52 Trips Around the Sun Birthday Bundle
I am about to turn 52, and I knew I wanted to mark the occasion with Wild Ridge Studio. A birthday sale didn’t really interest me. I didn’t want to knock a percentage off a bunch of things and spend the week yelling about a coupon code. I wanted to make something that felt a little more personal and a lot more like where I am creatively right now.
Of course, “make something” quickly turned into making several things because apparently I have learned absolutely nothing about keeping projects simple in my first 51 trips around the sun. And that is how 52 Trips Around the Sun came to be: 15 limited-edition birthday bundles filled with watercolor, pyrography, botanical art, paper goods, and a little bit of the trail woven through it all.
I Wanted to Actually Make the Things
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of work I want to put into the world. I love designing digitally and creating surface patterns, and I love being able to turn my artwork into products I could never reasonably manufacture myself. But I’ve also been craving more time with actual materials in my hands. Paint, paper, wood, and ink. Things that are a little imperfect because a human being actually sat down and made them.
The main artwork for the bundle started as a watercolor mountain landscape. I’m still very much learning watercolor, which is part of why I’ve been enjoying it so much. There is no autopilot yet. I have to pay attention to what the water and pigment are doing, and sometimes they have absolutely no interest in whatever plan I had when I sat down. That original painting became the 5×7 art print included in each bundle.
Then I pulled out the wood burner.
For the pyrography piece, I ended up making coneflowers on natural wood rounds. Each flower was burned into the wood and then painted by hand with watercolor. They’re becoming magnets, which means they’re little pieces of art you can actually put somewhere instead of receiving a beautiful wood round and thinking, “Well, now what the hell do I do with this?”
What I love most about them is that they’re not identical. The grain changes from one piece of wood to another. The bark changes. The rounds aren’t all perfectly shaped or exactly the same size. My lines change, and the watercolor behaves differently on every piece of wood. You can put all 15 together and clearly see they belong to the same family, but each has its own personality. That’s exactly what I wanted.
And Then There Were Bookmarks
Because apparently buying bookmarks would have been far too sensible, I cut watercolor paper and painted those individually too. Botanicals, mushrooms, trees, leaves and other little bits of nature started appearing across my worktable. I added ink details, little bits of gold here and there, and then laminated them so they can actually survive being used as bookmarks instead of becoming precious little pieces of paper nobody wants to touch.
Each bundle gets one bookmark, but I’m not having anyone choose which one. Part of the fun of these bundles is that you know what kinds of things you’re getting, but you don’t know exactly which combination will arrive. I also had a collection of woodland stickers tucked away in my studio that I’ve been hanging onto for quite a while, and this finally felt like exactly the right place to use them. There are forests, mountains, trees, wildlife and other little wild things, and each bundle will get one of those too.
The Field Study That Tied It Together
Once the coneflowers began to take shape, the Mini Field Study became apparent. It needed to be a coneflower study too. The little card includes Echinacea purpurea, its bloom season, habitat, and pollinators, along with a few things to notice and a prompt to stop and look more closely.
That idea of noticing has quietly become a much bigger part of my work. It’s not just about making art inspired by nature. I want to pay attention to the nature that inspires it in the first place. Learn the names of things. Look at the weird mushroom. Stop for the tiny flower. Notice what’s changing with the season. Take seventeen pictures of something nobody else on the trail noticed because apparently that one particular leaf is very important now.
The Field Studies are becoming a place for all of that, and I love that this little birthday collection gets to include one.
A Little Snapshot of 52
The funny thing is that when I first came up with this bundle, I was mostly thinking about making something fun for my birthday. But as I’ve been working on all the pieces, I’ve realized how much it represents where I am creatively right now. There is watercolor, which I’m still learning. There is pyrography, which I’ve found myself coming back to after spending more time away from it. There is illustration, botanical work, nature study, and a whole lot of making things with my hands.
A few years ago, I probably would have looked at all of those things and wondered which one I was supposed to focus on. Which one was my thing? What was I supposed to be known for? How did all of it fit together?
At almost 52, I have considerably less patience for those questions.
I like burning wood and painting. I like drawing digitally and designing patterns. I like walking through the woods and coming home with photographs of leaves, mushrooms, flowers, mountains and whatever else caught my attention. I don’t think those things need to compete with one another anymore. They’re all part of how I make art, and 52 Trips Around the Sun accidentally became a pretty good representation of that.
Each Birthday Bundle includes a 5×7 watercolor mountain art print, a hand-burned and hand-painted coneflower wood magnet, an original hand-painted watercolor bookmark, a surprise woodland sticker, a Coneflower Mini Field Study card, and a handwritten Field Note from me. There are only 15 bundles, and because so much of what’s inside was made individually, no two will be exactly alike.
Another Trip Around the Sun
The last thing going into every bundle is a handwritten Field Note. I’m not sharing the whole thing here because I want that part to belong to the people who actually receive one, but sitting down to write it made me think about what I want to carry with me into 52.
I don’t have 52 lessons to share, and I definitely don’t have life figured out. What I do have is a growing willingness to trust my curiosity. I want to keep learning things I’m not good at yet, return to things I used to love, spend more time outside, notice more, and make things with my hands. I want to follow ideas without requiring them to justify where they’re going before I start.
Mostly, I think I’ve finally accepted that the wandering counts too. The things that work count, the things that don’t work count, being a beginner counts, changing direction counts, and making something simply because I want to see what happens counts.
So that’s what this little collection is really about. It’s a snapshot of this particular moment, made while I’m somewhere between 51 and 52, surrounded by watercolor paper, wood shavings, laminated bookmarks, and entirely too many ideas about what I might make next.
There are 15 of the 52 Trips Around the Sun Birthday Bundles; they’re $52 each, and they’re available for preorder now. They’ll begin shipping in the first week of October, and once the 15 have found homes, this particular collection will be finished.
Here’s to another trip around the sun and leaving a little room for whatever happens next.
