about this blog

I started this blog in 2008 as a space to reflect on my creative journey at that time, and to sell the things I made and stitched. Over the next eight years or so I painted, stitched, crocheted, gardened, photographed, read, cooked, nurtured my family, and wrote about it on these pages. It is a little snapshot of my life during those years, and the many lovely comments bear witness to the beautiful online community of bloggers and artists who supported each others work during that time. I am no longer updating this blog and am now focusing on my art practice of drawing, painting and printmaking. You can find me on Instagram @suemcloughlin

guest room

 

I recently spent a lovely few days in Denmark with a good friend. Today she is stopping over at my house overnight, and I enjoyed making the spare room pretty, with the help of a few flowers from the late-summer garden. 

Soon I will post some photos of beautiful Denmark - such a light and airy country with an exquisite aesthetic.

happy nasturtiums

I'm having a go at blogging from my phone. Uploading the photos seems way more complicated than it should be, but hopefully this will work. Lovely bright orange nasturtiums from the garden.

chitting

Spring is springing and the blackbirds are singing late into the increasingly light evenings. My thoughts are turning to the veg patch, where the rhubarb I planted last year is tantalisingly pink and lush, but out of bounds until next year to let it get settled in. These wrinkly little chaps are soaking up all the light they can get and sending their little greeny pink shoots outwards and upwards, ready to turn into delicious new potatoes for supper. Fragrant narcissi are illuminating the garden. The Sarah Raven catalogue is the reading of choice. I love spring.

blocking

Over the last week or so, the starfish flowers have been worked up in a loooonnnnngggg string of teal Baby Cashmerino and are being blocked ready to turn into an infinity-scarf-necklace-thingy...

starfish flowers

What is a rainy Sunday for, really, other than to teach yourself how to crochet starfish-flowers and join them together?

I used this pattern. I am wondering about a starfish-flower-scarf-necklace now...

the way to amaryllis...

...four days of loveliness...

swedish christmas embroidery

Look at this absolutely beautiful vintage Swedish Christmas embroidery I saw at the home of a friend today. It was her mother's and is very old. I loved the colours and the simple stitching. God Jul!

the hopefulness of mistletoe

One of my favourite books to read at this time of year is What to Look for in Winter written by the poetic and mysterious E.L. Grant Watson. I love this series of Ladybird books and for me each change of season is marked by their beautiful words and C. F. Tunnicliffe's evocative illustrations.

Last weekend I spent a few days with friends in the thin winter light and quiet landscape of North Somerset. Everywhere you looked, the tall skeletal trees were laden with bright green orbs of mistletoe, hanging in the damp still air. Apparently it is a very good year for mistletoe, although I am not sure why. I don't know if anyone has identified exactly how it appears, but in 1959 E.L. Grant Watson wrote "How mistletoe grows on trees nobody knows for sure. Poplars and apple trees are the most likely hosts for this half-parasitic plant. If you can find out how mistletoe germinates, you will be a discoverer of one of Nature's secrets".

Like Grant Watson himself, a beautiful mystery. If anyone knows anything about him other than the thin sprinkling of information on the web I would love to know. But if you know how mistletoe germinates, don't tell me. I like living with the enigma, and think of Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves". This is a thought I carry with me daily. There are many unanswered questions in life these days. But it is still beautiful.

beauty

This little posy of late summer flowers from the garden is doing my heart good. That I have a garden at all, with flowers in, is enough for today.

summer

This summer has been about lettuce...

...and days out to lovely places with beautiful things to see...

...travelling to see friends in different cities...

...abundance, fruitfulness, and jam...

...unexpected creativity in surprising moments...

...crochet in the sunshine...

...food outdoors.

And many other things, beautiful and ugly, peaceful and anxious, familiar and new, safe and scary. Life goes on, all summer long.

slow and steady

Since I last wrote, I have been making paths and planting things...

...making lots and lots of these in different colours

...to see if I can finish this

...walking five minutes from my house to the meadow and the bluebells

...listening to lots of music, going to see bands, having a lovely time here and here

...breathing in and out, enlarging the place of my tent and dwelling in green places...

whatsoever things are lovely... think on these things

Exactly five years ago I began the practice, at bedtime, of writing a list of five things that have made me happy that day. It has been so good for me to do this, to look for the small beauties of life as well as remember the big, wonderful things. I now have over 1700 searchable entries recording snippets from my life over the last five years, which feels like a priceless asset.

Here are my top twenty nouns, verbs and adjectives. Naturally, tea is right up there. Chicken was a surprise. 

Imogen [my grandaughter], tea, bed, garden, sunshine, lunch, sleep, fire, bath, home, Toby, Isaac [my sons], walk, chocolate, friends, chicken, coffee, breakfast, cake, wine.

Watching, reading, eating, making, playing, feeling, sitting, thinking, looking, laughing, listening, talking, painting, walking, singing, writing, enjoying, working, finishing, finding. 

Lovely, new, little, beautiful, nice, warm, good, hot, happy, early, quiet, sunny, still, bright, kind, busy, soft, late, fresh, positive. 

out with the old

Over the next few days I shall be 'completing' 2014 with the help of these insightful questions which I originally found three years ago via Megan. I have done them every year since then and have found them incredibly useful in processing what has passed, and as a springboard into the new year. For me it's a much more meaningful exercise than party-poppers and fireworks and all the false midnight jollity. This year there is much to be thankful for and much to look forward to, but there has also been gut-wrenching disappointment and sadness, and the possibilities of the new year seem much thinner and more well-concealed than in past times.

One of my primary goals is to make more art, and try to work through whatever it is that has so far prevented me from full creative expression. I am both excited and fearful about this.

See you next year!

half-yearly report

 

Exactly six months since I last wrote, and a lot has passed. A lot of hard slog, a lot of lessons learned, both practical and emotional. Most of the work I have been doing has been with drills and hammers and bags of rubble, as I press on with making a home and garden from the bare plastered walls and rectangle of brown earth I moved into at the beginning of the year. And there has been much progress, and many tears, and laughing and happiness too. So, most of my 'creative' work has looked like this...

...but some of it has been more like the picture at the top, as I gradually find time and energy to dig out paintbrushes and concentrate for a few minutes on less practical expressions of creativity. Although most of my artwork is still getting done at the kitchen table with a five-year-old...

...or should I say a five-and-a-half-year-old. Because that's how I know it's exactly six months since I last wrote anything...

five

Today my funny, clever, loving and beautiful granddaughter is five. If I'm honest, this is really what I've been doing all this time. This is what's been absorbing me, keeping me awake at night, frightening me, limiting me, making me laugh, making me cry.

My son and his then-girlfriend were very young when she was born. Her mother had very little support from her family and so we had to rally. Suddenly a little person drove the pace. I say 'we', but it was mostly me, driven by love and compassion. My son has grown and blossomed into a strong and loving father and I am intensely proud of him and his brother, a devoted uncle. There have been many difficult times. My son now cares for my granddaughter full time and she is happy and thriving. That is the main thing. Along the way I lost a husband and a home and any energy for anything but survival. I am not being melodramatic or asking for pity, in fact I am choosing to hold things back rather than reveal too much. But she is five. Five! We have come so far. And we have survived.

nothing to show

I don't think I have ever started a post without a photo before, but I honestly have nothing to show and no nice pictures on my phone, so if I am to start any kind of a post at all in 2014, it's going to have to be words-only.

This year is not panning out like I hoped - at least not yet anyway. I have moved into my house but am nowhere near settled. The builders turned out to be awful in every way and left me with thousands of pounds worth of work that needed finishing, replacing or repairing. I am currently dealing with a collapsed and broken drain under the brand new concrete floor. The central heating is so badly fitted that the noise it makes is almost unbearable. The roof blew off in the storms. Nothing seems to work properly. There are a myriad unpleasant smells. I have acres and acres of painting to do before I can put up pictures or curtains, and the 'garden' is a joke.

All this has been so overwhelming and demoralising and unsettling and lonely and difficult. Those of you who know me well know that it has almost broken me, but, look! I'm still here. I haven't lifted a crochet hook or dug any soil or opened a book other than to look at pictures or cooked a half-decent meal and I certainly haven't looked at my paints or unpacked my sketchbooks or made anything other than a mess. But, maybe I will one day. And then I'll have something to show.

stuck

At midnight on 31st December last year, I lit a sky candle and sent it up into the darkness, full of symbolism and hope for the future. 2012 had been a terrible year for me and I wanted to say goodbye to all the sadness and illness and tears and regret. I felt optimistic and ready for change, ready to embrace new things and new challenges. I loved seeing that sky candle filling with light and heat and pulling away from me into the night sky. I watched it rise up with a happy cheer, a silent wish and a secret prayer.

The sky candle immediately got stuck in the branches of a tree, and stayed up there for weeks, tattered and forlorn. I saw it every morning from my kitchen window, and felt haunted by its failure to fly and what this might symbolise for my year ahead. Everybody laughed and told me not to be silly and everything would be fine and it was just a sky candle stuck in a tree, nothing more. Finally the rain and wind loosened it and one morning it was gone, so I forgot about it.

And then a few days ago, I remembered it. And I saw that actually it had spoken the truth, for I have been stuck in one way or another for the whole year, and indeed still am. Our house took forever to sell: months and months of fruitless cleaning and tidying and showing people round, never feeling able to spread out or make a mess for fear of the next viewing, my life on hold. Then eventually in September moving out and putting all my things into storage and taking a few essentials and, aged nearly fifty, with a little granddaughter, becoming a lodger. I expected to rent a room for a few weeks while my house was extended and refurbished... but I'm still here. The builders have taken forever and driven me nearly crazy in the process, and a catalogue of expensive disasters has unfolded. The end is not in sight. I am still living out of a suitcase and surviving on ready meals.

But yet, I am hopeful... at least a little bit. I know that one day soon I will be able to move in, and a new chapter of my life will begin... a lot later than I expected, and it does feel like I have wasted a whole year waiting for it. But I am painting my shelves so that I can unpack my books, and that feels good.

I'm not lighting any sky candles this New Year's Eve. I'll be babysitting for my granddaughter, and I'll probably go to bed well before midnight. I don't want to look into the future or even hope or dream. I'll wake up the next morning and it will all unfold just as it would have done anyway.

new beginnings

This has been the scene at my new house for the past three months. A tiny, unloved, worn, tatty and unremarkable house with an overgrown, tatty garden has been knocked about, stripped bare and ripped apart. Slowly slowly the house has been put back together, added to and improved, and is nearly ready for me to move into, a brand new clean slate for me in so many ways. Tomorrow my furniture and belongings move out of storage and into their new home, and at the weekend I will follow. There is a lot to do but it will be mine to do with as I wish, a gift. It will be exactly one year since my old home went on the market and life changed shape. A very long year, a very hard year, but a neat representation of the circle of life. I hope to be creative there.

I will be making a Flickr set about the house and the changes that take place there, should you wish to have a look. It's not up yet but will be soon.

home, where my thoughts escaping

I am popping in to say hello, having spread out my red spotted handkerchief at my temporary lodgings (the photo above is not, of course, my temporary lodgings, but the very lovely Crosthwaite House in Cumbria, which I can heartily recommend).

I have only intermittent wifi here so internet activity is sporadic. It's a strange and unsettling time getting used to being a lodger for a while, trying to sort out my new house and garden under pressure of time, and of course life doesn't pause itself when times like this happen, either.

Suffice to say I am rather stressed. I am taking refuge in Pinterest and crochet and toast. I have my art materials here too but they remain untouched for now. A full night's sleep is enough of a challenge for me at the moment.

Don't go away.