All Fingers and Thumbs

As we descended towards the shortest day I could feel the need to turn within very strongly.  I kept coming back to the image of a mossy hollow. Tucked in the earth, at the roots of a bare tree, a space where I could curl up in to a ball and let the days pass. It sounded soft and comforting, but the slowing has been awkward, and though the body tells me what it needs, keeping the mind, and the world around me to the same pace is always the challenge. As my new knitting project grows, I see the browns and dark greens are like the manifestation of the hollow. Happily a softer, cosier representation. Knitting this wrap is a process that literally helps me create the space I craved. I have been falling home from work and into its embrace all week. The long rows create a rhythm that wasn't in my hands as they scurried at the socks. Warm and safe from epic rains and winds. The hollow is the dip my bum is making in the sofa cushions. I thought I only started on the Orcha...

Just back from our three-weekly date night with a stack of new reads. Love the freedom in library picks, choosing on a whim, judging by covers, blurbs, mere fancy much more than when I am paying for a book. I find it easier to stop reading too if it doesn't catch my imagination. Back it can go and nothing lost. Our little library visit has been a regular in the diary since my trip to the States last autumn. I visited two glorious libraries in Provincetown and Boston . Stunning buildings with huge collections that made you itch to just pull up a chair and stay all day. The previous summer I visited the most delightful gem of a members' library in Providence that seemed so perfectly formed it could have fallen from the pages of one of the novels it housed. They seemed to honour the beauty of the books that lived within them and like they would capture and create new bibliophiles second by second. I felt like our libraries paled into the background against these widely varie...

Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life. Care of the Soul - Thomas Moore A regular week and an irregularly momentous one. Play and work. Work and play. Plenty of rest. Full in the flow of the remarkable and unremarkable. My basic routine has space for quiet ritual, for time in nature, for movement and stillness and space to do what my heart calls for in the most playful of ways. The simple everyday is so very good for me now, care fully curated, and I reap the rewards of that in health and energy even in this fallow time. More particularly there have been delicious moments of note. The weekend brought time with friends, talking about the things that really matter and just being together - that amazing gift of time with people who really see you. This Tuesday I had one of my fortnightly coaching calls with Jen , we're just sprinkling magic on the mundane, recognising the sacred or as the oh-so-eloquent Mr Moore would put it applyi...

Winter and candlelight. Tea and biscuits. Sarah and her slippers. Things that are delicious together. Just like Brene and Oprah and art journalling and The Gifts of Imperfection. I signed up for the on demand course last October and I was starting to wonder if it wasn't a little like my exploration of The Artist's Way . Bought in 2010 after it was recommended on a course the book has been in a drawer ever since, just waiting for the day.  I tried to find my deeper way of engaging with TGIF in the spring  but that didn't stick so this sounded like a perfect way to really play with the concepts that were so helpful to me last year.  I gathered my supplies and then just couldn't find that overlap of time, inclination and a dash of bravery to begin. Despite Julia Cameron lurking in the drawer I just trusted that the conditions would be right, soon, however long that took. And hey presto the window of opportunity opened last weekend. I'm so enjoying playing with t...

This embroidery is growing like weeds! I have found so much inspiration from the wonderful Embroidery Workshops book . Along with the book my Ma had gifted me this flowery fat quarter, three exquisite skeins of thread and notions. When I opened it on Christmas Day I had everything to hand but I wasn't quite sure what to start as I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it. So when I read the advice from the final chapter to "..please remember: Along the road of making things, it can be freeing not to worry too much about the end result." it was exactly the permission I needed. It freed my simple brain from the old trap of trying to get to the end before I've even started.  I'm still not sure how I'll use or display this work but it has given me such enormous pleasure this month to just doodle on these flowers, simply stitching what I feel like stitching. With the gentle pull of the thread, I can get in to that peacefully present place, beyond ...

These holidays with their sparkle and bustle are quite the distraction. In years past I used to associate this time with the pinnacle of winter, as if  I were saying "shortest day done, mince pies eaten, new year rung in, righty ho lets have at this spring business then". January and February dragging on drearily with the dark and cold were quite the anticlimax and time for restless blues. Then we had a proper snowfall one January and I had to actually slow down to something like the right pace for me, it was a revelation, January and I could actually be friends. Now these approaching quiet months seem like so much more the point to me and my traditional mid-December funk at being caught up in doing too much makes perfect sense. This is my big rest time, a natural lull in the cycle of the year. I think I must have been a hedgehog in a former life. The idea of lining my house with leaves in autumn, battening down the hatches,  emerging blinking somewhere towards the end o...

As the Balsamic Moon wanes to vanishing point and the New Moon waits in the darkness I have been reflecting, not just on this lunar phase, but on this solar cycle. This is the twelfth lunation for which I have been following the Lunar Abundance practice . The overarching goal for this past year was to build a sense of trust in myself: to show up, to take care of myself with as much compassion as I could gather. I have deepened into this relationship enormously. I have found a reliability in myself that has often been there for others but gone missing at vital moments when it would have saved me a harder lesson. The gratitude for this alone is heart expanding but, of course, there is more. There is always more if we allow it. At times like these, when words seem clumsy and inadequate in my hands, I am so grateful for the eloquence of others.  Mary captures this hummingbird for me. When I held a little honouring ceremony earlier this evening, sat on the earth, branches overhea...

"If we stop long enough to create a quiet emotional clearing, the truth of our lives will inevitably catch up with us." Brené Brown - The Gifts of Imperfection I read those words a couple of weeks ago now and it was one of those beautiful moments in life when your mind and body understand something together. There was a deep exhale and a huge sense of gratitude and relief that not only had I found another person out there who really gets it and is eloquent enough to express it but praise be - the crowning glory - she's written a guidebook to aid me on the next stage of my voyage, sailing through the swamp. As much as I have worked on letting go of 'why? ' it's a relief to have someone validate why things have been the way they have for the last 18 months, why that hasn't looked or felt anything like I imagined it might , why moving out of survivial mode has been hesitant , full of ups and downs , fumbles and stumbles . If you're running from y...

Anyone who watched the last few days of Wimbledon will have got the memo, we've decided we're having an actual British summer this year. A very special summer with a British Wimbledon champion (though don't tell anyone Djokovic is my fav or that I missed the final as I had to be outside. Truly I had to be. This weather just demands it!).  We were camping with family in the Welsh borders where many of these pictures were taken. Knitting came too, the crafting is still happening even if a true summer may lead to more moments of handwork just being held as sunshine is absorbed. Reduced productivity can happily be swapped for freckles. I also found a post from P osie Gets Cozy about summer reads and kicked off my summer reading trail, well more like my 2013 reading trail as I seem barely to have picked up a novel all year. If you haven't read  A Matter of Feeling by Janine Boissard ,  and if a French Little Women-esque ...

Having seen a couple of blog reviews of the new book from  Caroline Zoob  I had to have a copy, and it arrived this afternoon. One brief peek inside so far and I am sooo excited to do some more embroidery suddenly. Look at that one little snippet I had the patience to photograph for you, just so enticing to me! This chrysanthemum is not a project from the book, it is something that had been lingering unfinished after a fit of enthusiasm earlier in the year.  There was a wonderful exhibition of Japanese embroideries at the Ashmolean back in January which induced me to buy a  simple Anchor kit  in the gift shop. I had to finish it last night so I could have the hoop for whatever this book inspired me to start on next! I'm going to go and make a gin and tonic and settle in for a Friday night of embroidery, may your weekends be equally full of such daring pursuits!

It's definitely back. And all the sweeter for not having been chased after by deadlines or should dos. The creative pull is strong again. The camera is close to hand for colours and shapes and just everyday sofa moments. The mitten and a stripey garter scarf that I'd forgotten I'd even started have kept my fingers, my mind, busy this past week. Senses stimulated the real proof has been the itch of new starty wants. New yarn bought. A new project to start just as soon as I've stopped typi...

This weekend I actually knit something for the first time since early July. I'd say it was the influence of autumn creeping in with her shorter evenings and darker days but summer is still having her say with these past two days being about the hottest of the year. Since I taught myself to knit back in 2006 I haven't gone so long without picking up the needles. It's been a busy summer for work travels, Canada followed straight on from Italy and then east and west coast US at the start of this month. My trusty mitten came along but the impetus to knit just wasn't there. Missing that magic of inspiration which drifted off sometime this spring . I've just let it drift, not sure whether to try chase it and if I did how I would ever catch it. I've read books in the quiet times and been more sociable than I have for a long time. A different summer, no doubt a good thing. Though, I've missed my creative pursuits. I've not felt part of the blog world and have ...

Since I started this blog back in 2006 I've managed at least a post every single month and yet we're fast closing in on the end of May and I've said nothing. So quiet here and so quiet on the crafting front. I hope it is a good quiet. I'm getting a sense of resting. I've started the perfect knitting project for this quiet. A garter stitch scarf. Vertically striped which I find particularly aesthetically pleasing. At the moment it is just quietly pleasing to knit. And knit. And knit on those long rows. Simple stitches soothing my brain, ironing out the kinks rather than challenging it. This is a strangely long fallow period for me but I'm just going with it on  the whole though I had to fight it just to get here at least once this month and say Hi! I thought you'd like a pretty flower to brighten up your day if you stop by instead of a rainy window. So sunny now though I thought those April rains would swallow the whole of May. I know I'm an absent comm...

The one stitch approach has definitely helped. A half row here and a few stitches there and I managed more than one stitch every day this week. Past history suggests the best thing I could do is cast on a new super simple project but I can't even muster the enthusiasm for that. Casting around for inspiration this new online magazine Clotheshorse caught my eye. A fun concept though I haven't found the magic bullet here. Maybe I just need to heed the weather, realise it's time to put my paws up, continue the Prison Break-athon  inspired by a Netflix free trial and maybe I'll add a little hand sewing on the slowest dress to the slow knitting. My crafting speed definitely suggests I should get on board with my commitment to the slow movement .

I've been waiting and watching for weeks as ole plummy has been promising to burst forth with clouds of white loveliness and today I am wondering it I can call it peak blossoming time. Last Saturday I found the first open bloom and all week drawing back the curtain has revealed soft sunrises behind an ever increasing curtain of flowers. Possibly the height of blossomyness was yesterday as a few petals started to fall by the evening but there are still so many buds waiting to open so maybe today we will reach the moment of maximum fullness. Every year I am overjoyed by this wonder right outside my bedroom window. I just want to make myself a nest right in the middle of all that prettiness.