It's not even midday, and I've already demolished a bowl of porridge with blackberries & sultanas for breakfast, a brunch of poached eggs & feta cheese on rye crispbread and a white chocolate Bueno bar. Seriously thinking I might be overdoing it a morsel or two ... oh well, diet begins Monday. Isn't that how the saying goes? (Luckily, there are lots of Mondays throughout the year.)
Anyway, I've a couple of things to tell you about. One of 'em is this book, '365 Days of Creativity' by Lorna Scobie. I received it as a present last Christmas, and finally got around to starting it. The book has 365 prompts in the form of pages to paint or draw on, collage or write on, all aimed at kickstarting your arty crafty creativity. Like this starting page.
You're encouraged to fill each bowl with something. Fruit or pencil or random objects maybe.
I really enjoyed this, cutting up an old Sarah Raven catalogue for pictures to stick on. Two garden urns, a cardboard box, seed packets, a book, a handful of candles & two glass bottles. I also use a stamp to print the outline of green leaves, and I drew apples, bananas, a carrot, Nessie the Loch Ness monster and a sleeping cat. Plus random stamped letters in black ink. Oh, and I stuck on a couple of used postage stamps too. I was pleased with how these bowls turned out, and happily started on the next prompt. However - hmmm, not so much fun.
This page was blank, except for the text suggesting I use a variety of different materials to explore making marks, and I should embrace smudges or accidental marks. Well, there I was faced with a blank page and my mind went equally blank. I had various false starts, & never properly felt I got to grips with what was being asked of me. I ended up tearing up paper, gluing it down, painting over it, stamping & using stencils & adding a scrap of fabric, splatters of paint, lines made by Sharpies. It's all a bit of a dog's dinner, and I can't say I like it. The next page for me to start on is also blank. But there's more of a definate prompt about how to fill it. Draw the view through a doorway. It suggests the view could be into a garden or a room, or a view from a cafe door. That's much less vague than 'explore mark making', and I might tackle that this afternoon.
Okay, moving on, this blog post's entitled every day's a school day because I was today years old when I learnt how to upload a YouTube video! I'm not great with technology, so don't usually find things like this simple, but to be fair to YouTube they make it pretty easy. It's not the most accomplished filming in the world, but I wanted to try recording a flick-through of my fabric covered journal. The link's here, and I'd be ridiculously happy if you'd take a look at it. The more views a video gets on the site, the more it's recommended to others and gains a wider audience. Not that I expect there's a huge crowd desperately waiting to see my shaky camera work ... Actually, it's fascinating to look 'behind the scenes', as it were, about how YouTube works. If you upload a film, you can not only see how many people watch it, but whether they stick around to watch the entire film or only manage a few seconds before they're clicking on something else. I belatedly worked out how to add music to the video, but that might take a while to process. So maybe you'll see the film without a soundtrack and maybe you won't. But please, do me a favour and take a peek. Make an old gal happy! It'll be your good deed for the day.
Hello! And goodbye, at least for now. The blog's on hold for a little while as I'm easing myself into 2026 gradually. I'm still stitching and reading and enjoying life with Badger the cat. Even though he treats my sofa like a giant scratching post!
Here's Badger, looking like the little cutie-pie he is. He's settled in so well, is absurdly affectionate and eats anything and everything I put in his food bowl. The only fault I can find is that he likes to sharpen his claws on the side of my sofa. This is despite having two scratching posts, one of which is part of a cat tower that's taller than I am! I may have to try trimming his claws, but I don't know how Badger will react to that. Anyway, expect to see more photos of him, so sorry in advance for any of you who aren't feline fans. Apart from gazing in admiration at the cat I've continued to experiment with embroidery. I really can't decide whether this mainly pink piece of stitching is something I like or just a dog's dinner of a mess. This is another embroidery I've been stitching. Frankly, at the moment it looks like it should be lobbed straight into the bin. I'd painted with a mix of watercolour pa...
The days are marching by at record speed, and I've finally - possibly - bought all the presents I need to buy and written all the Christmas cards I need to send. I decided not to put up a full-sized tree this year as I'm convinced Badger the cat would simply view it as a climbing frame, and I'd find it toppled on a daily basis. Instead, there's a small green tree, and a simple white twiggy one that has lots of vintage baubles dangling from it. To be honest, I prefer the twiggy one, so the green tree might be permanently retired from now on. I've not gone crazy with the decorations, but there are various strings of fairy lights that look so pretty when they're lit. I have - between internet shopping and baking mince pies - made a little fishy pin cushion, decorated with seed stitches, French knots, chain stitch and stem stitch. I'm on the look-out for grey tweedy material to make another fish as I think that'd look better than plain ...
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