I returned last week from working at the Eagle Cap Extreme Sled Dog race in Joseph, OR. Since 2008 I have been going there to work on the race. For those of you that don’t know, I use to run sled dogs. Now I just work at races when I can – I miss the dogs I don’t miss all the work.

Even though the weather was much better for those of us watching and working on the race that it was for the teams, new records were set and we had the best looking and well cared for teams. Our team of Vets and the mushers did an outstanding job.

So why am I telling you this? Because being out in nature and spending time with the dogs are my biggest inspiration for my work. It is because of all of my work with dogs, both on and off the trail that the Cherished Paws Collection was created. The very first piece in the collection was created in honor of a dog named Forest who ran on my team. And spending time out in nature enjoying the color and textures inspire the rest of my work.

The past two months I have been spending time expanding my water collection which is inspired, as you might have already guessed, by the movement of water. Waves, ripples, and raindrops are what I am currently working on, though I have additional textures on the drawing board.

When I started this process of pulling this work together to make it a more cohesive collection, I thought it would be rather easy to do. Boy was I wrong. As I dug into my work I found that I had so many ideas and designs in my head around the texture of water that I needed to scale back and focus on just a few of my ideas and hold the rest for later.

So, as I write this, I am getting ready to start uploading the new pictures of the water collection. Here is a peak at one of the prototypes.