Life in the winter woods | Story 37

It's February now and we are halfway through the winter. It's only three months to go until all the snow melts and the spring arrives in the month of May. Thinking about spring makes me very happy. It gives me energy to know that soon enough everything will come to life again. But now it's February and we are still in the heart of winter. But this other half of the winter is always a bit easier because for every day that passes by the sun rises higher on the sky and we get more and more daylight for each day. Our life right now is pretty much the same as it's been the last months. We are still working a lot behind the scenes with our project of making a new website and webshop for our new jewelry collection and for my paintings and photo prints and all the things that we create. We have been working on this for a year now and we have gone through many mistakes on the way but we have learned a lot and it's been a fun process to build up our very own company. You look a little tired today, Nanook. Yeah, it's Sunday. You shouldn't need to work today, right? So my husband Johan have been spending most of his time in the smithy with the jewelry making to keep up with the custom orders and the very few designs that we have been selling this year. Just enough to keep it running while we build up our new webshop. I'm gonna write a birthday card to Rachel. Happy birthday to you. Ouch! We have some good news. For us it's good news. We have this new label printer which means that it will be easier for us now to print out the labels. We don't have to cut and tape by hand. We can just print it out. I will show you. Okay, let's see here. Oh my god, this is awesome. Wow, that is amazing. Hey, Zinek! Oh, another shoe for me. And my mom Anita has been focusing a lot on creating our new webshop which is something really time consuming since we want a really good site this time that can handle orders from all over the world to make it easier for both us and our customers. I am really glad that my mom knows computer programming and web development. My brother Filip has also been very involved in this and we have all been working hard to make reality of our ideas and to make our own business a little easier to handle. Another thing we've been working on is our new smithy and workroom for the jewelry. When we moved to our new house in May last year we wanted to move our jewelry business into the beautiful old barn that is next to our house. But before we could do that it needed a lot of renovations. After many months of renovations and waiting we are almost done with our new workroom. So hopefully this month we will be able to move our jewelry business from our living room in our old house to this new place at our beautiful homestead. Nanook, do you want to go out? Do you want to run in the forest? Yeah, let's do it! And I have been spending a lot of time in here lately in my painting studio. I have finally got inspiration to paint again. If you've been watching my vlogs for a while you might know that my studio was trashed by a man back in September and some of my paintings were destroyed. And after that I just haven't felt an inspiration to paint again until now. I've spent all my spare time in here lately and it feels so good to be back again and continue experimenting with making my own paint from natural pigments. I've been painting a lot with ashes and charcoal lately. Now during the winter we make fires in the stoves every day to keep our house warm and therefore we get a lot of ashes and charcoal and they make beautiful pigments. I just love to think about that these gray, black and brown colors made from the ashes and the charcoal actually kept our house warm before they got a new life and turned into art. And before the snow came I made sure to pick some beautiful sand and dirt and stones that I could use as pigments now during the winter. So I look forward to spend many more nights in here now. Now my sweet friends you know a little more about what's going on in my world right now. I want to thank you with all my heart for watching my videos and following my work and my life here in the woods in the north of Sweden. I so much look forward to this new year now and to share the journey with all of you. I see you soon again.