It began in August with a tiny idea.
At the time, I had no idea what it would eventually become. By September, it had somehow turned into a story, a website and a thirty-day journey.
First came the artwork.
I spent far too much time imagining what this little world should look like. What each place should feel like. What should be hidden in the distance, what should be waiting around the next corner, and how every image could quietly tell another piece of the story. Images were created, changed, discarded and created again until the world in my head slowly became the one you've just travelled through.
And then that world needed somewhere to live.
So I started building the website around it. One page, one door and one little detail at a time. There was a lot of coding, testing, breaking things, fixing them again, staring at things that should have worked but somehow didn't and going back over everything until the journey worked the way I had imagined it.
And then, of course, I had to fill that world.
That meant searching for the right things, buying vouchers, making plans, changing plans, writing little pieces of the story and occasionally fighting with Polish online shops. By October, the pieces were finally falling into place, and not spoiling it to you became perhaps the hardest part.
Then November came.
For thirty days, you visited the places one by one. You saw the finished pictures, read the words and discovered what was waiting for you. But what you couldn't see were all the months behind them. The ideas scribbled down and changed, the abandoned versions, the “no, that's not quite right” moments, the lines of code, the artwork that never made it onto the screen and all those evenings spent wondering what might make you smile when you finally reached this part.
And now there are no more places left to visit.
Four months after one little idea appeared in my head, you've reached the end of the journey I imagined for you.
And perhaps that's the nicest part for me: it was never really about the vouchers, the tickets or the presents. Those were things waiting at those places.
The journey itself was my gift to you.
I hope you loved travelling through it, Kate.
Because I loved every moment of creating it for you. ❤️
