Finished!

This is what happened last week:

I finished my Lucky Bear! :D He is adorable, and I'd love to stitch some other brothers and sisters for him from the lovely bunch from Kirikí Press.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of Mollie Makes gift kits from the past issues to keep me occupied!

The bear is too big to easily turn him into a brooch, but I'm still thinking of ways I could wear him (he's too cute not to be taken out and about), so if you have any ideas, please don't hesitate to give us a shout! :D

He is a small triumph in a different way as well: as a textbook ENFP, I am not a natural finisher. I can get lots of enthusiasm for a new idea, and start a new project with a lot of eagerness and vision, only to jump ahead into the next one when the idea strucks, often without taking the time to wrap up my previous endeavour.

Recently, things I've been reading have reminded me of this and I realized this aspect of my personality still needs a good amount of intentional work, the urgency of which is augmented by the fact that I am now a parent, and finishing things well is definitely on the list of habits, or character traits, that I would want to instill in my child. This is also most surely one of those matters in which a child will unconsciously 'absorb' her or his parents' way of doing things, over and above anything they might say about it.

A little (?!) challenge for me then: how many projects, crafty or otherwise, big or small, will I be able to finish by the end of this year? They can be things I've started a long time ago (affectionately known among crafters as WIPs or works in progress), or new things. If you'd like to join the challenge, you're more than welcome! Please let me know through comments of any newly finished projects, if you'd like us to spur each other on, and at the end of the year we can compile our foot-long lists! :D

I think I'll add a new blog post tag: finished!, to keep track of them. 'That's a good idea', as my Bee would say. Please feel free to adopt it as well if you want! :)

Another little thing I finished this week was my very first scrapbook layout, yay! :D
Here it is:

I'm super excited about doing scrapbooking, it's very satisfying when a layout is coming together! Too bad the living room floor ends up inevitably covered in supplies, but the time spent creating and then clearing the chaos away is well worth it!

I'm aiming for at least 10 different pages for this particular scrapbook, and the plan is at least one new layout per month. Here's to a post about it tagged finished!, at the end of the year! :D

Living with pain

This title sounds a bit dramatic, but it is the one that kept coming back to me when thinking about this post, so in the end I just decided to go ahead with it. It's nothing too big, really, just the fact that since last summer I have had pain in my right ear, and, over the months, it has waxed and waned (if you'll pardon the pun), but to this day the cause is not clear and the pain persists.

I have made several visits to my GP's, and they are still investigating it - I've recently been refered to ENT, and hopefully I'll have a diagnostic and a treatment some time in the near future.

In the past few weeks however the pain has been constant, day and night, somewhat alleviated by painkillers, but never totally away: and in the last few days, it has become quite intense. Yesterday was the most painful day in a long time, but paradoxically it has been a day with much more joy than usual as well!

Thankfully I was on my own for the most part, as my darling little Bee was away with my mother-in-law. When she had left, at about 10 a.m., I went back to bed, as I felt exhausted. One hour later though, I was still not sleeping, and the pain was almost unbearable. I gave up and after a dose of painkillers picked up the phone and called a lovely friend whom I get to talk to much less often than I should. One more hour and a half later, when we said goodbye, I was feeling so refreshed, in spite of the pain (which fortunately did subside a little), and in much better spirits than if I had slept, I'm sure! "A sweet friendship refreshes the soul" (Proverbs 27:9, The Message).

One of the side effects of constant pain is a sort of 'mind fog', a lessening of one's ability to gather and organize one's thoughts, to make a plan of action and then execute it. Trying to prioritize and then make my way through all the housework tasks that were waiting for me seemed totally overwhelming, so what did I do instead?

I picked up my current embroidery project, I put on some videos on YouTube to listen to while stitching, and I set to work. This is the little piece I'm working on: a delightful plushie designed by the wonderful Michelle Galletta from Kirikí Press - a little bear with a basket of flowers! It came as a gift with the latest issue of my favourite magazine, Mollie Makes.

~ work in progress ~

And these are the videos I listened to: first, a lecture on Imaginative Fiction by Malcolm Guite, given as part of a C.S. Lewis Symposium organized by the Westminster Abbey Institute in 2013. Then, another lecture, by Alister McGrath, part of the same symposium. (A couple of weeks ago I had listened to the great panel discussion held at the end of that event, with guests such as Michael Ramsden and William Lane Craig. Yes, it seems I watched these in reverse order for some reason! :) )

If you are at all interested in C.S. Lewis, Christian apologetics, or Christian writing in general, and haven't listened to these lectures and discussions yet, please do - they are so rich and wonderful, I'm looking forward to hearing them again a few more times, in the hopes that I'll be able to absorb more completely all the insights imparted there!

After listening to Alister McGrath (for the first time ever, I admit!), I was very keen to hear more, so I also watched two more lectures by him, "C.S. Lewis: Reluctant Prophet" (about his recent biography of Lewis) and "Why God Won't Go Away" (in which he engages with the main propositions of New Atheism). I would encourage you to watch them as well if you haven't yet come across them! (I was especially impressed with Mr McGrath's gracious attitude, and with the seriousness and compassion with which he approached his subjects, and all the questions asked of him. All the videos I mentioned have very good Q&A sessions at the end.)

In short, it was a feast for the soul, and I don't know why I've let almost twenty years pass before returning to the double pleasure of listening to masterly words while doing needlework, but I certainly do not intend to wait too much this time before repeating the experience: I might not be able to have as many uninterrupted hours for it soon, still it is worth it at any opportunity.

Then, with only about one hour left until my family returned home, I crammed a load of washing into the machine (isn't it wonderful when machines do many of the most difficult house chores, while we get to keep the satisfaction of a job well done?), and also made a batch of marmalade! :D Again, with gratitude to the amazing modern convenience of purchasing a tin of prepared Seville oranges, adding a bit of water and a lot of sugar - and half an hour later, voilà! Eight jars of super tasty, perfectly set sweet marmalade, with perfectly suspended, very thin pieces of dreamy bitter rind.

Love it! ^__^

I had been craving marmalade for a long time, and last Saturday and Sunday morning's pancakes, while delicious, missed it terribly, so now I'm really happy I've got plenty to last us for a while! Maybe some other day I will tell you a bit about my previous adventures in marmalade, with the Polite and Rude variety (both lovely, really! :D ).

So, this is how in the end the pain mingled with a lot of pleasure: and I know which of yesterday's experiences I'll be remembering for the longest time! :)

Embroidery and the East Coast

Another goal I've got for this year is to do more of what I already do and love: baking, taking photos of nature and places we visit, doing more crochet, weaving and embroidery.

As a teenager I used to do a lot of cross-stitch, which for a Romanian youngster in the 90's was a new and exotic craft. Traditional Romanian embroidery and needlecraft is wonderfully rich and varied, and I was also familiar with needlepoint tapestry, as I grew up admiring a couple of really beautiful ones created by my mother, but cross-stitch in the British and American contemporary style was something entirely new for us, and my sister and I spent hours working on projects big and small.

In the latter years, however, I find myself really drawn to a more 'freestyle' embroidery using traditional stitches, and also to Japanese sashiko.

Last year though I worked on precious little, and I think I've only got this small piece to show right now, it's an ATC I made for a swap organised by Ali Burdon of Very Berry:

Sakura

It's a little picture I made out of wool roving, wet- and needle-felted, and embellished with straight and lazy daisy stitches and French knots.

Instead of stitching, I've been buying a good number of lovely books about it! :) I'll maybe talk a bit more about them in a future post.

Another superb source of inspiration I encountered last year was The Great Tapestry of Scotland, which I had the good fortune to see in September, when it was exhibited at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I even took the opportunity to put a few stitches into the People's Panel! :)

The Great Tapestry is an amazing work of art, and you can read more about it here if you'd like! I was browsing the pictures I took at the exhibition, looking for a favourite to share here, and this one caught my eye:

It is about the women who used to work as fish-gutters - a difficult and certainly very smelly job - but between the two world wars, in the fishing villages around Scotland, this seasonal employment was a welcome source of additional income, even if the hours were long and the wages low.

The two lines of verse come from The Fish-Gutter's Sang, a song in the Scots Language and a very 'colourful' work of art in its own right :)

I love the beautiful design of the panel, and exquisite colours and stitches! I also really like the little cameos of marine creatures and fishermen's jumpers! :D

When I first saw it, I remember feeling quite chuffed (to use a cute Scottish phrase :p ) that I recognized almost all the place names around the picture, but not only that - I had actually visited a good few of them! Pittenweem, Anstruther and Crail are in Fife, towards St Andrews - and my husband and I have many happy memories of that area! Last spring we went further up north for our holiday, to Gardenstown, and visited Fraserborough, Cullen and Portsoy.

A reason I love the east coast of Scotland so much is because it's got 'real sea'!  :D To this Romanian child, who spent numerous bright, hot, summer days on the beaches of the Black Sea, the sea is the sea if that's all you can see all the way to the far horizon. If there are lots of little islands dotted here and there and blocking the view, as it often happens on the west coast, lovely they may be, but for me the 'real sea' only starts beyond them! :) Now, there are islands on the east coast too, and yet, there are lots more uninterrupted swathes of waves to satisfy my soul :)

I'll leave you for now,  then, with a few photos I took of some of the lovely places we've been to so far on the east coast:

Boats at Pittenweem

The sea at Elie

The beach at St Andrews

Cullen

Gardenstown