Moments of Stillness

Writing a blog post has taken more than a back seat this week.  I have had a full head of things to think about and I am not able to focus on writing when life gets like that.  It is what it is.  Writing does not come easy to me, I have to focus hard to get the words in a coherent order and to get right what I am trying to say.  I love it though and know that writing in this space has given me the skills to find my voice, my early posts are testament to how far I have come.  

I have intentionally not written much this past week.  We make space in our lives for the things that are important to us and that nourish us wherever life is at at a given moment.  Even when we don't think we are doing this intentionally, I am willing to bet that this is what is going on.  When we tell ourselves that we don't have time for something is that what we really truly mean?  Some of the time I am sure that is true, but I also believe that we, on occasions, don't want to make time for things, particularly the hard things, or new things or those things we tell ourselves we can't do, but we haven't tried, yet.  

When my head is full, and writing is not possible I turn to things that are, for me, nourishing.  Other creative projects.  In those treasured moments of stillness I have been reaching for my knitting.  The rows are slow on this complicated pattern, I am knitting it instinctively, looking at my knitting to work out the stitches needed in each row.  A pattern as complex as this would have had me looking at the written details every few stitches, I do love it when you can see for yourself what you have learnt.  Although this requires concentration it is not so much that I cannot do it whilst chatting or watching something, I also love that I see any mistakes instantly which I don't always do when I am following the written pattern.  A lesson learned for me on how I pay close attention,  I look and see my knitting in a different way when I am in charge of the pattern rather than referring to the written instructions all the time, I wonder if this is the same for you, if you are a knitter?

In those moments when the knitting was too much concentration, Alice and I have been needle felting.  We are organising a fundraising day on Easter Saturday, we needed some craft items to sell and wanted it to be a quick to make, simple and sellable project.  We decided on heart garlands, three needle felted hearts on a thread.  We have made about 40 hearts so far and will keep going until we run out of felting wool.  We have a wee bag with some wool roving, felting needles and our needle felting brush which we take with us when we are out and about and have a spare five minutes to whip one up.

We started meeting up with some friends more regularly and intentionally last year.  We spend some of our time together creating and crafting.  We made the window star one week, it took all four of us to work out the instructions between us, each of us bringing a particular skill which helps us to make sense of it.  Our paper was a little smaller than that suggested in the instructions so maths was required to work out what size we needed, we ended up with a slightly different shaped star to the one in the picture on the instructions but we loved how these turned out.  They do look rather lovely on a grey gloomy winter day.

The embroidery is also from this wee gathering.  We each designed what we were going to sew, mine is the primroses above, Alice's design is mushrooms, we drew onto the fabric and have been slowly stitching these as we meet each week.  I have loved the close attention you need to pay to the colours and shading.  I want to add something around the flowers once I have completed the leaves, I haven't decided yet what that will be.  The last embroidery I completed I made into a bag, I think I will make something with my primroses too, probably another bag, you can never have too many.

If I haven't already I will be coming a visiting your blog soon, I am sorry I have been a little absent this week.  I hope you have all had a good week.

Busy (Gently) Doing

We are now seven weeks into the year and my hopes of early last month that we would soon be able to get back into our rhythms did not materialise until last week.  A month of illnesses put paid to that.  We finally managed to find our rhythm again last week which was lovely, it is like wearing really comfortable clothes.  It is a school holiday here this week so Cameron is home with us, which I always love, coupled with the fact that most of our home ed activities also stop has meant that our restarted rhythm has stopped once again!  Perhaps it is going to one of those years?

I mentioned in that same post about words that I had written in my diary to hold space for me between each of the festivals that we celebrate here as part of the wheel of the year.  Now that Imbolc has passed I have a new set of words to carry me through to the Spring Equinox, Cleanse, Sow, beginnings, inner voice and rising energy.  I look in my diary several times a day as I use it for so many things, I have these words written at the top of every page for the weeks up to the Spring Equinox, as a reminder to myself.

My intention for the year of getting outside and walking somewhere every day has been mostly happening, there have been a few days when it has not been possible to fit it in but I am not beating myself up for that.  I have been out in all weathers, snow, wind, horizontal rain and sunny days which I do so love in the Winter.  The deep blue of a sunny Winter day is always so beautiful however cold the temperatures are.  It takes a lot of effort to go out when it sounds like someone is hosing down the front of your house, but when you come home to a warming fire and a glow in your cheeks it really does feel like the cobwebs have been blown away.  Time outside is just the thing when you need a break from work staring at a screen.  I tend to stay in the village during the week, usually walking on my own, venturing further afield with the family over the weekend.  It has got us out exploring places that are not far from home that we have never been to before.

I am really loving my other intention to declutter somewhere in the house each week, this seems to be happening each week on a weekend.  One Saturday I started tidying my cosy corner of the sofa as it had become rather overflowing with stuff and was not feeling very cosy anymore.  You know how it goes when you start with one corner of a room, I moved on to clearing next to the sofa, under the sofa and before I knew it I was over by another corner and clearing and cleaning that too.  Alice had joined in by then and as we moved around the room we were joined by Cameron and my husband too.  By the time we had finished going through every shelf, nook and cranny we had four big bags of books, DVDs and games that were looking for new homes and a shiny clean living room.  I have also since been through several kitchen cupboards too.

I managed to break a very small piece off my food processor which means that it no longer works.  It is the bit on the jug lid that slots it in and switches the motor on to turn the blades.  Without it the whole thing is, well, useless.  It is old, I inherited from my mother in law, so despite it being immaculate from hardly being used by my in laws I have searched everywhere online and no one is selling spare lids for that processor anymore.  I reluctantly accepted that I was going to have to buy one to replace it.  I love having a food processor in my kitchen and have struggled without one for a couple of weeks.  I realised that the new one is the first one I have bought in my life, my previous ones have all been gifts or passed on to me as unwanted.  I am going to be ultra careful with this new one.  I now have a large box of bits on the hall floor which I plan to sell on as parts, I am sure someone will want the rest of the bits, some have been barely used.  I really don't want to send it to landfill.

When I was sorting through the my cosy corner I went through the two bags I keep knitting stuff in and found a pair of socks that were nearly finished, they just needed the toe closing on one of the socks.  I am not sure how long they have been sat there waiting for me to complete that small task but it took me a few minutes and now I have another pair of hand knit socks.  That same bag had an almost finished pair of mittens for Alice in it too, they too only needed a few minutes of work.  She has been glad of them these past few weeks as it has been so cold and windy.  It was a bag of very nearly completed projects!  I am guessing I put them there and cast on the next thing thinking I would finish them off at some point and forgot about them.  My jumper is growing, I have passed the point where you divide for the sleeves (for non knitters this means putting the sleeve stitches onto scrap yarn or similar to hold them whilst you knit the body, you then knit each sleeve once the body is complete) and am now knitting down the body.  I have completed about 10cm/4'.  I am enjoying this pattern and loving the fact that I can see how my skills have improved when I knit a pattern like this.  When we reach this stage with anything we do it is always good to notice these things isn't it?   A reminder of what we have achieved and learnt.

I have not done much sewing this month at all, apart from the gift I made a friend for her birthday.  I made several birthday cards and started on some embroidery.  I haven't done any since making this bag back in 2020.  That was from a tutorial I found online, this time we drew our own designs onto the fabric, Alice did this straight onto the fabric, I drew onto paper first and then traced it onto the fabric.  My design is primroses, Alice chose mushrooms.  We are now using a painting with the thread technique that some friends introduced us to, it is so effective and makes you really look at the detail of the colours, it is amazing how many colours there are in a primrose flower and its leaves.

We had some exciting news here last month.  There were moments when I didn't think it was going to come to be. Back last year Alice decided to put herself forward for something and was accepted on a selection weekend last November.  Sadly this had to be cancelled as storms had closed most of the roads in our county, trees preventing anyone driving through.  The selection process was changed to one of two stages, with a two pieces of work to be presented in December either as videos or written documents as stage one.  She got through that stage, one of 36 out of 70, the date for the second stage was in January, on the Wednesday before she tested positive for COVID.  This had been considered and she was offered a virtual selection with two others which lasted an hour, the face to face was over a day and half with an overnight.  I was a nervous wreck waiting to hear, I kept thinking about the one hour she had to prove herself compared to the day and half the rest of the group had.  We found out on the Sunday of that weekend that she had been selected, Alice is off to South Korea in the summer of 2023 on a World Scout Jamboree, she is part of a Unit of 18 Scouts from our area and will be joining 4,000 other young people from the UK and thousands from other countries all over the world.  A trip of lifetime.  I am immensely proud of her putting herself forward for selection and gaining a place.  This is really special for my extended family as my brother also attended a World Scout Jamboree and unbelievably he also went to South Korea.  We now have the herculean task of raising a very large sum of money to get her and her fellow scouts from the area to South Korea.  We are doing it as a Unit rather than individually which makes it feel like a rather large sum of money, but we will all be supporting each other which I feel is a better way of organising things.  I think I will be living and dreaming about fundraising for the next 18 months. 

It has been quite a month!