There is beauty in every journey …
… in every story …
… in pain and grief …
… in strength and courage …
… and in the spaces in between.
There is beauty in friendship …
… in connection …
… in hearing and seeing.
Beauty sits at the heart of life …
… in the midst of it all …
… it is with us.
For all the women and for their deeply beautiful stories.
This is the post I prepared to upload last Friday ~ before our wifi started to misbehave ~ we now have a new router … it is sitting in it’s box in the dining room! It has been a busy busy week for both Mr P and me, and the window of opportunity to swap the routers is yet to present itself … so I am hoping the dodgy one allows enough cyber waves to reach my remote laptop so that I can finally get this post to you!
It has been a little while, and here are some of the places I have been since I was last here …
~ at the sewing machine ~
~ walking the land ~
~ at the flower stall ~
I have some fabric baskets in the shop, some have sold already …
I have stitched up a prototype cross body bag which looks fab …
I have an heard from another gallery who wish to have some of my bags and baskets …
I have made an apron by special request … and have been pacing the floor awaiting the delivery of cotton webbing tape to make ties for said apron …
I have been pulling fabric off the shelves and mixing and matching it for new stitchy projects …
Yes, I have been busy … and it is all good … until, following a delightful wedding last Friday I suddenly found myself exhausted … you know, flaked out, wiped out, fit to drop, pooped!
And so I stopped, and realised that it was the first time I had stopped since the beginning of April … I had been ticking off day after April day without stopping. And I noticed that in trying to set up a business from home it is very easy to never take a day off. And so I switched off the computer, put away the sewing machine and took myself for a walk – that walk up above down the beautiful woodland lane … an old favourite of a walk … which ended with a cold cider in a pub garden, because it was probably the first day this year that it has been warm enough for a pub garden. And it was glorious.
Perhaps I will do the same this weekend!
Wishing you a restful and renewing weekend, whatever you may find yourself doing!
It seems I can’t do everything ~ although, secretly, I do believe that with an extra three days in each week, I would come close!
So my blog has been abandoned for over a week ~ the lemon loves facebook page is sitting idle ~ my sewing machine experienced an unprecedented ten consecutive days of neglect ~ and my camera has a backlog of more than a months worth of unedited photos … my heart gets a little nervous about all of these things …
… however, my nephew came to stay over for two whole nights ~ some long-loved friends rented a nearby holiday let for the week ~ a much delayed mate-date eventually came to fruition ~ I squeezed in some extra hours at work ~ and yesterday I caught up with one of my favourite girls for some brunch and a woodland walk … and it has been marvellous!
The past eleven days have been full of family, friends and food; laughter, love and friendship; woodlands, hilltops, streams, sticks, mud …
… and even a peep of Spring.
And now … I have two bags to complete stitching, some baskets to make, photographs to edit and stock to photograph and upload to my shop …
… one step at a time, keeping an eye on the bright side all the way!
Oh my goodness ~ I am thanking my lucky stars that I started to upload the photos for this post yesterday evening ~ as this morning my vintage MacBook died and now these gorgeous bufferflys (seen at Ness Botanic Gardens, The Wirral) are all I have left of over 300 pictures I took in Liverpool and The Wirral last weekend. Lessons have been learned today!
Aside from the technological crises of today ~ there have been bright spots this weeks which deserve to be captured, and luckily they were still stored on the memory card of my camera!
So, this week, my days have been brightened and lightened by …
~ butterflys ~
~ this beautiful vase with a bubble in it’s base ~
~ new fabric ~
~ notebooks … yep, time to get organised ~
… other highlights include …
~ catching up with long lost relatives ~
~ a positive verification at work ~
~ a wonderful weekend away with my lovely husband ~
~ celebrating 19 years of happy marriage ~
Oh yes! Despite the technological glitch this morning ~ it has been a good and special week.
And you?
The redness of them, the papery delicateness, the bowing buds, the sculptural seedheads … the breezy dancing on their spindly spikey stems … what’s not to love about a poppy …
… their reslience and tenacity … I love how they grow along roadsides, on wasteland, in concreted areas … year after year …
… in hot summers, wet summers and completely summer-less summers poppies continue to bloom and dance.
I see poppies and my heart lifts.
These little beauties were photographed at the Junior School and at Cock Croft, Leominster.
Do you get those days when your head drives you a little bit crazy … yes, me too. So I have developed two quick cures …
1. Doing. Yes, it’s as simple as that, and so the sewing machine put in an appearance this weekend, and it proved most therapuetic …
… I was drawn to reds and oranges and set to running up a couple more bags …
… busy hands keep the mind task focussed … step by step progress is measured … and a finished project brings a sense of achievement. Oh yes. And the second cure … ?
2. Seeing. Noticing the detail of what lies around me, seeing shapes, colours, light, change and process. And so it was that I took my camera into the garden …
… and noticed that the seasons have reached that stage when the reds and oranges start to burst forth … like this beautiful crocosmia …
… and these rather fruity berries …
… which I am sure I don’t recall ever planting, but they seem to pop up every summer bringing a burst of warmth with them.
And so it may be that ‘doing’ and ‘seeing’ are not completely fail safe cures for a head that thinks too much … but the outcome is that I have made two lovely bags and captured some beauty to share with you, and I got to emerse myself in the warmth of red and orange all the way … which was rather wonderful.
Wishing you all a very happy Monday folks.
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