Sofa snippets #003
quiet work week, taking time out, reading and watching lots, and navigating how to respond to horrible world events
Hello and welcome to Sofa Snippets, a weekly roundup of bits and bobs from my life and work.
If you’re reading this in your email inbox, it might be too long and you might be prompted to read it on the website. Sorry!
This section is mostly about what my Morning Ink practice has shown me this week, and sometimes other general sketchbook insights.
This week’s Morning Ink has included thirteen trees, two cats, a seagull, a dragonfly and a fox, fifteen cups, two bottles of flowers, the words ‘peace & calm’, ‘love’ and ‘adventure’, a little snapshot inspired by buildings in Bath, one full-page floral pattern, and a plethora of tiles and flowers.
I did also do a little bit of sketching while out and about. Observational sketching while out in public is still very much not in my comfort zone. I did also take a lot of photos and I will probably do quite a bit more sketching from them.
Do you do much in-public observational sketching? Is it something that took you a while to get used to? (Morning Ink is a section of my publication that goes out daily. It is not automatically switched on for you so, if you want to see those posts whenever they are sent out you’ll need to toggle them on, via Manage Subscription.)
This section is what I’ve been doing illustration business wise - drawing, outreach, and so on.
This week, after finishing a piece last Sunday, I have taken it very easy with illustration business, after an intensive period of fitting quite a lot in. Friday evening I was feeling ready to get back to it and sketched the basics for two pieces (decorative pieces for greetings, stationery and wall art) and did some brainstorming and research for another couple (scenes with potential for editorial, greetings, wall art and puzzles).
Hopefully, I’ll have a bit more to show you next week. And I will be trying to get back to a balance that ensures some new personal work that I can show you, so that it’s not all pieces I have to hide for ages.
This section is about freelancing life, including what I’ve been working on with my educational publishing hat on and just general bits about working from home in a self-employed capacity.
Freelance work has been quite nice, and reasonably calm, this week. So much so, that I took the day off on Thursday and went off for a solo day out. I went off to Bath on the bus, which I talked a bit about on Friday’s Morning Ink post and about which I have a ‘proper’ post percolating. I did less than 20 hours paid work last week. Which feels both wrong and good at the same time. I am currently in a period that I had originally thought might be ideal for taking an actual holiday but into which some work has crept. So, really, I should be grumpy about working that many hours. But instead I am making sure to carve out time to do holiday-type activities and just enjoying a calm workload. I have been working on Spanish and Child Care titles this week. A combination of print and digital resources and a wide variety of tasks, including development editing, copy editing, proofreading, typesetting, design and digital development.
Are you busy right now? Is the summer a quite time in your working life?
This is the culture section - mostly what I’ve been reading, but might also include TV and film and wider culture, too.
That light workload has meant I’ve got a bit more of a culture dose this week. I went to see I Know What You Did Last Summer at the cinema with my youngest on Monday (and we ate out beforehand, too). It was good and very scary and I appreciated the SMG cameo. We had the screen to ourselves (this seems to happen quite often these days) and we were at the late showing so I was quite spooked when we came out.
Tuesday night I binged Mix Tape on iPlayer. I really loved it. It was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, since it was (half) set in the eighties. There were eighties bus trips, and mix tapes and music I recognised and, while it was set in Sheffield, not Stroud, it still felt very familiar.
Friday and Saturday night I binged The Assassin on Prime Video. I’m a big Keeley Hawes fan and it was nice to briefly see her as a mum on a Mediterranean island again, though an oh so very different mum to the one she played in The Durrells.
Have you watched anything good this week?I’m almost half way through The Story of a New Name, which I’m loving. If you haven’t read the Neapolitan series, I would very highly recommend it. I did finish listening to The First Woman and this morning I finished The Gendered Brain. I started listening to Where the Crawdads Sing. I’ve read the book twice and watched the film at least four times. So am loving that, too.
What are you reading right now?I also had a morning of The Archers – I think that was on Monday morning. And I listened to Giuseppe’s interview with Candlewick Press art director Maria Middleton, on
Podcast which was a good one.Have you listened to any good podcasts or radio shows recently?On Thursday, during my day out to Bath, I went to an absolutely wonderful and huge bookshop – Topping & Company. I could probably have spent the whole day browsing it was so big and beautiful.
And, of course, I bought some books.
James by Percival Everett, Jazz by Toni Morrison, You Are Here by David Nicholls, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell, Soph’s Plant Kitchen by Sophie Waplington and The History of Information by Chris Haughton. So I have some books to move on to, for sure!
Have you read any of these? What did you think (no spoilers, please)?
This is the Substack section - Substack posts or publications that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the past week.
The photo on the front made me open it, because it was of Lola Young, who is the daughter/granddaughter or old friends, but it was also a great piece.
A collection of many different little pieces of advice from creatives to other creatives on how to make money. A useful one to bookmark, I think.
This was an interesting one, especially for someone like me with a very ‘wobbly’ style (as someone described it recently). I have a fairly continual fight between my desire to be loose and naive and childlike in my art and my brain telling me to zoom in and smooth those lines and keep that colour flat and so on. I think a lot of what is being looked for (but not everything) at the moment is the former – the ‘wobbly’ very human art. And it’s been a long time since I was making very vector very graphic work. Even if I am still often creating vector work, it is still almost always (digitally) hand-drawn.
Even more interesting, or pertinent, is the whole question of whether we can make money by fully leaning into the things we genuinely want and love to create or whether we need be looking at trends and making work that is going to appeal to enough people. That’s something I’ll be pondering over the next six months. I suspect a combination of both is the ideal. Though, of course, there are people who make it work entirely by leaning into the quirks and just (or perhaps loudly) being themselves.
This was an interesting one and got me thinking about cliques and friendship groups and shyness and introversion. (Thought so much I had to write two long comments on the post!)
What Substack posts or publications made a particular impact on you this week?
This is the food section - meals I cooked, new food I tried, places I ate out, and other food-related bits and pieces.
I feel like I did a bit better with food this week, but then again, I do also think I need to be looking at things like having a few tubs of salads in the fridge and so on so that I don’t automatically default to toast (and peanut butter, and Marmite). Some of the meals I made this week were spicy sausage pasta and pasta primavera – adding silken tofu into the pasta primavera to give it an extra protein kick. I also made a stir fry with a packet of stir-fry vegetables, a packet of sweet chill sauce and some rice, with lots of added soy sauce!
I really love the new bowl I picked up in a local charity shop last Saturday. It only cost £2.50 I think and it makes all my food look so so much better if I eat out of it.
And I also did a fair bit of eating out, actually. So probably doesn’t count as a good and healthy food week! I had Bang Bang Cauliflower Noodles at the Curio Lounge on Monday, a delicious vegan pizza (Over the Veg) in Bath at The Stable, which was loaded with roasted Mediterranean vegetables, pine nuts, rocket and lovely drizzle of a basil dressing, and then a delicious Green Goddess Bowl which had lentils, another basil (I think) dressing and loads of green vegetables and green leaves, at The Felt Cafe. Oh, and there was also a really really good slice of vegan chocolate and orange cake which I think was called ‘a Jaffa cake’.
Did you cook or eat anything nice this week? 
This last section is for general other stuff - things you might talk about over a cuppa at the kitchen table.
I have enjoyed getting out and about and soaking up the world outside these four walls this week. Chatting with friends is lovely. As is getting more doses of culture and nature and travel than I do most weeks.
I have typed, retyped, deleted, and retyped, and deleted again a paragraph about what is happening in Gaza right now. I am not being deliberately silent. I just really do not know how or what to say about such absolutely abhorrent acts and absence of acts. I am not being deliberately silent, and I also know that there is so much more I could and should say and do.
I hope you enjoy this weekly roundup format. I will still be writing some ‘proper’ posts on individual topics, but I enjoy reading these and it will keep me regularly showing up in your inbox (it has a section of its own, though, so you can untoggle it if you prefer, by going to Manage subscription).
Loved reading your little "snippets" - and I am going to look at the substacks you have recommended. Thanks for inspiring me!
This is the second week I forgot to fill in the sub-title before sending the email! So hundreds of people have got an email that says "add some nuggets once written"! Doh. I am now going to edit my template so the sub-title is blank which will be less embarrassing if I forget to write one next week!