This Week's Favourite Things! Monday May 4th - Sunday May 10th 2015

1.  The annual Artist for a Day event at NSCAD (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) which happened this past Saturday as part of Open City.  It was nice, the campus was full of free fun demos for all ages.

2. Mark Grantham's 20th show at Studio 21, which opened this past week.  Inspiring! Beautiful work and it's cool to see someone proving that it is possible to make a living as an artist with hard work and dedication.  Here's an article about the show. 

3.  Relief Carving! and various youtube videos I've listened to while doing it.   Pics coming soon of works in progress but having made tonnes of little things over the past while, ornaments and figurines and such, I've been feeling like working on some bigger things, like relief carving on to vases.  It's fun. Previously I've only done this on earthenware red clay with black stain, so we'll see how making things with coloured glazes at cone 6 goes.  So I've been back in the studio carving away listening to tonnes of stuff about manifesting and law of attraction lately, always a favourite topic.  Here are some videos:
Louise Hay - Receiving Prosperity.  I like the bit in this one where she says that "feelings are thoughts in motion in the body".  Interesting when you consider that you can choose your thoughts. Hmm.  On the topic of creating one's reality I re-listened to these Teal Swan videos which were very good to re-hear:
The common pitfalls of manifestation
Spiritual Bypassing
How ego comes through the backdoor
And this video about presence with Eckhart Tolle is nice and speaks about the balance between the urge for creative expression and presence (being versus doing), eg "if you becomes stressed you're losing yourself in the doing".  aha.
Eckhart Tolle author of the power of now explains the divine purpose of the universe

4.  This video about economics that I saw posted in a comment on a Globe and Mail article about Canadians and their debt.  Seems to explain economic cycles really well.
How the Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio

5.  This blog post by a potter (Back Bay Pottery) on how to make a covered butter dish, great blog, super great post with awesome photos, and great facebook page and social media presence in general.  Inspiring!