Just a quickie while I'm still in a good mood...
Lovely nature pics from a freebie site. Wish I could say I took them but I didn't. This is pure, gratuitous nature porn. Mmmmmmmm... yummy!
Just a quickie while I'm still in a good mood...
Lovely nature pics from a freebie site. Wish I could say I took them but I didn't. This is pure, gratuitous nature porn. Mmmmmmmm... yummy!
30/06/2008 at 09:06 AM in Photography, The wheel of the year | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well, so the saying goes.
I have been reading my favourite book Sloe Gin and Beeswax again. I'm feeling more inspired. The problem I identified in my ranty post from last week is the sense of a lack of time. There is no pleasure to be had from rushing through a job with your mind on other things; rather the joy of making things for yourself comes from mindfulness.
Mindfulness can come in many guises, I am learning. There is focus on the task at hand, which clears the mind and feeds the soul. There is awareness of the materials you are using also; gathered or homegrown ingredients have their own special energy. Also, and this is what I think I was missing out on, is the anticipation of sharing that energy and satisfaction with others.
I have a fear that what I make is not good enough to share. What if my cordial goes mouldy? What if my biscuits go stale? What if the fabric I used wasn't special enough? These things stop me from freely sharing the things I make, and give me a stick to beat myself with when I feel selfish for not sharing.
So here's a recipe for shortbread. When I've got through this batch and I'm happy that they're not going to go rotten overnight and kill people, maybe I'll make you a batch...
Shortbread
Makes 10-12 fingers
125g/4oz butter
55g/2oz caster sugar
180g/6oz plain flour
Cream together the butter and sugar until they turn pale. Stir in the flour to make a very soft dough. Knead as little as possible - just gather the bits together and squish once into a mass. Roll out to 1cm thick and cut into fingers. Prick with a fork and sprinkle with a little extra caster sugar. Place on a baking sheet and put in the fridge for 20 mins.
Once chilled and firm, put the fingers in the oven at 190C for about 15 mins until pale golden (you might want to turn the tray once just to get a more even colour and prevent one edge burning). Cool on a wire rack.
Thank you BBC Food for this one.
25/06/2008 at 01:12 PM in The wheel of the year, Visit the stillroom | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I can hardly believe that next Saturday is the Summer Solstice. Where has the year gone? I don't mean that in an absent-minded way; I really want to know. It seems as if five and a half months have passed in the blink of an eye.
I am enjoying my life on the whole, but sometimes in the last few weeks I have felt that I am running downhill with the wind behind me and my legs can barely keep up.
My body certainly can't. I'm just not fit enough to work hard and play hard anymore. I'm exhausted. I feel bone-weary. My creative juices have almost dried up, and I feel like the only way to get them flowing again is to... actually, I don't know how to get them flowing again. A change of job? A change of living environment? All of the above requires effort and energy.
What I am managing to do at the moment is to brew. Not the full-blown, creative pottering, but micro-brewing. Snatching a session here or there, but not really getting much more out of it than a sense of continuity.
The Midsummer Night's Dream soap in the picture sums this up. It's pretty, but it lacks substance. It ticks all the right boxes - herbal, seasonal, original (to an extent) - but its research credentials are lacking. What have I learned from making this soap? How has it deepened my connection to this sabbat? The answer: it hasn't.
The reason I started making sabbat soaps was to distill something of the season into each bar. What Bex and I make are soaps with intent - it should be possible to actually feel something of my intent in the soap. It has been suggested to me (by someone important to me we shall call "R"), that since I alternate sabbats with Bex, I should spend a full three months researching each new recipe.
What a beautiful luxury that would be.
But I feel at the moment that I don't have the creative space. That's not to say that I want to become a recluse and to spend my days alone thinking only of soap - far from it. What I want is the headspace to come up with new ideas, and the free time to research and experiment. In the past this space was part of my day job. Lately however, my working day is crammed full of work (how dare they!) and my evenings and weekends are crammed full of feeling and experiencing rather than thinking or pondering.
Do I want anything to change? Well maybe not right now. I wouldn't want to swap the experiences for creative solitude. I like the experiences and the company too much. I think what I want to change is the working day. I feel like I am working myself into the ground in a job I no longer love and it is sapping my physical strength and mental reserves. I want a job that is intellectually challenging (and not just because I am thinking of ways to reinvent the wheel), one that gets me off my chair and away from my desk, and one that values space for thought.
So where do I find one of those?
***
And my micro-brewing (recipe slave that I have become!)
(l to r) Sloe gin, orange syrup, mint liquid soap (quite exciting to make but a boring creative choice for colour and scent) and elderflower cordial.
Hand-stitched bags. No purpose in mind, but it was at least fun to vary the designs (drawstring vs self-tie).
(below) Tansy dyed silks. Again exciting to make but without a purpose in mind it becomes mechanical.
16/06/2008 at 06:31 PM in Crafts, The wheel of the year, Visit the stillroom, What's in the soap pot? | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
*breathe in*.....*breathe out*
Ahhhhhhh.
After my Janet and John-style post on the merits of woodcarving, I feel the need to stop, take a breath, and rediscover why I blog. Having spent a glorious (pain-free) morning pottering around the house I have the headspace to write. My wrists are beginning to twinge already, but we'll see how far I can get.
I have noticed that my ability to write improves immeasurably when I have the time to sit comfortably and contemplate my navel for a while before hitting the keyboard. Now, I feel that after a stressful week that seemed never to end, it is important to stop and find my balance before I head into battle once more.
So far, May has been a busy month. It started with a back-to-basics camping trip that saw me rediscovering my inner survivalist and was followed by work, pain, and a heavy dose of the life laundry. Today, I have decided to put all of that out of my mind and get on with making time for those things that are healing for my soul.
With Beltane just behind us, there is a feeling of coming abundance - of warm days and time to be spent with friends - and in a way I spent today preparing for a party even if there is nobody coming round to enjoy it. I have made molasses gingerbread with fresh ginger, there are heart-shaped fruit juice lollies in the freezer, and I have just decanted the sloe gin from its preserving jar into its permanent home.
It's a delicious feeling, and I want to take the time to savour it, and to record it here. I get such pleasure from my Nigella mixing bowls (seconds but who cares) and the wide-necked le Parfait jars with their orange rubber rings. Is this materialism, or is this enjoying simplicity?
My plan for this afternoon is to use the spent sloes to make sloejacks, and maybe save the stones to make a heat pad with a remnant of fabric from my stash (something else I love to hoard). Three useful things from one simple fruit, and a connection to a passing season is medicine for my soul.
11/05/2008 at 05:05 PM in Crafts, Religion, The wheel of the year, Visit the stillroom | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I have a new toy - it is a crook knife. These curved knives are used for scooping out hollows in wooden items like spoons, bowls and cups. I'm currently trying my hand at making a birch cup. These are traditionally called Kuksa and are used by the Sami people of Scandinavia. They're also normally made from birch burl, which has less tendency to crack than a birch log but I'm using what I've got. Townies like me don't often get the chance to wield an axe and chop up our own kitchenware, so I shouldn't be choosy!
I'd like to write something about the joys of working with your hands to make something useful, or the meditative quality of gradually scraping away the layers of wood to reveal a pleasing bowl shape, but my hands hurt from too much copying and pasting in my day job and my brain is fatigued from staring at a computer screen... so there's your answer right there. Time to get out more and enjoy life - my desk job is killing me!
11/05/2008 at 04:06 PM in Crafts, Hedgewitches' abroad!, The wheel of the year | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Spinners and knitters in the US are reminding each other this week that it is nesting time and they need to put out their fibre scraps for the birds. There's something lovely in the idea of providing a little wire feeder filled with silk and wool next to the boring old red peanuts.
I think I might try it with some of my scraps and then look for multicoloured nests in my neighbourhood next month!
Oh, and Mars is now in Cancer until May, so it seems an appropriate time all round to be nesting. Sweet.
06/03/2008 at 11:59 AM in Crafts, Spinning, The wheel of the year | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Oh yes. Unadulterated woolly goodness.
The nostepinde was an unfinished wooden one that I stained and oiled as part of the general productivity binge. All of the rovings came from here. When I grow up I really want to be as good as Heike. She's incredible.
03/02/2008 at 03:04 PM in Spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Unspun. Raw. Fibre in its natural state with all the nepps and burrs and tangles from the adventures of its ovine owner.
Unspun. A blog. Thoughts and opinions in their natural state with all the raw edges and harsh emotion of a woman who lives with her heart.
Imbolc is a time for spinning. It is also a time for reflection and introspection. Traditionally, women would gather on Candlemas Eve and tell tales of childbirth around a Bridie doll in the ashes of the hearth. In the morning when they woke they would examine the ashes and the footprints of mice and augur their fate for the coming year. The fertility of the land, of their bellies. Imbolc, or Omeilc, meaning literally "in the belly" and the festival of ewe's milk.
Who is to say they didn't spin at these gatherings? A woman's hands were rarely empty. Brigid, the Celtic goddess associated with this festival is a goddess of spinning, of poetry and storytelling.
In my own celebration of this time of year I look to these crafts within me. I look at my productivity (I now have a basket filled with skeins of my handspun yarn) and I look within myself too. Brigid tells us to "untangle the threads of our Fate, be a weaver of tales tall and true". It is no accident that the Fates were weavers, who cut and measured the threads of a life. Or that the Celtic imagining of these women was visceral - a loom warped with human entrails, and a skull for a shuttle. Weaving the threads of life from the detritus of death.
The last 18 months have been a continuing journey for me, to experience and understand the spiritual side of spinning. My teenage years were raw and unspun. My emotions vivid, harsh, and animal. Inga still captures the essence of my youth, speaking of a time of riot grrrls and handprinted zines. But my life has moved on. I have mellowed, at last, (at least partly), today my loom would be warped with silk, and my shuttle made from bone. Is it the spinning that is changing me?
I am gradually weaving the bright threads of my life.
30/01/2008 at 02:04 PM in ::My favourite posts::, Personal, Religion, Spinning | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I wasn't going to write more now, but checking to see if my last post displayed properly I happened to click on the "soap" category. I got a shock. Firstly I was shocked by how few posts there are in here, and secondly how angry they sound. My immediate feeling was to recategorise them - to remove the ones not entirely about soap and to hide the rants among the morasse of uncategorised material on my blog. But I made a deal with myself at the start not to re-write history, so I can't start doing so now.
Instead, I realised that what I have in my soap category is an analysis of a misspent soaping year. Compared to Bex, whose loft groans under the weight of her soap hump, my output for 2007 has been paltry. A few "mega-batches" from the occasional soap binge during the reign of the voodoo queen, and one or two quite frankly generic batches from the second half of the year when the risk of being chatted to mid-pour made me shy away from anything too involved or any soap that required focussed magical intent.
It has been a furtive, angry year of soap.
By contrast, my first batch of soap in 2008 has a smooth two-colour swirl. I soaped at 25 degrees, taking my time to let the oils cool and to blend the ultramarines thoroughly with the traced soap. There was no chatting, just a passing interested query: "what are you making?" as a disembodied voice disappeared up the stairs. It was very zen, and I don't think that has to do with the recipe, even if it was meditation soap that I was making.
I had thought that I didn't want to make another batch of two-finger soap right now because I didn't want to upset any good thing I have going in my life at this point, but maybe I should. Maybe I should make a batch so that I can make a clean break and put a bad soaping year behind me.
16/01/2008 at 03:57 PM in What's in the soap pot? | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I am feeling under par today, so bear with me. I think the crap explosion that was my procrastocrafting weekend has worn me out, and my evening of cutting and photographing soap on Monday night finished me off. I may have a lurgy.
Nevertheless, behold my productivity! In all its soapy glory.
We have (clockwise from top) lavender tea rounds, rosehip and ginger, meditation soap and a felted flower. The teapot just got in the way and it looks sort of domesticated so I let it stay.
I had hoped to write something intelligent and perhaps mildly funny about the title of this post and how it came to be, but I think I'm about to slide off my chair and into oblivion.
Meditation soap - caution may cause you to fall headlong into your navel never to return.
16/01/2008 at 03:02 PM in Crafts, What's in the soap pot? | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Recent Comments