So yeah....

The last two weeks ended up being a nightmare.

Work has been crazy, with the culmination of two HUGE projects. First there was the ongoing saga of the company brochure. We took the first steps for this project in December, asking the printing company to organize a designer. The first one SUCKED! Just because Photoshop and Illustrator have a bunch of plug-ins and filter, doesn't mean that they need to be used at every single opportunity. She quit after I sent back a rather scathing email. The second designer did a solid job and produced a good proof but didn't really "get" what the boss was looking for. So, after some discussion, I convinced him that we'd be better off having me do the design as he would get exactly what he was looking for and it would end up being quicker than trying to get an outsider to understand his ... erm ... "tastes."

So after a number of weeks of back-and-forth we finally have a new company brochure. There are things I would have liked to do differently, but for the most part I really like it and its a huge weight off the shoulders.

The other project was a MASSIVE redesign of the company website. We put this in motion literally just before Christmas and the first few weeks was hands-off as the web company worked with us on the design and then started coding it all. The last three weeks I've finally been able to start filling in and updating ALL the content to get it to the point where we could go live. Its been a couple of weeks of long, lunch-less days and delayed home-time to get it out by my self-imposed April 15th deadline. However, the deadline was made and the website is live even are there are more developments in the works for it, the main thing is that they're not as imperative.

Then of course I'd been goaded into entering my very first A&S competition, which happened to coincide with the website deadline. To say I was stressed last week was an understatement! I spent all week dealing with the website only to come home and have to finishing preparing my three A&S entries for Pent Central. By Friday night I was done, completely drained and ready to just fall over.

Pent Central was pretty cool. Never entered into an A&S competition before, but was goaded into it by JP. I entered the Calligraphy, Illumination and Fine Arts categories. For calligraphy I showcased my 14th century cursive hand in the form of a paragraph from a period document. For illumination, I enter the Silver Crescent award scroll I did for JP and I have to admit that it looked pretty impressive sitting on it easel, framed. For fine arts I submitted my personal research and experiments with gilding. As always, there's room for improvement but I was happy with it and got really positive feedback from the judges. I even won two of the categories, calligraphy and illumination, so I'm now the proud owner of scrolls by Heather Rose =)

And now I can breathe again. I can sit, I can relax, I can play WoW, I can read, I can do what ever the hell I want without feel pressured but stuff I HAVE to do. For a couple of weeks anyway.

So, I'm off to think about the design for an AoA I have to do and chill a little before Game of Thrones makes it's debut on HBO =)