Love it all, love it all, love it all...

This is my greeting card project! (They fold, so the colored bit is the front). 

If they are in the shop before I leave I will buy a whole bunch and send them out! It is just knocking my socks off that people are going to be BUYING my design work! I'm kind of a big deal... 

Update: I am alive still! Super busy with life! Having such a good time with friends here! Loving pound pints at the Junction in Harrow, a "uni" bar (university students, not our little spandex rowing suits crew girls). I've made some British friends and been with them a lot, dancing, drinking and hanging in the sun. haha but the boys want to marry us so they can come back to the US without a visa. Ha! I promised several friends at home to bring them home British men as souvenirs. I've been seeing this British boy who drives a motorbike. He took me to Brighton for doughnuts on the pier this weekend. I couldn't help but think how much my life was like a movie as we drove through the British country side into a beautiful red and orange sunset on the way home from a perfect day at the beach! 

Going to concerts and shows galore with school. Friday we went to Kew gardens and met our AHA replacements: a batch of UW students fresh off the plane from America (yes they didn't put their camera down the entire time!). School is sooo not stressful here. It is wonderful to not be stressed over papers and projects all the time! Next week we are off to the Globe theatre and the week after we are going to Stratford for the Shakespeare's birthday festival. I also got tickets from a woman at work to see Madame de Sade with Judi Dench! I feel so cultured! Ha! Natalia and I have been going to exhibitions in London too. We can get in free with our NPG passes. I even talked my way into the design museum where we don't have a partnership for free! Oh and I went to see the Oxford-Cambridge boat race! yay crew! It was kind of awkward though... basically a shit show of drunk college students. It was like one of the American Pie movies or something, I have never seen so many bottles and cans in one place! 

I have been drawing and painting like a mad woman too! I am working on a creative project called "faces of London" putting together of over 50 faces (sketches from my sketchbook) in an installation modeled after Annette Messenger (a show on at one of the galleries on the South bank). Also I am making a found object book out of an old A to Z (thats A to Zed in British) with photos, tickets, timeout clippings, newspaper bits and the sort. I am calling it "Nicole's London"... it will be great! I also stole a whole bunch of black and red wall paint from the framing department at work and am going to start doing stencil art. Look out Banksy! Zoe and I have been making trips around London for sketching and she has been pushing me hard to try new things sometimes to the point of tears. I did have a few awkward train sketching incidents which put me off and I'm still trying to get back into the swing of things. When I am back, you guys will all have to ask to see my sketchbook! It is such the perfect thing to recount my trip! 

Work is busy, busy. Love it, still! In the office we downloaded this music program called Spotify and have been making playlists and sending them around to each other. I love being a designer. It is so cool to be able to translate people's ideas from paper into something real and tangible. Ian, Natalia and I have so much fun together and I look forward to lunch time with them everyday! I just have to mention the avocado of the century that I ate the other day! I am still thinking about it, it was THAT good! Our office, the design studio, is known as the office to always have biscuits and cakes. No wonder I am gaining weight! Um, I am reformatting a document for CPD right now, working on a leaflet for the BP travel award, making the odd caption here and there. Oh and I just finished 16 A3 signs a project for the Youth Forum. It was kind of terrible, because Ian helped me finish last Thursday as I had to leave for a concert. He accidentally left the project on the bin and in the morning I came in and they were missing :( My fingers were so sore from the scalpel at the end, I redid the entire project in 2 hours! 

Anyway life is wonderful! I can't wait to see everyone when I am back! Let's have a Nicole's Home party! Anyone who wants to organise such an event should start doing so immediately! 

xxx