What’s the Time?

This week’s Sketch Tuesday assignment was to draw something that tells the time.  Waif and his Dad both went for good old-fashioned analogue devices:

Gman’s clock also shows the temperature:

I haven’t worn a watch in years, and use my mobile phone to tell the time, if I really need to know:

And yes, my phone really is that basic. No iPhone or BlackBerry for me. Call me a Luddite, but I have no burning desire to join the ranks of the frantically hyperconnected. In fact, I am reading Richard Watson’s book “Future Minds” at the moment and kind of agree when he asserts that:

We think cellphones are connecting us, but they are turning us into a society of rude, impatient, narrow-minded, stressed-out, aggressive and isolated individuals.

Yes, mobile technology is useful, but I don’t think 24/7 connection is a good idea. Where is the time and space to think and reflect and to, well, just be sometimes?

A Doll, Unhurried

Fleur is taking shape, and getting ready to face the world.

I am trying not to rush her along, but to savour the process.

I am trying not to “busy” my own life away, but to savour the process and enjoy the moments.

For me, sewing and craft is not about the finished object, but about loving the process. Hence I am trying not to pressure myself to finish things. “Must finish this, so I can share it on my blog”. No siree.

In the spirit of this, I am happy to share the process. To share the baby steps along the way. What’s the hurry? Why the pressure?

Slowly, slowly. Enjoying the process.

Happy Birthday Blog!

Another birthday! This time, not mine, but this blog’s. Yep, it’s a year today since I started blogging here at Live.Grow.Nourish.Create.

I have broken the cardinal rule of blogging – to stick to one topic – and have rambled away randomly, from drawing to menstruation; from sewing to climate change; from reading to nutrition. Ah, well, someone must be reading, because I seem to have amassed over 200 followers, 14,000 page views and 1,300 comments. And even better, I have made some lovely blogging friends along the way .

Thank you to all who contributed to making blogging a fun and enriching experience this year. Here’s to the next one!

ps/ the font I used to write the birthday message is from The Scrapbooker’s Handwriting Workshop and is somewhat fittingly called “misfit”. Just thought you should know

Facebook Schmacebook and Other Thoughts on the Year Ahead

This week, looking ahead to 2013, I have decided to deactivate my Facebook account. Is my life really enriched by knowing that an old classmate is having steak for dinner? Or my sister in law has a pile of ironing to do? Or by hearing my cousin’s offensive political opinions? I think not.

When I first signed up to Facebook, it seemed a fun way to keep up with those friends and family members that I didn’t get to see often. Then there was the novelty of seeing how former classmates had “turned out”. Over the last year or so, when I have been trying to pare down and simplify my life in many ways, it has become increasingly apparent that Facebook is not such fun. It has become, for me at least, a compulsive and yet irritating presence. Yes, I have had some wobbles (a Fear of Missing Out, as Leo Babuta might put it) but in deactivating my account, I feel that I have opened up a new space in my life. Facebook – I don’t need you!

Other internet sites and habits have been more of a support and inspiration this year though. I have really enjoyed being part of the Everyday Matters group, joining in with Daisy Yellow’s ICAD Challenge in the summer, and more recently signing up to the Love What You Wear project.

But one of the things I have been most proud of this year was overcoming my party-phobia to invite friends and neighbours round for a stitch-in as we took part in the Craftivist Jigsaw Project. Online groups certainly have a place, but sometimes you need to connect with people right where you are. And giving a thought to what the future world might need to look like, this community level involvement will become more important than over. So, for 2013, I would like to devote the time and headspace freed up by releasing myself from Facebook to make deeper connections with local friends and neighbours. Just call me an old-fashioned girl.

Learning to Live on Eaarth

Have you ever read a book that affects you so deeply that your life for ever more will be separated into “before” and “after” reading said book? For me, eaarth is such a book.

I am certainly no climate change sceptic and some would consider our family to be quite “green” – we recycle and compost; we don’t take foreign holidays; we cycle and use public transport as much as possible; we eat organic food…

However, until reading McKibben’s book, I don’t think I had fully appreciated the scariness of the predicament that we humans have placed this planet in. McKibben gives example after example after example of the effects of global warming. And these are not predicted effects. These are things that are happening RIGHT NOW. This is not a problem just for our grandchildren. This is not even a problem just for our children. This is our problem. Now. Right now. As McKibben puts it:

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists.

Although the first half of the book was seriously terrifying (it quite literally gave me nightmares), McKibben does go on to talk about solutions for the future and there is hope BUT only if we radically change things. A few green tweaks here and there are not enough. We need to do some serious scaling down. In McKibben’s words:

The project we’re now undertaking – maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm – requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about towns, about neighbourhoods, about blocks. Big was dynamic; when the project was growth, we could stand the side effects. But now the side effects of that size – climate change, for instance – are sapping us. We need to scale back, to go to ground. We need to take what wealth we have left and figure out how we’re going to use it, not to spin the wheel one more time but to slow the wheel down. We need to choose safety instead of risk, and we need to do it quickly, even at the sacrifice of growth. We need, as it were, to trade in the big house for something that suits our circumstances on this new Eaarth. We need to feel our vulnerabilities. It’s not just people in poor nations who are exposed to the elements now, but all of us. We’ve got to make our societies safer, and that means making them smaller. It means, since we live on a different planet, a different kind of civilization.

From a personal point of view, this has triggered some serious thinking about how I can prepare for this future, and as a home-educating parent, how I can help prepare my children for this new Eaarth. I strongly believe that compassion and kindness will become more important than ever. But I also think that we need to become more self-reliant and resilient. The skills for life on Eaarth are probably quite different to those emphasised in our current educational model. I believe that we need more practical skills. I undertake to help our family to learn skills like:

• growing and cooking our own food
• mending and making our own clothes
• basic property maintenance
• holistic health care

Our throw-away, consumer, growth-driven way of life must end soon. These forgotten skills (that would have been second nature to our forefathers & mothers) are in serious need of renewal. What better place to start than right here, right now?

How will you prepare for life on Eaarth?

Getting Ready to Buy Nothing

I’ve stitched up this little piece in preparation for Buy Nothing Day on 24th November 2012.

Not sure what I will do with it yet though! A card? Bunting? Banner? Purse?

If you are in the US, buy nothing on 23rd November.

Cutting & Sticking & Drawing with Thread

I’ve been playing around with collage & experimenting with drawing with my sewing machine:

If I was a *proper* crafty blogger, I would have step by step photos of what I did! But I’m not, so I’ll just have to tell you. I started off with an A4-ish sized piece of white muslin and, using a diluted PVA glue mixture, stuck down various bits and pieces. There’s velvet, scrim, threads, book pages, a cake wrapper and some of the momigami paper I made the other day. Once this had dried for 24 hours, I took it over to my sewing machine & after separating sections off with lines of straight stitches, I practiced a bit of drawing with thread, using free motion stitching. It was kind of random and uplanned . Once I had finished “drawing” I cut the collage into the four individual pieces. I clearly need a lot more practice at the thread drawing, but it was fun.

If you’re wondering why the bottom one says “empty your cup” – it’s a reference to this Zen story:

A Cup of Tea
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Sometimes, we need to empty our cups before we can learn something new. I like to remind myself sometimes!

Linking up to the Show Me What You Got Art Linkup.

What do I see?

This week, I picked up a copy of Bert Dodson’s “Keys to Drawing” from the library. From what I’ve read so far, it could equally be “Keys to Life”! I copied this quote from the first chapter into the front of my journal:

Our goal in drawing from observations is to capture the richness and variety of visual experience. We should draw, for the time being at least, as if we know nothing, and were obedient only to what our eye tells us to draw. This is the key to natural, life-like drawing

He talks about the conflict between seeing versus “knowing” – so the temptation is to draw not what you are actually seeing, but what you think it ought to look like – a tree, a hand, an apple. To me, this conflict isn’t just something that applies to drawing. For instance, how often do we really see somebody? We say “I see you…your’re a policeman/ a small child/ a homeless person/ my sister/ a teacher/ fill in the blank”…and sometimes the label we apply, this knowledge, is what prevents us from really seeing the other person.

In “Keys to Drawing”, Dodson says of the drawing process:

The one simple rule to follow is: at each point of frustration or confusion, ask yourself, “What do I see?”

Not what do I think I see. Not what do I know I see. But – what do I see? I think I might make myself some reminder cards to carry around with me, with WHAT DO I SEE? writ large. What do you think?

Anyway, enough of the philosophising, on with the drawing. I tackled the first two exercises in the book. Project 1-A was to make a drawing of your own crossed feet:

And Project 1-B to make a drawing of your own hand from the unusual end-view of the fingertips:

I was quite inspired by this last exercise, and think I might tackle drawing some other stuff from unusual viewpoints.

So, that was me getting my art on on day 13!

Quiet Please! Introvert at Work

I would rather go to the library than to a nightclub.
I would rather stroll through the woods than the city.
I like books better than movies.
I like home cooking better than meals out.
I prefer emails to phone calls (and letters are even better).
I work better alone than as part of a team (though I may not put this on my resume).
I value my friends and family but I need plenty of time to myself too.
My idea of hell on earth would probably look a little like Disneyland.

My name is Viv and I am an introvert.

When I read Daily Prompt #57 One Word Journal Page I knew straight away what my word would be. I am reading Susan Cain’s book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” and it is both a revelation and a comfort. It seems that there is evidence supporting what I have always thought – open plan offices are an abomination, team brainstorming doesn’t work, not all good leaders are extroverts and most creative ideas happen in solitude . I’m not sure the cult of the extrovert is at quite the same level in this country as it is in the United States, where Susan Cain is based (there is still some room for the traditional British reserve), but I think we are increasingly headed that way, and I’m not sure that is a good thing. So this “quiet” page is my ode to introverts. There are plenty of us about and we have lots to contribute. Just don’t shout about it!

Creativity, Inspiration and Castle Walls

So, a little time away from blogging and away from the computer has had me thinking – about creativity, inspiration and about the fear of missing out.

I am way too prone to obsessively reading blogs, subscribing to feeds, checking websites – all in the name of “looking for inspiration”. Is it inspiration I am looking for, though, really? Or is it fear that I am missing something? Missing an amazing new technique, the perfect quilt pattern, a review of a book that will revolutionise my art, my outlook, my life?

In reality, even if I lived for a hundred years and quilted 10 hours a day, I could never make all those quilts I have looked at and thought “I’d like to make that”.

If I lived for a hundred years and read for 10 hours a day, I could never hope to get through all the books I would like to read “one day”.

If I spent 10 hours a day surfing the net for the rest of my life, I might still miss out on hearing about some inspirational project or technique that I would doubtless love to try. And I would never have time to try any of them.

I was reading Andria’s blog and she wrote about some instructions for an online course that advised her to turn off the computer, close the magazines and look to her own life for drawing inspiration. Isn’t that just the best advice? Sometimes because we are frantically looking to find those inspirational pictures, posts and tutorials, we miss the beauty of what’s right under our noses. Like, oh I don’t know, the patterns of bricks on some castle walls:

I am not saying that we can’t find inspiration for art or indeed for life from reading others’ blogs, looking at pictures of other people’s work, or perusing magazines. But it needn’t be the only way to get inspired. Sometimes we find the inspiration we need by just taking a break, stopping to notice the beauty in the everyday things that surround us.

So, although like many, I struggle with the Fear of Missing Out (check out Zen Habits great post on this) I am going to make an effort to rein in my impulse to click, click, click around the internet and instead devote my time online to keeping up with those bloggers with whom I have made a genuine connection; and limiting my inspiration-trawling to a few trusted sites that I know and love. No doubt, I will miss out on the occasional amazing quilt, technique or insight, but I will have freed up headspace for nurturing my own creativity and inspiration. It’s got to be worth the risk.