everything that glitters and reminds me of heat and wealth.
Gold is regal, expensive, prosperous, and successful…

Beautiful Brass © Lisa Shambrook

Brass, strangely, for a metal, brass feels soft to me, warm and soft.
The colour of dropping autumn leaves and sculptures.
Brass is warm, welcoming, autumnal, and happy…

Crisp Copper © Lisa Shambrook

Copper always brings images of red squirrels, butterflies, and pipes,
not the smoking ones, but plumbing ones.
Another metal that is autumnal and warm.
Copper is fun, bright, friendly, and down-to-earth…  

What’s your favourite metallic colour and what does it mean to you?

An Ode to November in Silver and Gold

Loosely using the word ode, but I want to celebrate November.
It’s a month that often gets lost between the beginning of autumn
September, October, and the festivities of December.
So, let’s love November…

I set my latest manuscript in the first week of November, and while writing during August, September, and October I worried I’d got it wrong. But November and the dates I was describing came around and it was perfect!

Silver Lining November © Lisa Shambrook

My favourite month is October, which is full of moss and lichen, leaves turning, late warmth, and Halloween. Then comes November, and we usually hurry through it complaining about the cold and rushing about organising Christmas!

Leaves and Hot Chocolate November © Lisa Shambrook

November is beautiful. I think I might be Elsa, as the cold doesn’t bother me anyway, but this month it’s been warm and the chill of winter has only just begun to bite. I love the clocks going back, I love the drawn in nights, the cosy darkness cuddling into the sofa with a hot chocolate and furry blanket.

Silver and Gold November © Lisa Shambrook

I don’t mind turning the heating on. I am Scrooge with it, but the heating helps me check my privilege. I have it, some don’t, and sometimes we all need to be reminded of what we have versus what we don’t.

Misty November © Lisa Shambrook

I love the mist and fog, the ethereal beauty of the end of autumn. The silver mist and the gold leaf of forests full of copper, bronze, and gold. My manuscript contains forests of beech and oak and November is the month they gild our countryside.

Gold Leaf November © Lisa Shambrook

We’re about to enter the glitz and bling of Winter – but I think autumn
with its earthy colours and metallic sheen is my most favourite.

What about you?

 

Glorious Autumn Leaves

We have had the most glorious autumn this year…
Colours that have truly stunned and beautified the season.

Gold, Bronze and Red © Lisa Shambrook

It’s been a colourful year in many ways – not always good ones – but the autumn leaves have brightened my life and made the tough stuff easier. Right now at the end of November and as we move into winter I need to make the most of the amazing colours and leaves before the trees have completely disrobed in the gales and November rain…

Gold and Green © Lisa Shambrook

I’ve already posted a couple of autumn blogs this year: Autumn Days Are Here and The Best Bits of Autumn – but the leaves themselves warrant another post to bask within before the seasons change!

So, just enjoy my leaves in all their glory…

Sycamore Helicopter, Acorn Cup and Red Leaf © Lisa Shambrook

Bronze and Green © Lisa Shambrook

Red © Lisa Shambrook

Acorn, Oak, Green and Gold Leaves© Lisa Shambrook

Bronze, Crunchy Leaves © Lisa Shambrook

What have been your favourite colours and leaves this autumn?

Being Broken and the Kintsukuroi Art of Healing

There are times in my life when I know I’m broken
and I’m okay with that.

I have scars, scars that run across my skin and scars that run deep through my very being. Most of us do, from superficial scratches on our surface to deep canyons that reside in dark places. We all have history, and emotional pain stays with you, no matter how much you try to let go.

I’m not talking of forgiveness here; maybe I’ll post on that another day, but even when you can or have let go, the experience, the memory, will always be with you. You can’t erase the things you’ve been through, and it’s good that we can’t.  

Dawn’s gold rippling through the sky © Lisa Shambrook

I’m a firm believer in the fact that we are not perfect and nor should we worry about trying to be perfect. I want to be good, kind, loving, and harness many other beautiful characteristics, but I don’t need to be perfect. Along with my good qualities, I embrace rebellion, curiosity, cynicism, and other traits, as I believe you can’t know the good without the bad, and after all we are human.

This also means that though I would love to live on a fairly even keel, I am grateful that I don’t.

I’ve known pain. You’ve known pain. And whilst the levels of pain we’ve known may differ, they are powerful and good. The fact that we’ve known pain means we can enhance the joy that we feel too.

There is an exquisite extreme to emotions, sorrow and joy, and to know one you have to truly know the other.

Broken things still live – Greencastle old oak tree © Lisa Shambrook

I have felt broken, and I have been broken, but I am also mended.

Many things can fix you. Family, love, religion, nature, chocolate, even money – but know that despite being mended your scars still endure.

I used to worry about my scars; they still decorate my skin and remind me constantly of the times that have hurt. Right now they are white, and pink, and narrow and pale. They’ve filled in, healed, mended, but they’re still there. I live with them and I love them, because they are me.

We need to love our brokenness. We need to embrace the scars that have healed us, for they have made us who we are.

To bathe in sunset gold © Lisa Shambrook

The Japanese have a wonderful procedure called Kintsukuroi (golden repair) or Kintsugi (golden joinery) and they have beautified brokenness.

It is the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.   

My attempt at Kintsukuroi – though I don’t have gold so it was nail lacquer! © Lisa Shambrook (Check out the real thing on my Pinterest Page)

Is there anything more beautiful than someone who can embrace their flaws and know that they are worth more for what they have been through?

We are all broken, in a way, we all have scars, some more visible than others. And even when you are healed, those scars, those things you’ve been through have made you stronger. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable, to be flawed, and to be broken.

My heart is made of stronger stuff than glass – Patrick Rothfuss © Lisa Shambrook

We don’t have glass hearts that can shatter beyond repair, we don’t have crystal spirits that can splinter beyond hope, we are made of stronger stuff, and even if we need repairing at times, we are all the more beautiful for it.