richer by giving

I have been managing a little making again, and started with an engagement present. It is for the sister-in-law whose husband died the year before mine (yes, that is a little complicated!) meaning, our husbands were brothers. I am really pleased she has found someone new to be happy with and wanted to make her something, as although we are very different people with different tastes (she is much more elegant, and has a degree in the philosophy of science) we both enjoyed being able to have intellectual conversations at family gatherings and discuss books when the mainstream of the conversation was what third cousins were doing 150 miles away 😉

When making a gift, I always have a think about whether I am giving a reflection of myself, something purely for the recipient’s taste or some combination. This time I leaned more towards what I wanted to give, a piece that rejoices in her happiness with a touch of sympathetic magic (wellwishing) in the making.

Then I said in the card I hoped it wasn’t too eccentric for her 😉

As it is only 7cm square it won’t be too dominating… but it has some of my current concerns in, mandalas and fibre bundles.

I started with a collage background, and two possibilities, one plainer, so I could go with ideas as they came up, and by decision time, they were very different.

Comparing the two side-by-side helped me realise the first was too clumsy, and I cut the beads and button off, and put it all to one side (yes, you will be seeing it later 😉 ) I still liked the second, so on I went, choosing tinier and tinier elements, oh my…

Final touch was a machine cord loop for easy hanging, and that was secured by stitching the bead loop on the front at the same time.

Why? It is a little more fiddly, but it means the weight of the elements are braced against each other, with less drag on the twinchie canvas, which as you will see from the shot of the back is… more of a bargain than a quality product 😉

The Japanese, the Hindu, the Tibetans all have  ritual mindful sewing, and many contemporary slow stitch groups are connected to the prayer and good hope Christian church sewing circles, where women met and stitched quilts and baby clothes for the needy…the idea is that by consciously investing the process with good wishes, the recipient will feel loved and energised in themself as well as receiving the physical aid of the item.  Of course it also bonds the community and makes the group focus on positive action for the good of everyone, so it really is a shame the groups fell out of favour, with fundraising for bought goods taking over in some places.

I use this mindful technique a lot, as among other things, it helps overcome self consciousness about making, the worthiness of what you are offering as a gift etc – all good to pass on to anyone you know with social anxiety or low self esteem!

Making for others, even from patches and leftovers, often makes people feel very aware of how rich they are, and this ties in nicely with linking to zero waste week, which runs from 2 – 9th September http://www.zerowasteweek.co.uk/

for which I will be trying to post everyday with zero waste ideas – as the focus this year is food, and I have already posted about sprouting seeds, there will be at least one upcycled post – but how appropriate is that?!!

waste not, want not: new plants from old: stonecrop/succulents

So, the mornings have that slightly crisp feel and the smell of autumn coming in – not here yet, but soon, which makes it harvest and garden tidy up time. Over the years I have realised these are the jobs that give me the greatest satisfaction, perhaps because the garden spreads into the house and kitchen 😉 perhaps because I can see that I do get to be zero waste sometimes 😉

Lots of the stonecrop/succulent plants are at their best right now – Autumn Joy, the large bush forming stonecrop is becoming the main food source for Small Tortoiseshell butterflies, so leave those to flourish. But some of the flatter/houseleek style are looking tatty and slightly soggy. The flowers have passed and there are lots of sprawly stems, and if you look closely, lots of bright green new growth coming at the base.

  Snapping off the soft/going over stems for the compost inevitably drags up some roots, but no worries, they are the harvest for today!

Strong and woody stems with darker green little sprouting florets are what you need to propagate lots more stonecrop. I don’t know the name of this particular kind, I got the maintenance man to give me what he’d cleared out of the gutters at the house in Sneinton :0 about £20worth!!!  I soak the roots in warm water in a flat tray for a day and then plant in old compost (ie not too nutritious, or the shoots will outgrow their strength and not last the winter)

When it’s clear which shoots will survive, I share with friends and look for gaps in the garden to fill. I really like stonecrop for its different texture, and for covering bare soil with green rosettes in February/March when we all need a lift 😉 That’s the point at which to lift and split Autumn Joy if you have it, each plant can become 4, and you can trim off the dried stems and stack them near the compost – they are ladybird and beetle hotels at that point so don’t put them IN the compost till April/May. They are a great companion plant for late beans as the bees will flock to them and of course, pollinate the beans 🙂

updates: I lifted my compost potatoes cos the guys in the other flats promised to come help plant leeks so I needed the 2 buckets of top compost, which means the potatoes are tiny new ones

– ordinarily I wait till the foliage has died down at the end of September. Insult to injury, some sporting event waylaid them, so my leeks are languishing, grrr, but there is enough for potatoes and peas with cheesy scrambled egg for today’s lunch 😉 (sorry vegans, I’m getting my lysine count up!)

Blackberries from the brambles in the garden with soyesse yoghurt for pudding though 🙂

My ginger rhizome has the tiniest shoot, and the compost is lovely and crumbly, the peas are cropping and with more things to plant, life feels abundant 🙂

happy happenstance…

So by chance, I spotted this opportunity (still open for a week!) for artists affected by disability and mental illness:

https://witness.theguardian.com/assignment/52149804e4b0ca9a4cf92c90?INTCMP=mic_2902

and as I had had the most beautiful wrongness happen with my camera yesterday, I got to turn around a week of feeling unproductive/ uncreative/ unrecognized in one fell swoop 😉

Due to “hurty hands” as I would have phrased it with my ‘make small of things we can’t change’ husband, I haven’t made much while sorting out listing items to sell on Amazon/eBay/Gumtree…the inertia was really hard to fight back against and when I did, I felt mentally and physically clumsy, including not just dropping the camera, but changing the settings as I grabbed it. Small change, you say, reset it! Yessss, hmm, I got it free, with no manual and a bit broken, and so far haven’t found the manual online… so I turned it on again and off again a few times, with increasing camera wobble…oh my! 😉 and theeeese effects!

Now the opportunity is for artists with experience of disabling conditions to make a postcard sized piece that expresses what is important to them…it seems pretty open what you can choose that to mean, so I started with this last image, as the tiny compass/ helm (a charm) stood out. I inverted the colours in Picasa and cropped and came up with ‘Death of My Safe Person’. It is very hard to explain to anyone what losing the only person who wanted to be my safe person has been like…I have met others, to me it’s kind of a magnetic effect, once a total stranger on a train helped me cross the seventh pit of hell, sorry, Birmingham Railway Station – without him knowing!  As an erratic eccentric artist with bi-polar, considered loveable but deeply unreliable by his nearest and dearest, I think Andy was fascinated that I could ‘lean’ on him, and we stretched my world way open again…it was hard, and I had a lot of anxiety and upset, but I got to have an allotment and go to see Benjamin Zephaniah live and the Chalice Well Gardens and see the sun set into the sea…happy memories that have changed who I am 😉 Anyway, as well as losing my lovely partner, I also lost the person who took me places and made me safer in the world…I am still held by his effect on me and my life, and nowhere near as housebound as I was in my late 20s (classic agoraphobia onset is 27, I learned in a biography of Charles Schultz of the Peanuts cartoon strip fame, he was probably the highest earning agoraphobic of the last century). But I shocked a lot of people by going out every other day for a month after he died, I was so frightened of losing my mobility…and lately, as the fibromyalgia gets worse, I feel it creeping up on me more. It was very hard (British understatement!) to go out to the chiropractor on Thursday – luckily as soon as he crunched my neck, my mood swung right up 🙂 so I think there must be a link to feeling efficacious in the world, effective, respected, seen, empowered, supported…some blend that is crushed when you can’t hold your head up… I often feel like things are slipping through my fingers and some of that is in the image too…

and although there is a slight atmosphere of ‘gone beyond recall’, as usual, I have balanced it with other images expressing my firmly held life mantra that there is always good stuff to find in the world:

and my other mantra: pay attention! This is a sunbleached fence paling, but it takes me straight to my favourite beaches of the North-East coast (please don’t let know-nothing Tories frack there!!! Osborne’s father-in-law’s Howell-er is deeply worrying if you love watching the exquisite cyclamen pink autumn moon rise out of lilac, lavender and dove grey seas…)

So I feel happy that those 4 images give quite a balanced view of how I live with agoraphobia, extreme PTSD and fibromyalgia – yes, things get hard, but there is so much beauty to be found, and sometimes it is the happy accidents that turn out best 😉

Earlier Nights…

I am having my end-of-summer wistfulness…the point where I forget how much I managed to do (two installations in parks?) and instead feel winter is going to shut me in and I’ve done nothing, wasted so many sunny days…

This is all unfounded! But somehow it happens every year, I just get better at reminding myself of truths to be grateful for:

my favourite season is AUTUMN, not summer 😉

as the nights lengthen I must make more effort to sit outside on sunny days and take vitamin D and play in the garden: look what I have to plant out: leeks, apricot agastache (mmmm) and cyclamen:

life is BEING not DOING

I have not made enough art this week because my hands hurt and I have been listing art and craft materials on Amazon, Gumtree and Facebook. Cherise has helped set all that up and she is doing the hardest bit (Ebay!) so my brain is a bit full now, but I also have ideas, I have cleared lots from the studio, but I still don’t have that crucial space to lay out my new mandala ideas (that have were sown in the halcyon retreat and are now pushing to the surface, just like the ginger root i planted 2 months ago 😉 ) too much and not enough, all at the same time!

it is full moon….fooooolmooooon….and feelings are amplified 😉

And here is some of why I am frustrated: this lovely collection cost £6.50 and a barter with TrulyHooked for her gorgeous bluefaced Leicester homedyed yarn…eye candy indeed, but I want to get started! And I know my hands hurt too much already…but I see the chiropractor tomorrow, so maybe at the weekend! Hold that thought, it is a candle for the next while 😉

Can you imagine how beautiful all this azure and sand and turquoise and burnt umber is going to be?

A candle for the early nights indeed…

link to dwp denials info

apologies for less posts – i’ve got hyper- somnia and my hands ache really badly…very glad i won my DWP ESA appeal, please read this, think and sign the petition and if you have the spoons share the info with MPs etc :

DWP denials: They would kill you and call it ‘help’

these stressbusting doodles are made on this:

http://www.permadi.com/java/spaint/spaint.html

enjoy!

things that like to be together

So I have cleared every last cone of skipped and gifted yarn in my studio – I have NO, repeat NO, cones of yarn…I’m reeling! (sorry, bad pun!)

I have a small collection of metallics and serging silks/nylons on cones, mmm, kingfisher blue, silver, copper, mmm…. for embellishment, but all my yarn now fits in the small plastic 4 drawer unit that sits on top of some project crates.

Wow! Where did it go, you ask? The largest/fullest cones and some fluffy acrylic that will go well with the fake mohair on some of the cones is going to the refugee forum, a bag so big I can barely lift it 😉 Luckily my home help volunteers at the forum, so she will happily drop it off with some baby toys my child visitors no longer use.

For the story on where I get this skipped yarn and tips on winding yarn to maintain good tension:

skip for joy: a yarn winding tutorial

The 47 cones I cleared (in slow stages! it was a lovely anti-anxiety aid when I was fretting about the missing benefits – now sorted, only the appeal to not worry about now 😉 ) are now divided into yarn for ‘whispering wall’ and balls to use for fundraising for the exhibition next year. What you see below is for the netting and bedizeners and is now stored in a newly cleared 80litre crate of materials and components for whispering wall and cradle for stones – they only both fit in because about 80 cones and cardboard inners that I will use for scrolls are now stored in a big cardboard box, waiting for winter when I can dry the brusho painting by the fire.

I want to make the most enormous braid/dreadlock so will bundle several of these together for one huge freeform crochet chain…I wonder what the record is for the most strands/ply in a crochet/finger knitting chain?

Some of these were so pleasing to mix – they may look a little brash in the picture but once mixed will hopefully be rich and sumptuous 😉

My principle for choosing what yarns to mix is based on paying attention whenever I am in nature – there are colours and textures that like to be together. Too harmonious can become bland, so a little contrariness often pays off, too 😉

The smaller balls are to be corded with a zigzag on the sewing machine, I have some dark golds, metallic brown and gold mixes and a dull orange that shows up as sandy gold against blues, oh yum!

The blood orange mixes will be corded with a metallic plum and black mix…oh yessy 😉 colours are so pleasing to work with!

The other mixes are a fluffy fake mohair based set, and a wide range of landscape inspired mixes…my favourites are the ones with flashes of turquoise and the strawberry sherbet mix 🙂 I might knit some up as scarves, they would look lovely with machine cord tassels …

It looks as though I used picasa neonize for the bottom images, but I think my camera did some funny flash/solarise effect..no, I don’t understand the settings on it, it came free from a charity shop because it didn’t work properly and had no manual!! I will take better photos when I set up my fundraising site, promise 😉

taking a yarn trip

So, I was supposed to take a trip into my overdraft at a fancy yarn supplier, but life had other plans…instead I have been upcycling more factory yarn into hand work friendly balls… some yummy landscape mixes are coming through, very Cornish heath and autumn woodland, the holiday I want to have is happening in the winding 😉 Nonie gets mesmerised by not just watching me wind, but the long dreadlocks of freeform crochet as they accumulate on the floor. The next mix is sand, blues and browns, driftwood on the beach and white horses on the North Sea colours…mmmm….

But first a trip down memory of yarn used  lane 😉

going round and round in CYCLES

Lovely Robyn came to help me with some weeding and tidying yesterday – she used to have a mini plot on my allotment, so she is particularly easy to work with, as she understands that for me, everything goes in circles 😉

My list was:

some cardboard boxes from new peeps moving in, that had been left out in the rain (big bed frame boxes)

new compost bin needed

weeding the rockery

more support for tomatoes and peas

weeding next year’s herb bed by the raised bed

-plus belated birthday brownies for her, a goodybag for help and to tide her over while finding work, and just generally catching up on what has been going on 😉

We started with the new herb beds, pouring rainwater out of the weeding buckets over freepapers and the biggest delivery boxes. This area has been walked over a lot while the raised bed was built and tree felling was going on, so leaving it to soften (the worms will love it being damp and cool under the mulch) till autumn when the garden plan is clearer is sensible. I still can’t kneel and asking friends to weed an open space in a heatwave is….asking for trouble! So the mulch is laid, anchored with spare bricks and my tomato plants, which got some more staking at the same time.

After a drink and a chat in the shade on the edge of the rockery garden, Robyn clambered through the weedy undergrowth and set to on tidying it up: some before and after shots, it’s more striking in real life, promise 😉

Scorching weather again yesterday, so she is wearing an upcycled Tshirt sweatband below the hat I lent her 😉 Between us we filled that giant yellow tub and a big bucket with ‘safe’ weeds, that is, weeds I don’t mind reproducing everywhere again if the compost isn’t hot enough to kill the seeds. So, foxglove, liquorice agastache, sticky weed, rosebay willowherb (fireweed) and any grass with soft roots (NOT twitch, which is the stuff with hard white roots that run for miles, given half a chance, grrr) and half a bucket of brambles, rubbish and big twigs, which go in the garden waste collection bin. The crystals and treasures all show up again, though there is more to do over the weekend, when Ben is there to open the shed to get the loppers out (sycamore and laurel, beware!)

The fresh herbage went straight to the new compost bin, an upcycled hamstercage that I used for storing drying onions and garlic at the allotment. This was set in raked soil with a brick edging to keep it stable on the slope and encourage slugs to live where they’re useful. (Ever hopeful!) Then we used the smaller approved food boxes to line the bin, filled the bottom with soil, kitchen compost, soil, wet cardboard, soil, herbage, one year old leaves from the garden waste bin, more herbage…I filled the spare compost caddy with leaves to add when this heap has settled, probably two weeks in this heat.

There were some buckets of rainwater around so Robyn poured all those over the layers as the heap built.

As I’ve been making big batches of smoothies and freezing them, the kitchen compost is very acid at the moment, so the leaves (neutral) and the comfrey and foxglove bases (alkaline) will help make the heap more worm friendly. If you have access to fresh coffee grounds and egg shells, scattering them in too is great for the same reason. I also put cat combings and hairbrushings in, hoover dust (mine is 40% cat fur, 40% yarn and then random sparkles! Laughter over that with the homehelps 😉 )There is room for the next kitchen compost bags, but, as I said, in this weather the green herbage will drop/droop very quickly. Ideally it would have been chopped a bit, but I forgot to ask for the shed key the night before – oops! Ben mowed the badminton lawn before the rain, so I will add grass clippings to the potato crop compost bins to keep them mulched. I think there is a sweet potato plant in there too, these darker green oval leaves and the tiny purple flowers?

A lovely surprise was that the miniature rosebush Andy gave me ten years ago has survived yet again. (more lives than the cat!) It got very dry when I was having a flare a while ago, but lots of watering and a different position so it catches the rain better mean it is flourishing again – and flowering 😉