Steampunk Button

Booster Maintenance

My little robots are back on another adventure. I love making these. They have a lot of character. This piece has been put in my shop alongside Slash.

All Change! Art Room Reorganisation Day

I realised that my workspace isn’t working for me. It is way too cluttered, all the surfaces are filled and I can never find anything. Similar items aren’t grouped together (which results in me buying several of the same product because I forget I’ve already got one) and activities are being done in unsuitable areas e.g. not enough lighting.

In order to streamline my workspace and make it a more productive area (and thereby make me more productive) today is a designated ‘Organisation Day’!

Furry Little Helpers

I have two cats and a dog.

I use my dog as practice for sketching and watercolours as I find his brindle colouring a good challenge (He’s a Staffordshire Bull Terrier).

My cats though, they’re a different story. They pretty much run the place, or they think they do.

Autumn is a grey tabby who sleeps in the most awkward of places like on the finial of the bannister on the stairs. She frequently falls off. So much for cats landing on four legs!

The little guy in the picture is Jake. He’s become very clingy while the storms have been here and apart from nipping out to the loo, he pretty much hasn’t left my side.

Last night I decided to do a bit of extra crafting. All of a sudden, I heard crashing and banging behind me.

Instead of just jumping up from the floor onto the table to sit beside me (or rather bask in the heat from my magnifier lamp!), he decided to knock everything off any surface he could find as he walked around the furniture in the room!

He finally settled - splayed across my cutting mat!

I still managed to get some crafting done. I didn’t like to move him as he gets so scared in storms, its quite nice to share those moments with him, in the quiet of the night, listening to some cool music created for Youtube, doing what I love the best. I am so lucky and blessed 💚.

I have an overactive imagination

This ‘Work in Progress’ could well serve as an accurate depiction of what it looks like in my brain. I am a thinker, an imaginer, a dreamer and an artist.

My friend sometimes looks at my work and says “Where on earth do you get your inspiration?”.

The answer may be as simple as “The dream I had last night” (which usually is followed by the comment: “What weird dreams you have!”), it may be that the inspiration has followed a complex thought path down a rabbit hole into a world completely different to the one I’m actually living in or it may simply be, as in this morning, from how my crocs looked when I put them on this morning (They reminded me of the sets they used on a TV show in the 70’s called ‘Space 1999’ that I absolutely devoured as a kid!).

In my life I have suffered unimaginable pain, loss and disappointment and I think part of me developed a highly active imagination as a self-preservation mechanism, even from early on in my childhood. Now I’m older (50 to be exact), ‘life reflection’ also now adds an element to my imagination.

As a child, I loved movies (and still do!), I devoured the characters and plots from cheesy science fiction movies, to musicals where it was always sunny and happy (apart from’The Wizard of Oz’!).

On that note, I blame Disney for an unrealistic image of love, marriage and career advancement. 😜

The negative aspects of an over active imagination are anxiety, depression, irrational fears, insomnia, exhaustion, over-thinking, delusion and sometimes, an inability to differentiate from reality and fiction (I dream whole conversations have occurred between myself and my friends and then get frustrated when I think they’ve completely forgotten what ‘we’ discussed).

I am dyslexic too. This affects my memories, thought process, time-keeping (whole days can pass in the blink of an eye, it’s not unusual to find that I’ve completely missed meals and am still crafting at 10pm at night), ability to read (I was a late starter, but thanks to bags and bags of ‘Famous Five’, ‘Secret Seven’ and ‘Enid Blyton’ books donated by Mrs Goodwin, an elderly neighbour when I was young, I soon caught up).

The positives far out weigh the negatives though.

I can literally find inspiration in EVERYTHING!

I awoke this morning to hear hailstone on my window (we are currently being visited by two storms with rain, hail, snow and winds of 100 mph), it reminded me of a dream I had when I was in my 20’s where I had been dreaming of a hailstorm with hailstone the size of tennis balls crashing through the car roof.

Sometimes people think I’m staring at them, especially strangers, (if this happens to you, take heart that it means you look particularly radiant today and you have just triggered a thought process - I’m no longer actually staring at you - the way the sun caught your hair probably reminded me of wheat fields in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or your eyes in that light looked like galaxies and my imagination has whizzed off to explore half a dozen planets).

When I was at school, the headmaster, Mr Apthomas, encouraged us to imagine when listening to the classical music he played in assembly. ‘The Hall of the Mountain King’ is an utter favourite and even if the music is no longer playing, I only have to close my eyes to see the dancers and relive the plot.

I still listen to music every day now. Although what I listen to is defined by the activity that I am involved with. Painting usually calls for classical music, assemblage demands rock music, if I am working on a new project, then ‘Epic’ music on Youtube is my inspirational ‘go-to’.

I have a genuine ‘lust for life’ (you’re welcome to that ear-worm 😜). I love living, I love life and everything in it. I was the kid who made wormeries, and watched baby spiders hatch. I was the kid who examined the colours in flowers or watched the aerial dance of the migrating birds. And guess what? Through my love of gardening, I still do all those things and more.Every experience, every day, floods my imagination, and gives me new ideas. My problem is not what to do today, but how to pick out what to do today from the gazillion thoughts in my head…and its only 7am, I’ve only been awake for an hour…24 more hours of ‘gazillion’ thoughts to feed my imagination before I start my day again!

My Latest News - Halloween and New Link to Everything

I’ve started getting ready for Halloween with my latest creation - Glowenda Dark (who actually glows in the dark!). She’s scared the pants off me a few times late at night when I nipped back in my craft room for a forgotten item! (Available in my Etsy shop now).

I’ve used ‘Linktree’ to put all (well…most…) of my links together in one place to make it easier to share…please do share if you feel like it. 😁

https://linktr.ee/steampunkbutton