When I started Smidgen of Calm I never imagined we’d become a community of over 100 creative souls. ✨ So rather than celebrating me, I’d love to celebrate us. 🙏🏼🙌🏻❤️ Here’s the challenge… Create one tiny square of art ! It can be a doodle, painting, collage, photograph, poem, pattern, pressed flower… absolutely anything that feels like you. Keep it small. Keep it joyful. Keep it unapologetically yours. Once everyone has shared their square, I’ll stitch them together into one giant artwork that represents this wonderful little corner of the internet. One hundred people. One hundred different stories. One beautiful piece of art. I genuinely can’t wait to see what we create together. 💜

Can I gently challenge that? You absolutely can draw. 🙌🏻 The act of putting pencil to paper isn’t the difficult part. The difficult part is expecting yourself to be brilliant before you’ve given yourself permission to learn. We don’t expect an athlete to become an Olympian without years of training. We don’t expect a doctor to qualify without years of medical school. A chef wasn’t born knowing how to create incredible food. They started by being curious, making mistakes, and practising over and over again. So why do we expect ourselves to pick up a pencil and create a masterpiece on day one? Creativity is no different. It’s a skill that grows with time, patience and practice. 🥰 So perhaps instead of saying, “I can’t draw,” try saying: “I can draw… I’m just at the beginning of my journey.” Let go of perfection. Stay curious. Keep showing up. Because every artist you admire was once the person who thought they couldn’t do it either. Keep going. Your future self will thank you. 💜🙌🏻 First two pics are from the start of my journey many years ago. The third is more recent. I will always keep practicing and I can’t wait to see what I am creating in another 20 years 🌱

Firstly let’s welcome our five ! New members @Helen Lawrence @Helen Michelle @Bethany Elle @Ana P. @Danielle L 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻 Also thank you @Caroline Fransz for referring i appreciate you taking the time 💜 I genuinely can’t believe how much this community has grown. 🌱 Over the last six months, I’ve learnt so much—not just creatively, but about people, connection, and what can happen when we create a space where everyone feels welcome. 🥰🙌🏻 You’ve been here cheering me on, encouraging one another, sharing your work, your stories, your victories, and even the days that felt a little harder. Watching this community champion each other has been one of the greatest joys of my year. ❤️✨ Smidgen of Calm has become something so much more than I ever imagined. It really does feel like a little pocket of safety on the internet, and that’s because of every single one of you. Thank you for believing in this little idea. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for making this such a kind, creative, and genuinely special place. Here’s to the next adventure together. 💜✨

Why I Created The Lantern Room. 🥰 People often ask me why grief feels so important to me. I think it’s important that I tell some of my story for context 🥰🌱🏮 The truth is, grief has been woven through my life from a very young age. On my thirteenth birthday, my mum married her second husband. Just a month later, he died. None of us knew that years of alcoholism had caused so much damage to his body. Within weeks of their wedding, he was in hospital. His leg had to be amputated, but it was too late. A blood clot travelled to his heart, and he died. Overnight, my mum became a widow. I was just thirteen. What followed shaped me in ways I wouldn’t understand for many years. I found myself carrying responsibilities no child should ever have to carry. I helped organise the funeral and was expected to be the strong one, supporting the adults around me while trying to make sense of my own grief. I was taken to view his body because I was told I was needed. It was an experience that stayed with me long after everyone else had moved on. Just over a year later, my mum remarried and moved to Spain, shortly before my sixteenth birthday. It was another profound loss, and one that left me navigating much of my teenage life on my own. By the time I was sixteen, I was already working in care. Not long afterwards, I was offered a role on a palliative care unit. Looking back now, it feels as though all those difficult experiences had quietly prepared me to sit beside people during the hardest moments of their lives. It became work that I loved deeply. Grief, however, continued to find me. My sister died at just thirty-six from alcoholism, leaving behind her teenage daughter. The grandfather who had always made me feel loved passed away, and I wasn’t told until after he had been cremated. Then, years later, my mum’s third husband died suddenly while they were living in Spain. At eighteen years old, six months pregnant, I flew to another country to organise another funeral. It felt as though I had stepped back into the same role I had been given as a child.

Today Holly and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and honestly… it never disappoints. 🙌🏻❤️ Every year I leave with a sketchbook full of ideas, a head buzzing with inspiration and a heart that somehow feels a little fuller. But this year felt different. For years I’ve entered work into the exhibition and, year after year, received the same email saying I hadn’t been selected. It would have been easy to let that convince me I didn’t belong. Instead, something unexpected happened. Over the last couple of years I’ve stopped trying to fit myself into one creative box. I’ve realised I don’t just love painting. I love printmaking, illustration, photography, writing, bookbinding, murals, theatre, sketchbooks… I simply love making things. ❤️🎨 Walking through those galleries today, surrounded by every imaginable medium, style and voice, I realised that perhaps belonging isn’t about having your work on the wall. It’s about finding a place that celebrates curiosity. ✨ The Royal Academy reminds me that art doesn’t have to look one particular way. It can be loud or quiet, polished or wonderfully imperfect. It can ask questions rather than give answers. So I left inspired, not because I compared myself to the artists on the walls, but because I was reminded that creativity is vast… and there’s room for all of us in it. I took lots of film so I have lots of editing to do 🙈 Keep making. Keep exploring. Keep being curious. You never know where that curiosity might lead. ❤️