Art, craft and vision boards

Oh how I wish I was good at art! I have been thinking about this muchly this week. Firstly I am in touch with an old school friend again through the wonderful world of Facebook and how I always envied her talent when we were at school together... guess what? She hasn't lost it! You can check out her portraits and landscapes on her Facebook page at SAS Art and Design. I have another good friend who was always so whacky with her art and how I loved it! She hasn't got a FB page but I am about to message her to tell her to get one!
Anyway, I am not good at art. I am hugely creative and wildly expressive and mostly quite over the top in my approach to art.

I love doing crafts of all sorts and a particular favourite at the moment is polymer clay. But I have to be honest I am pretty hopeless at all of it. Now in the past this has quite put me off. Doing something not very well or even badly is quite hard for most of us. We are very critical of ourselves and often expect far too much.

I had a major breakthrough with the craft side of things when I discovered card making and then polymer clay. Sadly, no talent for either... I live in hope.... but oh how I love doing them. I came to accept that enjoying the time and immersing myself in the craft and loving the space I was in at that time was a good enough reason to do it. The end result is really not important. I don't fool myself by thinking that what I have produced is in any way good in comparison to the people I know who are so talented but I can look at it and like it and feel almost proud of it. I enjoyed creating it and therefore I love it in the way only a 'parent' can, with all it's faults!!

I therefore without shame of the pretentiousness of it. Obtained a few years ago a huge 12' x 12' summerhouse and have allowed it to be a creative space (every now and then it manages to accumulate all the junk and needs to be saved). I have all the craft 'junk' a person could want,  beads and stencils and card making and polymer clay. Everything needed to express myself in an arty kind of way.

I have been reading a book lately called The Vision Board by Joyce Schwarz. A lovely book that explains this wonderful way of manifesting your future through the creative expression and creation of a vision board. By spending your time sitting and making something that says 'how you feel' or 'what you want for yourself' or maybe even 'what you expect from yourself' it does help to find a focus and when we have focus we are much more able to achieve.

View from the summer house

I have long been into The Secret and all forms of the law of attraction, namely that what we 'put out there' into the universe is what we will get back into our lives. It seems such a simple concept to me. We all know that if we go out smiling into our day that we generally have a better day, as everyone responds to us in a certain way. A bad day will often get worse because of the doom and gloom that we are carrying around with us. It seems to me that creation of a vision board is a wonderful combination of my love of craft, my love of life and my belief in manifesting.

Here are some pictures of my first vision board. I am not sure I can explain what every part of it means because it might get rather personal, but you are free to make wild guesses. But I wanted it to say partly who I am now, partly what I want for my future and partly how I aim to get there. I will be making more vision boards and using them to help me focus on different aspects of my life and the goals and challenges that I set myself.

Also decided to have a Vision Board Party and invite friends into my summer house for an evening of crafting fun. I have had a craft party before and I think it surprised people who have long given up on playing with clay and sticking things, how much they really got into it. Put it this way, I have never known five women together be so focused and SILENT!

(Yes, I know muchly isn't a word, but it should be!)

Raw Food Lunch

Had an amazing day today teaching Reiki II. Two lovely people who I am lucky enough to have come across in my life and who have remained friends. They did not know each other but I felt very much that they would sit well together on their journey with reiki. They are both very intelligent and completely scatty at the same time. But this entry is not about reiki it is about raw food! I prepared a raw food lunch for us using some recipies from a course that I went on way back in March.

I went up to Bristol on the 10th March to a course designed and run by a lovely lady called Saskia who has a fantastic website www.rawfreedom.co.uk.
First I made a raw stir fry using the following ingredients (I'm sorry that I am not that good on remembering quantities as I tend to always prepare and cook with what I feel is right at the time. This has the effect of never eating the same meal twice which is sometimes upsetting when it is so nice but it makes you appreciate it all the more knowing you will never remember exactly how you made it.)

- pak choi
- baby corn cut in long strips
- spring onion cut into long thin strips
- a couple of large mushrooms
- yellow pepper cut into thin strips
- mange tout, halved

I made a dressing based on Saskia's recipe using some fresh ginger, garlic, lime juice and zest, fresh corriander, hemp oil and tamari - all wizzed up in my little hand blender.

I made a separate salad using watercress, baby spinach leaves and red cabbage.

I then put some lovely butternut squash, courgette, carrot, and raw beetroot through the spiralizer to make a fantastic multi coloured 'spaghetti'. This was dressed with Saskia's recipe for a pesto:-

1 handful of pine nuts
4 tablespoons of olive oil
1 handful of fresh basil
1 clove of garlic (optional)
Water and salt to taste

Wow! It looked beautiful and tasted wonderful and seemed to be enjoyed by the guests!

Next I made some 'pate' using sunflower seeds that I had soaked overnight (about 2 handfuls), also:-

4 pieces of sundried tomato
1 spring onion (white part only)
juice of half a lime
1 handful of fresh corriander
4 tablespoons of water

Wizzed up in the little hand blender and then spread into halves of mini peppers.

The whole lunch was well received and seconds taken so either a) my friends are so so lovely that they wanted to make me feel good about my 'weird' raw food or b) they really did like it! I'm thinking a) as I would hope that both of these people would feel confident enough in knowing me to be able to gulp and say "yuk, sorry I can't eat that".

I am thinking of experimenting with some raw food deserts next although they are in no way 'slimming', using nuts, bananas, dates, avocado, raw chocolate, so I had better be careful not to like them too much.

Fruit and veg saddened by the weather

This year is the first 'proper' year of my venture into growing my own vegetables. Until now, my husband has been in charge of this department and is a little .... let's be kind and say... sporadic about his approach to the whole thing. I don't think that gardening is a real passion of his anymore. He used to be into the whole thing but now he seems to need prodding (nagging??) to get anything done. Except for the grass - he is mostly good about keeping on top of the lawn mowing. I only say this so that you don't think I have barged in and taken over the whole project in my usual domineering way.

Weeding is a great hobby for me - I love it. I find it relaxing and soothing to the mind. It seems to give a pleasant time to help untangle the jumble of thoughts in my brain and in between doing that I don't think about very much other than the weeds themselves and getting out every little bit of bind weed root that I can. On the other hand, Dave is good at planting out some things but then he prefers to leave them to their own fate as far as fending off the weeds is concerned. He is good and consistent at watering but weeding is definitely NOT his thing.

I am also such a control freak at times that I do like the vegetables to look neat. They don't have to be in smart rows or anything - as demonstrated by the potato photo below! My only reason for planting anything else in rows from seed is that I need to see what comes up and identify it in it's uniform setting as what I planted, rather than thinking it might be a weed!!
I have started the beans in the propagator as well as the squashes. As you can see from these pics we are in the early stages and not too much progress yet. I have just put some cloches over them to see if a little shelter gives them a fighting chance.Lets just blame the weather at this point for their pathetic-ness! It seems to have rained constantly for the last week and the wind has been rather tempestuous too, resulting in rather forlorn and battered small plants. Never mind, lets see what happens.

The fruit bed is doing very well, although the strawberries are begging for more sun. The blueberries are looking good. I have had the plants for several years but they have been rather neglected in pots. At the end of last year I planted them in the ground with some ericaceous compost, and they seem to be responding well to the love and attention. The autumn raspberries are coming up well as are the blackcurrant cuttings taken last year and planted as bare sticks straight into the soil. The goji berries are looking busy but I don't think have ever produced a fruit so I am not holding out much hope for them. The loganberry and the thornless blackberry have both survived the move into the new bed and are looking healthy. Hopefully they will cover up prison fencing over the summer so that it doesn't look quite as cage like!

The fencing has a cat gap cut into it so that the cats have a quick way through. At the moment the cats are spending a lot of time in the polytunnel where it is warm and dry, or the greenhouse. I have lost the battle against the bindweed in the greenhouse at the moment, it is a bit of a disaster area.... watch this space, it is on my list!