gold lining

 

I’ve been having a lot of luck recently – bad luck with med change and detaching my knee cap from its tracking [ow!] but also good luck with crafting supplies. I mentioned to Cherise the quilt I admire [Passecaglia, drool] but could never make because it takes an immense amount of cutting out, not just ordinary or frugal quilting where you trim, but ‘fussy cutting’ where you find particularly pleasing parts of the design and centre your template on them. You don’t have to waste the rest of the fabric, but you often cut in a long way to get a small piece, several times, and that becomes a lot of repetitive strain if you’re susceptible, which I now am. There are amazing cutter gadgets you can get, but they start at £100, which is a lot to pay when l’m not sure how much it would get used.

A few hours later, Cherise messaged me that a local crafters Facebook group had a secondhand Sizzix Plus on offer for £25!! I immediately messaged the seller and she kindly dropped it off the next day – happy dance! Now this was the weekend before Xmas, and I knew I’d need cutters as the seller was upgrading, not abandoning making. The mangle bit is fed a sandwich of cutting buffer sheets, a VERY SHARP cutter in the shapes you want – and for paper, some of these are amazingly complex – and the paper, card or fabric. So I betook myself to the tintanet and with Cherise’s expert help [she used to do classroom support at a crafting place] chose hexagon cutters for the paper templates and separate ones for fabric.. and then, cos, well, they’re amazing, I got these:

to make pretties with 🙂

They all arrived before Xmas, and when Cherise could show me how to use them! So I was all set up for my quilty retreat, I’d found free downloadable graphpaper for hexagon quilting and we printed off a dozen sheets.

http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/triangle/

the link takes you to triangles, but they offer music paper etc.

The fabric company I buy from regularly gave me a £10 voucher for my birthday, and the parcel had been delayed, due to lazy or stressed delivery peeps ignoring the directions [access via is a BIG clue when you can’t find the address on the top line, sigh] but I had finally collected it without the delivery card [takes soooo much proof when they put the postcard somewhere you can’t get it!] so, I was all set!

but when I was buying the hexie cutter, I saw this charm pack, a set of 30 different fabrics in 10cm squares, and suddenly I wanted to make a quilt based on the the cloisonne/ Kona Bay style Japanese fabrics…

drool!

Perhaps because I painted in a very abstract style, I’ve always had a ‘guilty pleasure’ feeling about liking this style so much… I don’t wear jewellery now except my wedding ring and a jade necklace Andy gave me, but when I had my ear pierced I wore enamel star and moons in this style…

So, by now I was feeling very abundant with this feast of good luck and good timing, and an exciting new project, but it kept rolling! For the first time I went on eBay, and found some lovely fabrics in this style, and even tentatively placed bids [ what, with no adult to supervise?!]  which promptly won! One of the colours was way out, it showed black and arrived green, but that’s screen resolution for you, one of the photos I took of it reads black. Anyway, at a quarter of the normal price, not a problem 🙂

All three parcels, even the one from Thailand arrived on New Years Eve, which was a lovely sunny morning here, and I had the loveliest time stacking the fabrics for tone and colour matching, and feasting on all that gold lining…

 

Yes, more than a silver lining in my clouds, I have gold, kintsugi.

I have a cracked knee that hurts like you wouldn’t believe, because it has triggered a neuralgia/sciatica ‘burning wire being dragged through my leg’ pain, but I also have a pile of 105 hexagons, cut in 25 minutes with effortless ease… and paper patterns to colour in and plan …and finding a way to make things easier builds hope that there may be other bits of luck just waiting around the corner…

 

and the best way to help painkillers to work is to find a distraction, and so… they are..

 

 

self centered – a story quilt

I have been collecting fabrics for a year now, knowing that one day l would make another quilt. I still haven’t finished the random plank top, but I made the Trans-ally quilt back in the summer [ see here https://singingbirdartist.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/flag-waving/ ] and that feeling of enjoying what I was making, while wanting to break away into a new project was hovering then. Working to such a tight [self imposed] deadline tired me out of course, but everything comes round, and while I have been thinking a lot about mandalas over autumn, the idea of a crazy/crazed quilt crept back in too.

What has surprised me is that as I looked through all my fabrics, and chose colour sequences, ideas for elements of a story quilt have suggested themselves… The medication situation and this stage of chronic illness seem to be pushing me to a re-evaluation, so I’m choosing to go with it, and trust the process. I’m making 30cm/12″ squares on calico backing and may make a wall hanging, book or just keep them in a box for me, but having a project is helping me deal with the meds ‘side’ effects until I can come off them and go back on Citalopram, fingers crossed!

This block is called Spin, and I had plenty of flowers and mandalas to choose from, but the matrioschkas demanded some attention… I like the idea and beautiful objects that matrioschkas are, but I also find something sinister/anxiety provoking about them, the little daughters trapped inside the mother unless she allows them out…that’s maybe not a thought you’ve had about them, unless your mother was very controlling. My mother wanted me to go to the same University college and study the same course, living in the same residential halls… omg! Apart from some pretty obvious problems with this, it really screwed up my final years at school, as I wasn’t allowed to do the subjects I wanted, Art and Sociology, because they ‘didn’t fit’… WHOM?! I was allowed to do English with French and German, though my parents put me under a lot of pressure to take a science, or maths…

I’m 51, and was brought up in a small, rural, conservative country town, and my parents were actually quite radical, ran events for Anti-Apartheid and my father supported Palestinian rights…but the family dysfunction meant that my ability to stand up for myself and my vision of being an artist was really dented. So, I consciously chose overall survival, dropped art [partly because I wasn’t good at drawing, which back in the 70s was where art in schools was at 😦 ] and worked hard at getting to University as a way of leaving home that would be sanctioned and even supported by my parents. I think I was attracted to all the fans in the Cache Cache fabric [main disc] because of all the hiding I’ve done in my life… it’s a very odd thought as though I wasn’t a tomboy, I was a feminist and have never played those ‘female’ [read society imposed] role games, so the thought of me fanning myself with demure downcast eyes is outlandishly amusing! The peacocks from Pousse Pousse stand for family pride and keeping a good face up [a fault I still have, one of the odd things about this med is how it makes me very ‘loose lipped’ and open, I can imagine some people on it end up in real trouble!]

Hiding my need to leave by doing what was approved, was a strange stepping out of myself – unfortunately aided by being good enough at languages to be accepted at University – though fortunately not the one my mother wanted! I wanted to apply for English in the School of African Studies at Brighton, but of course that was squashed, and I was grudgingly allowed to apply for the School of European Studies. I was interviewed on my 18th birthday, by a tutor who informed me ‘everyone’ had studied Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, so my context would be on that – when I explained that not in Suffolk, they didn’t and could I have an extra 5 minutes to read the excerpt through, he sighed and said it wasn’t really fair on the other candidates [!!!] but let me, and I was given a BCC offer, which was low for Brighton.

The tutor and the huge empty caverns of drained pools with no warning rails in the snow had left me rather unimpressed, so I chose otherwise, but the turnaround, the ‘spinning on a sixpence’ that hypervigilance has made me so good at, really came out around this time… It has served me well, but all that turning to have the right face to the light, to be able to cope, to initially escape my family home and not rock their boat too much, to then keep on to the point where I could make freely, has been a strange skill for someone who prides herself on authenticity and integrity… but then, perhaps that’s why…

crazed but not broken

I’ve been feeling very odd – changing medications is no fun as many of you will know better than me. I have a history of either being absolutely fine and not minding ‘minor’ side effects or getting the most extreme, even life-threatening ones possible. An early experience with Duphaston that the dreadful GP refused to report lead me to be very wary of medication for nearly 20 years…

Then, for me, Citalopram has been nearly the best thing since sliced bread, and to be coming off it after 10 years was a little daunting. My lovely GP hoped Venlafaxine could help with the ‘phantom’ pain fibromyalgia creates and help me use less painkillers and maybe gain more mobility, and also as my mood has been understandably but increasingly low as the fibro has got worse, maybe help more than the maximum dose of Citalopram could. She wanted me to start before she left, and helped me by setting a smooth transition with no tapering [as recommended by consultants] and l’ve now taken Venlafaxine for 4 weeks.

At first it was fine, just a very dry mouth, but drinking extra was easy enough, though by the time l started craving ready salted crisps, it occurred to me that yes, you can drink too much… the lovely chiropractor reminded me to take care of my electrolyte balance as he could see and feel the difference when I went in this week. A friend cooked me a lovely lndian meal including dahl, which confused things a little, as legumes now give me gripey wind, so when l saw my ‘new’ GP I was clear I felt wretched, but wasn’t sure how to separate some of the symptoms out. She briskly told me it was too soon to tell [hmm, 3weeks+ ??] and would see me in early January meanwhile here’s another prescription. I left feeling disgruntled on top of feeling sea sick and on heavy ‘amplification effect’, a most disagreeable fibro symptom where you feel like all noises are TOO loud, all smells are chokingly invasive, everything is clashing with everything else…on top of sea sickness, it’s a peach…

The surgery/practice I go to is patient-centred by ethos, so I am planning to go see a different GP should this one remain brisk/ unhelpful/ dismissive when I go back, if it wasn’t heading for xmas [what, it’s still November?!] I would try to fight for another appointment, and I will definitely be more prepared to argue my corner. An inbox conversation with a friend in London really helped clarify some of what is bothering me, and luckily I went from the doctor to my therapist, so we worked on it there too.

 

Meanwhile, I have been struggling with no immediately engaging artwork around to help me focus and cope, and failing to make much at all as being too nauseous to eat enough to take the painkillers means there’s extra pain on top of all the other symptoms.

Creativity is the singing bird for me, and the tree feels very lonely without her… not all of this is because of the meds, some is because I have been ill now for 6 years and made many changes to my lifestyle, more meds, more help, more pacing, less everything else, from showers to walking, to seeing friends, all while dealing with bereavement and losing not just my allotment, but my ability to garden, and moving from being a painter to a mixed media/ fibre artist, because of damage to my collarbones. That’s a lot, and inevitably there are times when it feels like too much…but lately with the accumulated tiredness from living in a country currently run by entitled sociopaths who are draining money from democratic infrastructure like the NHS and National Insurance benefits, mostly for their own pockets, but also to fund missiles that can never be used… oh, my…that’s way too much…

Another week of feeling sea sick and resting/ lying flat and leaving my face on the floor [instead of keeping it up and smiling!] and being gloomy as all get out, has passed, and gradually the space made by letting all that gripe out has started to allow some more positive thoughts to hang around. I even managed to make some software help me [techno fool win!!] and start rebuilding my lost list of over 200 blogs/resources I used to have on my dead laptop. It has really helped, deciding that Venlafaxine is not for me and that going back to Citalopram is not perfect but will be a lot better than this, if I can also structure in some more…something? Acknowledgement of how hard chronic illness is? Not sure…

What has come to me so far is this, the affirmation that however damaged we may feel, we still have value, all the ones being Westminstered to death and painted as the problem in the media, we are treasure houses of experience and human in ways the pretenders are too frightened to acknowledge.

I’m researching around kintsugi again, and think this will be the key to a new direction or piece of work… my life/ sense of self/ sense of possibility has been shrinking and something wants to fight back…

We are strong in the broken places, we know how to live well, we know what matters, we can be the gold that illuminates…

Kintsugi

the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. [Wikipedia]

Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated… a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin….Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. …The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself.

”

— Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics

 

 

Progress report

I have been having many small and irksome obstacles recently, against a background of settling in to the new meds – Gabapentin and then Lansaprazole again to manage the digestive system pain and gripes from the Gabapentin. The Gabapentin is worth persevering with because I am able to read non-fiction again! Even just reading a couple of books a week again has been great and my habit of small pleasures is boosted by new releases from favourite authors 🙂 I feel we all need that, but the ones who need it most are now right against the wall, the Conservative Government is pushing as many welfare cuts as it can before it is before the European Court of Human Rights, for crimes against disabled people. People are dying because they cannot afford the Bedroom Tax on the spare bedroom for their carer, and now that the Independent Living Fund has closed, people will be found dead as people who need round the clock care won’t get it. Many more will die very slowly, each day increasingly painful as bedsores become ulcerated, wounds become infected and carers are allotted only a few minutes to shower and toilet with no extra time to change dressings and change beds… Hard Times in Old England, very hard times…

Against that, my own problems feel petty, but it is worrying that going out one day for a few hours means sleeping for nearly a week, that making one day means being too shaky to stand to heat a ready meal. At the same time, I often feel full of ideas! About politics, about making, about creativity as the core activity for humans, and maybe even what Earth is for..insects and birds and fish all make beauty, with species like the bower bird making aesthetic choices that might challenge an Art graduate, as whale music challenges musicians and mathematicians… who knows?

 

Anyway, I have been working on a piece in ‘woodland colours’ since before moving, chosen to be fun, freeform and easy to keep track of while moving. Suddenly it has a name: ‘The Vital Spark’! It feels like there is maybe a series unfolding, from Organic Process to a next one which I know will have crimson and lemon yellow in, and that’s all so far! The Vital Spark is about the happy point when a new idea flashes into being, lighting up the hearth of old ashes and mossy, greened-over bricks and logs… all those old ideas are the compost for the bright new shoot, which promises such hope, and makes sense of the dullness of winter, when life was creeping along in very quiet ways that were easy to be ignorant of while bigger events shook the tallest trees…

Cherise came round and we talked about what finishing her degree course means and how art is making-led for some [us] and prestige gaming for others, and what fun bright colours can be and how textures can change readings.. and meanwhile our hands worked away and I had great fun playing with beads to embellish some old work that lost its way [mistakes!] and has now become a feature to bridge between the freeform crochet, found wood and bought elements of raffia and willow [remaindered xmas baubles and mini fencing.]