Craft as Therapy

Yesterday was a day dedicated to saying goodbye to a dear family friend. Someone who "loved life and life loved back". A wonderful man who was taken from his family unnecessarily early.

It has prompted me to want to share this article about how arts, crafts and creativity can help during the grieving process.  

Recover from Grief

Today I will mostly be spinning through my feelings x

Progress report...

Four skeins of freshly spun and plied alpaca fleece. Each one from the bags of fluffiness I received just over a week ago.

What these need now is a good long soak to clean off the dust and debris and they will be transformed.   When that's been done, I shall be making something special for the owner of the alpacas.

But timing is everything. Our lives on a narrowboat are generally dictated by how much water we have (our boat teen will sometimes run the tap for a bit longer than really necessary as a passive aggressive act of protest).

It's been two weeks since we last filled up and we are definitely getting low (the boat sits higher in the water and our pump starts to make a distinctive flapping noise). 

The yarn bath  is not considered a VITAL use of a precious and diminishing supply (some may disagree) so for now is going to have to wait. We can't boat move today as Storm Brian is blowing a hooligan through the valley. I shall exercise some patience.  

 Until then I shall carry on with this...

Blended alpaca.

There's always something of a woolly nature to keep me occupied :-)

Coming up...it's half term week so I'm looking forward to a week of spinning, chilling and pottering about on NB Mercy. By this time next week I will have hosted another Woollycraft Heal Yourself with Wool workshop. So looking forward to introding more lovely people to the wonder of wool .

TTFN x x x 

Confession...

Ok so I have a confession to make...

Yesterday I was gifted 4 (Yes FOUR) sacks of the most fluffiest loveliness. Each sack was a different coloured fleece of those most magical creatures...Alpacas.

What can I say..it was like birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. All that stood between me and those bags was Wednesday night bath night and a half day of work this morning.

And then? I was very bad. I did the barest minimum of supermarket shopping and went straight home to card... 

...and card...

...and card...

..and card...

  I forgot to buy the 'special cakes' for tea, I'd left washing in the car and 

I now have a fine layer of alpaca fleece and dust over our main living quarters...

My poor poor family and what they must endure...what I SHOULD have been doing was reminding people about my next craft session at Westwood Parish rooms...looking into funding opportunities and researching the benefits of crafting and mindfullness...instead I was just making a dusty and fluffy old mess.

My afternoon of dedication to my craft has resulted in two batts of every fleece sitting next to my wheel waiting to be spun...

Temptation

Final edit: some fluff MAY have ended up in the pizza...there I said it...I think I'll get away with it. The main victims tend not to read my blog. Please don't tell.

Coming up....a LOT more alpaca...I'm buzzing with all the things it will become :-)

TTFN x 

Feeling the Feels

We had a very poignant moment at school today. The class teacher, a beautifully soft and sensitive lady, talked about the difficult feeling of jealousy after a playground incident.

I was listening from the back of the classroom and heard her say to a little girl " I wonder if you were perhaps feeling jealous"...this was then followed by a cracking and then a sob. She'd hit the nail on the head. What then followed was a time of understanding and healing for ALL the children.

It struck me how important it is to name emotions for children and sadly how infrequently it happens, especially as the pressure in school to get 'results' and 'make progress' seems to be increasing year on year. I really appreciate the time our teacher takes to deal with feelings throughout the day.

My feelings seem to be very close to the surface today, as I noticed this morning when helping my daughter  analyse a Philip Larkin poem on the way to school!! And this leads me onto crafting and how it helps so much.

When feelings threaten to overwhelm us we can either swallow them, bury them, mask them or....feel them.  I find a bit of wool work is very soothing and often the best way to help me through the feeling bit. I remember going through a particularly painful bereavement some years ago and a simple task of carding white alpaca fluff was incredibly soothing. It was a gentle, repetitive task that had a slightly rocking motion that really helped ease the pain.

I'm feeling some pretty big feels today...thank goodness I have plenty of fluff to see me through.  Autumn...such a melancholic season...

I really will update on some projects soon.

Take care x

Mercy in Autumn

Just a little update...

Obviously astrology is fake but as a rather typical Libran I do prefer a life of  balance and harmony...

I am by now well used to the ebb and flow of life and it certainly does make for one quite interesting but by last Friday evening the seesaw of life was definitely weighing heavily on the 'Not So Great'

I was finding myself coming down with a snotty cold just prior to my Heal Yourself with Wool workshop (rather ironically ) and then topped that off with dropping my precious phone, holder of memories and dates of more to come, into the canal. It bought about the full range of shock responses!! I was trying to take a pic for Instagram...fallen leaves piling up on my gunnels, the soft Autumn light dappled through the trees...the plop of my phone bouncing off the concrete and into the canal ...

Universe: 'Err...how about just enjoying that moment....rather than trying to capture it' .... hmmmmmmm

But luckily... both these unfortunate events were more than balanced out by a wonderful morning introducing some lovely ladies to the joy of wool.  It was so inspiring that not only did I have to go home and card wool (much like when you see someone eating cheese on toast and just have to have some ) I immediately set about booking the Parish Rooms for another session.

So that's it. Heal Yourself with Wool is a thing and it's happening more than once!  I'm really hoping this will become regular event and feeling very excited about it all.

Saturday, 28th October..lots more info to come.

But now I REALLY must do some crochet...this simple blog post has taken two evenings to complete (due to my slight ineptitude with technology probably)  

Obviously I didn't have a phone to take any photo's but these are a few shots captured by others.

I hope I have taken heed of the Universe's message to enjoy the beautiful moments nature gives us rather than immediately thinking I should capture the image to share with the world.

I lasted 36 hours without a phone though :-D

TTFN xx