An evening of willow weaving was held in my village hall, I popped along and had a splendid evening, we all had a go at weaving an obelisk and all went home with a willow wreath. I'd wanted to try it for so long and I was thrilled to have a chance, and then our tutor, Jess, announced she was going to start a willow group, where we'd be able to get together, suggest things we'd like to make and do a new project every month. It was perfect & I signed up, in the time since we've made all sorts of different things. A woven heart that sits in my garden:
A corn dolly style dragonfly:
Either side of my garden swing seat sit some woven obelisks that my sweet peas grew up and around last year, I made these from memory of what we'd been taught at the evening, so I'm looking forward to doing them again with supervision!
And another obelisk at the other side of the garden, they weren't perfect but for a beginner they worked just fine...
And we made hurdles too, I'm going to make some more of these and have them all around the edges of my beds, they'll give support to the plants that start to fall forward, as they lean, keen to grab each and every ray of sun that they can
It was bloody hard to take a photo of the flower I made last year, but the centre of the flower is the same as the way you start off a basket, not that I can ever quite remember how it's done, but I do love how intricately pretty it is..
And here's Bogart, my hare, one of the things I most wanted to make when I had the chance to learn willow weaving was a hare, so I am utterly, utterly thrilled with him, he's so adorable! Look at him! Look at how goddamn adorable he is! I might be somewhat proud of Bogart, I'm not sure if I made that clear... ;)
At one of the sessions last year we were making a bottomless basket, that you could put around a plant pot to make it more decorative, it's safe to say I did not find French randing easy to pick up. I was flummoxed, so by the end of the session, my basket was quite small as I'd been incredibly slow in my weaving. I wasn't sure what to do with it, and I hadn't even cut off the excess rods and correctly finished it, I'd just put it straight in the garage until I could decide what to do with it. Well, this weekend I decided I'd let it be an obelisk, so I purchased a large enough pot, filled it with compost, planted a climbing fuschia and added the makeshift obelisk. I'm actually really pleased with it and it's now sitting right by my front door:
It's somewhat annoying that a bird pooped on the boards outside my house and all I can see is my obelisk and a blob of white bird poop. But here's the thing, how did it poop at such an angle? Did it come in sideways for a direct hit? I possibly live in the vicinity of acrobatic poopers. And there we have a sentence that I never thought I'd utter.
My current project is a large basket, which is actually taking three sessions to complete, and it means I'm back to French randing again, but it's actually going mostly okay. As it's going to be a lot taller than the few inches in the photo above, it should prove to be excellent practice and I might finally get my head around this weaving technique!
I've also made a woven Christmas tree and a wee angel. Well, actually a wee wonky angel. She has a definite lilt when she stands, but she'd do fine on the top of a huge Christmas tree! Not that she'll ever make it to a Christmas tree, she'll just have to remain a lilting angel!
Overall I'm just thrilled that I finally got the chance to learn a new skill. Also, as I have problems with both anxiety and depression, it's been a huge challenge for me to go out and do something social in a group with new people. I've come to feel really comfortable there, Jess is lovely and my fellow weavers are a wonderful, it's been a hugely positive thing in my life, with far more benefits to me than simply beginning to learn a new craft. Thanks are definitely due to Jess for her patient tutoring & splendid company, and also for sharing my mild obsession with ribbon and fonts.
It had been a while since I'd indulged my love of ink so it was time. These words come from a song by Frank Turner, the whole lyric is "If that's your road then take it, but it's not the road for me" The first time I ever heard the song and that line, it really spoke to me, to be honest the entire song is filled with lyrics that speak to me, like "I'm happy and I'm settled in the person I've become" and then there's "And I won't sit down, And I won't shut up, And most of all I will not grow up". I feel like parts of it are about me, but isn't that often the way with music? We find songs that speak to us, songs that appear to accurately reflect our lives, songs that seem as though the writer was talking directly to us. If that's your road then take it but it's not the road for me...I like how that infers that we all get to do what we want to do and it's okay if we don't want to do the same thing, we get to live our own lives, making our own choices. It all boils down to live and let live in it's simplest sense. In a deeper way it speaks to me about how, during my journey of body acceptance & feminism, I'm learning to be non-judgemental. Somehow we're all taught to judge things that just aren't important...they shouldn't be wearing that, their make-up is wrong, that outfit isn't flattering, they must be an idiot to be reading that book, that's a terrible tattoo, that's a boring hobby to have, they're too fat, they're too thin, the list goes on and on. I've spent so many years making those judgements that I still do it sometimes, but I catch myself in my mind and make myself consciously accept that someone else's choices do not have to mirror my own, and good on them for living their life the way they want to. I find myself silently celebrating it every single time. The knock-on effect has been that I'm happier in my own skin, if I don't judge others harshly, I don't judge myself harshly and let me tell you, that's a far happier way to live! Just a few words, arranged on my back, that I wanted with me forever, to remind me of a happier way to live.
I've spent all of this year travelling back & forth to hospital visiting my Dad after he had an accident a couple of days before Christmas. It's £3 to park each time at the hospital, or you can get a 10 day parking pass which works out at about half the price, so I've been working my way through parking passes. After having used my newest pass just twice it turns out that my Dad is being discharged and I have no need of the new pass any longer. The other visitors I'd seen around the ward weren't about when I left so I couldn't pass it on to them so I resigned myself to carrying it around for the foreseeable future until I'd had cause to visit the hospital a further eight times.
When you have a pass you have to have your parking validated at main entrance, so as I queued for this I overheard that the couple in front of me had exhausted their pass & would need a new one the following day. I waited, got my validated ticket and chased after the couple and called to them, when they turned I handed them my pass. They looked suitably confused and I explained my father was being discharged tomorrow and I no longer needed my pass. "But you've only used it twice!" said the lady "you could use it again!" I explained "it'll take me forever to use up the remaining 8 allowances". "Well would you like me to give you some money for it?" she asked, going for her purse. "Absolutely not, I know what a long slog it is going back & forth, that's my third pass here and I've been travelling back & forth to various hospitals since just before Christmas, so I know how expensive it is too". She looks at me and says "I'll be sure to pay this goodwill forward, thank you so much" I tell her that she's very welcome and she replies that she's very moved and is clearly a little tearful. I wish them both well and say that I hope whoever they're visiting is soon feeling improved. She thanks me over and over and tells me that they're visiting her father, which seems wonderfully serendipitous to me.
It was such a tiny gesture, but it left me feeling really good. I walked back to my car with a spring in my step!
I realise that it's the 9th of March, a long time after January 1st, but today the sun was shining so brilliantly I took the chance to start tidying the garden.
For the record, starting a petrol lawnmower with your left hand when your right arm has tennis elbow, is really bloody hard work!
Anyway, as usual, I have digressed, it's wonderful to see everything growing, it's a new year for all my flowers. New buds are appearing everywhere & I start to get excited about all the flowers that'll open in the coming months. My climbing rose has gone bananas, I'm not sure, even if I add some new trellis that I'll be able to contain it. I planted my new rose - Lady Marmalade - that I got for Christmas. It's very cool having a rose that shares my name, albeit my adopted internet name! The first of my tulips are flowering, daffodils on the verge of joining them, snowdrops coming to their end. The red tips of the paeony are just pushing through the soil. A flurry of crocus' that I don't remember planting are battling for sunshine. It's been such a mild winter that some sweet peas are already starting to climb the willow obelisks that I made last year. Even my verbena bonariensis has survived the winter, I'm quite delighted at how full and promising the garden looks. I filled up my wood store too, ready for a year of barbecues & fire pit evenings. And hopefully of pizza if a new oven can be built to take the place of Colin Falstaff, who didn't survive the winter. I'm going to have to google where to purchase clay for oven building.... I just wish you didn't look such a billy no mates if you chose to sit around a fire pit on your own. Although, it has to be said, usually the grass ends up catching on fire, and it's a definite bonus if there's more than one of you about to throw water on the ensuing blaze. Perhaps the job this year should be to find a less flammable location for the firepit! It might be that today was just a blip of sudden heat in a cool spring, but it was a delight to sit in the sunshine, surrounded by the cacophony of mowers in neighbouring gardens. I like that spring clean of the garden, it's the beginning of the welcoming in of summer, although it does mean I really have to get down to the allotment, build my greenhouse and start my plants growing, ready for a bumper harvest - well I can but hope!
A short while ago the 2014 IQ Test was showing up on Facebook so I decided to give it a go as it's been ages since I took an IQ Test. So I made my way through the test, a couple of the questions didn't make sense to me but I came out with an IQ score of 170. I briefly felt like a genius. But then I remembered how terrible I am at chess. I don't know what it is, I like logic puzzles, I like puzzles and quizzes in general. I like learning new things, I've come to really enjoy learning about science. But chess just doesn't seem to fit inside my head. I mean I fully understand what I'm supposed to be doing, I fully understand how all the pieces move, I get it, I do, but I'm still terrible at it. Somehow I can't see the moves ahead that I need to be seeing, I can't make the plans. I'm also hasty. I make moves without considering all my options. Makes you wonder how much chess duplicates real life. Sometimes I don't even see really obvious moves that are right in front of me. I also fail to be competitive enough, I don't mind whether I win or lose. Even though I get pleasure when I do win, I don't experience any great disappointment when I lose. Actually, the games that I have won, I experience surprise over pleasure. I do want to be good, I really do, I've been taught with such incredible patience but I think I've hit a plateau that I can't leave. I mean I'm smart enough, why is chess so damn hard?! I'm never going to be a Grand Master!
I was advised to check out this band at the Cambridge Folk Festival and I was not disappointed, I was absolutely blown away by how good they were. Within a couple of days I owned absolutely everything I could buy that they'd recorded. This cover of the Eurhythmics track is just beautiful, I have been known to listen to it on repeat, over and over. And over. The song actually kicks off at about the one minute mark... The Miserable Rich - Sweet Dreams:
So I've wanted a pizza oven in my garden for so very long. In 2012 my niece and I built a clay oven. As we completed the dome I squealed that we should give it a face, and thus the cat pizza oven was built:
Unfortunately all did not go well for kitty, rain made her sad and there was a collapse before a single pizza was cooked. Lesson learned, she had not been fired adequately. So in 2013, the mission was again to build a pizza oven, the clay was made ready and the dome created, but this time no kitty! No, for smoke & flames shall spill forth from the mouth of the pizza oven, so it clearly had to be a dragon:
Pretty damn cool eh? We were beyond thrilled with it!
I even named it, Colin Falstaff. And better than that - look at it in action. Look at him eating pizza!
Look at my pizza, look at my damn delicious pizza before I stuffed it all in my face.
Colin Falstaff worked like a dream, he cooked up the pizzas to perfection. But this is not a story with a happy ending. Colin Falstaff did not survive the winter. So now there has to be a mission for 2014, the pursuit of a pizza oven that lasts. I suggested using bricks to make a dome, my niece pointed out we don't know how to do bricklaying, which indeed could prove to be an obstacle. There must be a way!
