About three and a half years ago I was frozen in indecision. Paralyzed by fear. Fear of making the wrong decision. Fear of making a mistake.

This week I painted bleeding hearts with the paint I mixed last week.

It’s lovely to be working with flowers from the garden again. But it’s also been a bit frustrating trying to get back into a groove of art-making and gardening and all the other stuff that life demands.

I talk about sketchbooks quite a bit around here. They’re one of my favorite ways to create. The art I make there, the practice and play, is special. I sometimes share my pages here and on social media and I’ve shared physical sketchbooks with Dana Barbieri, but most of my pages are just for me. And I cherish that.

Last week I shared my fears around hand sewing and how my belief that I wasn’t “good” at stitching kept me from trying embroidery. I’m not sure if it was that belief, or if was other fears that kept me from using the espadrille kit I bought at the end of August.

Are there things you wish you could do, but “know” you can’t because you don’t have the talent?

Around ten or twelve years ago, before I got the rose tattoo on my ankle I studied images of roses and planned out a design. I even made a sketch and brought it and lots of photographs with me to my appointment. I clearly remember telling the tattoo artist “I want something like this sketch, but I can’t draw”.

What are your barriers to creativity? What keeps you from making or doing on a regular basis? A lack of:

• time?

• space?

• money?

For a while now I’ve been in a weird place in my art journey. Knowing that I need to change, or am on the cusp of change, but not knowing how to do it or what that change is supposed to look like. I know I mentioned it last month.

Do you keep a sketchbook? Right now I have nine sketchbooks on the go, which might be a bit overkill.

But each book has a different purpose. They're different sizes and different types of paper. One of them is nearly filled and two I recently started for very specific projects -- one dedicated to color and the other as a garden journal.

I think one of the reasons I have so many different sketchbooks is that I've been chasing the myth of the Perfect Sketchbook.