So I was meant to be working my documentary today but I was a bit too distractible. I finished off my plans for this instead…
creativity
Getting out there to sell my swag.
A few weeks ago I launched some of my creative things out into the world through setting up shop on both Threadless and Redbubble. I can’t imagine this will surprise anyone, but since setting up I have sold one thing, to my boyfriends mum. So I’ve not exactly been a roaring success, which is ok because I’m still learning how to do these things.
I have been investigating how it is that people actually sell stuff on these forums and one of the things that seems important, which I doubt will come as a surprise to any bloggers out there, is raising your profile within the community that uses a particular site. Threadless has a nifty way to help with this – it has a rolling competition which allows you to submit a design for other members of the community to vote on. This will allow other people to see your style as you invite them to rate your stuff. If you win, I think your design may be selected to be printed up and sold on the main website, which would be pretty awesome. In any case I think this is quite a fun thing to do.
So, to that end, I’ve just submitted my first design to Threadless. I would really appreciate it, if anyone reading this had a moment, if you could pop over there and vote for my new design (pictured above).
On finishing things, summer down pours and downtime.
I think summer has arrived in the UK. I love spring, and autumn, and am fond of winter. I’m not particularly a summer person. I don’t particularly like the heat, and we don’t really seem to know how to do air conditioning. I seem to be particularly affected by fatigue, and struggle with lethargy when it is too hot, which may go some way to explaining why the blog has been a little under active of late. I have been taking lots of down time, lolling around on the sofa, and watching documentaries on Netflix. I was particularly moved by this documentary called Laerte-Se, and would recommend an afternoon spent with this.
Last weekend weekend we went to the Cotswolds, and went walking in the woods, one of my absolute favourite things. The trees, which are numerous in variety in that area, are an amazing shade of lush green at this time of year. While out walking this weekend we were caught in an amazing downpour. We stood for a while in a dry patch, surrounded by a curtain of these fat, heavy rain drops, saying to each other, ‘it will pass over in a minute’. It’s didn’t pass over, but instead settled firmly in. We ended up walking through the rain most of the way home. The air had been warm and sticky, and I found the delicious slip of water through my hair and down my neck refreshing and exhilarating. It has been some time since I have been caught in the rain like that, and I was happy for the experience. It made me think of how the amount of control we think we have other things is really an illusion. People make plans and Nature laughs.
However, despite all the lolling around and walking in the rain, I have been a bit productive. In the past I have always had a bit of an issue finishing things, as I have previously written about here. Recently, while not exactly finishing things, I have managed to bring two projects to a relatively satisfying conclusions. Last weekend I submitted a draft play to the Bruntwood Prize. I don’t really expect anything to come from that, but it feels a bit like drawing a line under the project, which means I can move onto the next one. In recent weeks, during my down time, I have had ideas for two new animations, so, patiently, watch this space on that.
I also recently opened an Artist Shop with Threadless, where I am selling prints and bags based on a series of artworks I have been working on for over a year. While the artworks themselves aren’t actually finished this feels like a satisfactory conclusion. I’ve even had my first sale, with I think was to my boyfriend’s mother. From small acorns, great oak trees may grow.
Veganuary: the story so far
Regular readers (hello!) will know that we’ve been giving veganuary a try over here at the Magpie Nest. I don’t have any plans to become a food blogger, my main interest here is exploring creativity and wellbeing, and other things related to that. I did, however, want to offer up a few thoughts about the things I’ve learned so far about eating vegan.
There are a whole range of different approaches out there to vegan diets – we’ve been eating a wide range of things, both raw and cooked, including lots of different beans, grains, fruits, vegetables. Pretty much the least restrictive version of ‘vegan’ you can get. We have, however, avoided eating processed or ready made vegan meals, and have been trying to keep the ‘refined sugar’ down to a minimum. This is mostly because we wanted to use the time to experiment with different forms of cooking, not because we feel strongly about ‘ready meals’. We are also on dry January at the moment, so no booze. We’ve been doing research on nutrition to make sure we get enough of the things (there are lots of things). I particularly like this book by Jack Norris and Virgina Messina, who use scientific evidence to back up their advice (its American so UK readers will need to do a bit of research to translate the serving size suggestions). So, by following the above type of diet I have found:
I can eat all day. Seriously, I’m steadily loosing weight and I can pretty much chomp down on what I want at the moment, including lots of nuts and avocados. This suits me really well as I’m a bit of a grazer, but I can see that for some people this would not be ideal situation. It’s also likely to be related, in part, to not drinking this month, so I’ll see how that changes in February.
My sense of taste has changed. I’ve been cutting out refined sugar for a while now as I have quite bad sugar crashes. Now I find a whole range of foods, from red peppers to dark chocolate, taste much sweeter to me now. In fact I used to find dark (70% + cocoa) quite bitter, but now I can’t get enough of it. Which is good for my brain (well that’s my story anyway).
Vegan cooking is pretty yummy. We’ve been trying out all sorts of things in our efforts to make sure we get enough protein. So far this has been really enjoyable, and it has pushed us to be more creative and experimental. This in itself is a mental health plus for me. I particularly like sprinkling toasted nuts and seeds on soups, stews, curries and pasta which adds an extra crunch to the texture of what ever it is we’ve been eating.
My wallet is a little heavier. We’ve definitely spent less on food. I should add that we’ve not been eating out at all because of the dry January thing, which helps, but we are still spending less. We’ve stocked up on dried beans (which are cheap) and fresh veggies, and aren’t spending what we normally would on meat products (which is significantly less cheap).
There is a strange satisfaction in soaking dried beans over night. A while ago I blogged about how some aspects of my arts practice forced me to slow down, and this can be a helpful mental health thing. Shifting our cooking from things that can be thrown in a hot pan and served 30 minutes later to things that need to be soaked over night, washed, cooked and cooked some more has made us think more carefully about what we put in our bodies. This point resonates for me with this really nice post by Rumpy Dog on food and self care. Go read that.
I feel better. Physically and mentally I do feel better. Not perfect, unlimited energy better, but noticeably better. This could be due to the novelty of it all. We are supplementing things like B12, and eating lots of dark chocolate, which is high in tryptophan. Both of these things are important things for a healthy nervous system. So it could be due to that too. I’ve definitely been feeling less nervous, which is good.
Vegan doodles are fun. Expect more.
Feeding ourselves: Vegan food, art, and all the treats
Chocolates from http://www.boojabooja.com
It’s been quite an up and down week. I’ve been feeling quite tired and grumpy, and like I’m not really ready to go back to work tomorrow. I’m feeling better now, but was feeling pretty grim at the beginning of the week, and have been thinking about what has happened between now and then to improve things. It’s has led me to reflect a bit on the things we can do (or not do) to look after our selves when things begin to feel a bit stressful.
The main things that have been helpful have been focused around feeding the creative bits of me. To start with we went to see exhibitions of work by both Robert Rauschenberg and the William Kentridge. I found both exhibitions interesting and though provoking, but the exhibition by William Kentridge was particularly inspiring for me. This is because he used lots of film, narratives and animation in his work, which are also things that I like to play with. He has talked about using a ‘stone age’ approach to film making, and many of the pieces in the exhibition used these techniques, with beautiful effect. From a technical point of view there was little in his work that I probably couldn’t have a go at myself with enough time and effort. Seeing that kind of work on a large scale has been a trigger for me to think more widely about my own practice and where that could go.
We’ve also been out for several good length walks, one through the centre of London and one through some local woods. I tend to find my thinking is most productive when walking about, there is something about the rhythm of walking that works for me. A walk in the woods can really help me work through the kinks in an old idea, or snatch hold of and develop a new one, so this was a helpful thing to do.
Finally we’ve both been paying a lot more attention to what we put in our bodies, as we are a week into Veganuary at the magpie nest. We have had one vegan fail, but as this is time of learning for us I think it’s ok. One of the brands of gluten free bread we’ve used for some time uses egg as a binding agent and we didn’t think to check the label until we were half way through the loaf. What we have found is that we are having to think more creatively about what we cook, as a number of our ‘go-to’ meals are animal-product heavy. In putting limits on what we can cook, we are exercising our creativity in this way too, which is fun and an unexpected benefit.
Finally, we’ve also been indulging in some vegan treats. My boyfriend bought me a box of these chocolates from Booja Booja for Christmas, which are dairy free and particularly yummy. They have quite an intense chocolate flavour and I find one or two are satisfying enough so while they are on the pricy side, you can eek them out a bit. They come in a really beautiful hand painted box (see the picture above) which is particularly appealing to my arty/crafty creative side. I have been enjoying them anyway.
New project in progress: Poor Boyfriend
My boyfriend and I have had this quite long running joke now that he should start a blog called ‘poor boyfriend’ because he does a lot of things that free up time and space for me to be creative, like chunks of the house work. I’m probably a bit challenging to live with, given the old artistic temperament and my love of indulging in childish and playful things at times that aren’t always that well chosen. He’s also super tidy and I’m…. not. The concept was a kind of diary from the point of view of a rather put upon boyfriend living with a ‘creative’. I really like the idea and think it could be turned in a little series of animations, which would also give me a reason to get familiar with another aspect of the creative softwear I am paying a subscription fee for and totally underusing at the moment. I’m thinking a little series on Vimeo or YouTube could work.
Here’s a little ‘poor boyfriend’ sketch for now. I’ve chosen a super simple style to make it easy to play around with the idea for a while before I settle on things like style, tone and mood.
New Year Plans
It’s the beginning of a New Year, I hope everyone is feeling positive about making this year kinder and more inclusive than the last. I don’t tend to make New Year Resolutions as I don’t feel like they work particularly well for me. I tend to see my self as a work in progress, and in need of far more regular check-ins and course corrections. However it is a good time to take stock of what was achieved in the previous year and make some loose (and less loose) plans for what to do in the one to come. On Christmas day I wrote this post about actively practicing kindness and holding onto liberal, pro-diversity principles in the face of what feel like grim times. I feel like this is a pretty important perspective to go into the new year with.
Here in the Magpie nest we have a few other immediate plans:
Dry January – we did this last year (and did dry October too) and found that we felt much better for giving our bodies a bit of a rest from the sauce, so we are going to be doing that again this year. On both occasions we found that our wallets emerged in a better state too, so that’s a bonus.
Money – we are going to try to save up a bit of a financial cushion this year as we feel that we may want to start thinking about making some lifestyle changes of the ‘work less, live leaner’ variety pretty soon – it will be good to go into those with a bit of cash behind us as we work things out. I’ve been inspired by reading some of the posts at Frugal Health for Life in approaching this endeavour and look forwards to reading more of these.
Veganuary – We’ll be trying to go vegan for January. This morning we had our first vegan breakfast of home made baked beans and avocado on toast. It was yummy. I have to be a bit careful about eating well as I have a health condition that could lead to diabetes (I don’t want that), and my partner is gluten intolerant, so there will be some nutritional kinks to work out as we go along. I’m not sure how well we’ll manage this one, and imagine that after January we may well settle into something that looks a lot more like vegetarianism, but my partner and I are doing this together so it feels like a fun project to work on.
We’ve been watching quite a few documentaries on a range of things ranging from global warming, to animal cruelty, to many health issues, to the nutrient poor foods that have become dominant in the market, to antibiotic resistance. When you look at major contributors to all of these problems, the road seems inevitably to lead back to industrialised, factory style farming of animals. We’ve hit the point where we have a stack of reasons to give veganism a try, and only our own laziness as a reason not too. We generally cook lots of vegetarian meals from scratch anyway, so I feel we’ll get on ok with that side of things. We used to eat lots of bacon, and couldn’t imagine not having a bacon breakfast on a Saturday, but we’ve not really eaten that way for a while, and haven’t really missed it. We have been phasing out other types of meat and lots of forms of dairy for some time, but I think I may struggle with not having eggs. I really like eggs. Eggs could be a problem.
Building a creative business – I’m still exploring ideas for this. I’ve not even begun to think about starting trading yet, but I think I have some good ideas now for a set of art pieces, and may be in a position launch something later this year. Until then I’ll continue to highlight any useful resources that I stumble across on my route there.
Other creative stuff – I have a play and a film to finish, and ideas for another play, and another film (that relate to each other) to get going with. And a little animated series. Plus some art. Lots and lots of art. Oh gosh, what a list.
Mental health – I’m going to reduce my hours in the day job in April, I’m really looking forwards to having a whole day a week to myself to work on creative stuff. Let’s see how that works out.
That’s about it for a round up, but who knows what other opportunities may crop up as we go along. What New Year Plans do you have?
Christmas creativity: Something pretty to do with those empty booze bottles
I hope everyone is enjoying some down time over the festive season. We’ve had some family staying. They left today and we have a night off this eve before another round of family arrives tomorrow. I’ve not had much time for creative things but was able, in an idle moment, to put these beauties together. This is super easy so I wanted to share this with any one who had been working up a recycling mountain, which you can now confidently rename as a ‘stockpile of craft materials’.
So you will need:
Empty glass bottles or jars – you want to wash these out and let them dry thoroughly before you do this. Keep the corks, screw lids or wire cages. You’all need those later.
A small/ light weight string of fairy lights. I have been using theses Starry String Lights from YIHONG. I really like these and had them in the house because I bought a load in for a completely different project. They are a 2m strand of tiny LED lights sealed in blobs of glue on delicate copper wire, attached to a battery pack fitted with an on-off switch. The sales info suggests the batteries should last for 72 hours. I’ve not had these going for that long to test that out yet but we’ve had them on for most of Christmas and they are still very bright. The batteries are replaceable. These lights are designed to be worn in clothing so don’t use a high enough voltage to cause a shock. I would avoid using fairy lights that draw power for the mains – I’m not at all sure how you would use these safely with bottles that have metal caps or lids.
What you do:
You want to uncoil the length of the fairy lights and then feed them slowly into your glass bottle. I’ve deliberately let mine coil up in a very uneven pattern as I think this looks quite magical but I’m sure that the more ingenious among you could find a way to get them to sit evenly in the glass. I’ve been really lazy about capping these off, and have just pushed the tops back in or on over the wire – mine stick out a bit. For a better result you probably want to slice a channel down one side of the cork for the wire to sit in before you push the cork back in. You can also screw screw caps over the fine copper wire if you run it down the outside of the neck of the bottle. And that’s it. Done.
Happy Christmas.
Putting things down, picking things up, starting again
Over the last few weeks I’ve been making a slow return to working on two projects that I started last year. At the beginning of last year I took a course in documentary film making and I took two courses in play writing. I’ve been interested in the process of documentary filmmaking for quite a while. A lot of my formal training has been in research methods and in the social sciences, and have some frustrations with the way that academic work gets communicated (or doesn’t) to the wider world. At the time this seemed like a good thing to understand a bit better, and a good fit with my existing skill set. I took the play writing course because I was stuck with a novel I was working with and thought it would be helpful to look at it from a different approach. But then I got hooked and decided I had to write a play, obviously. And I did, sort of.
But there were problems. The film school that I enrolled with decided to change the dates of their course without really giving me much notice and I ended up trying to do both things at the same time, and have a full time job too. It worked for a while, but then I went through some crappy nonsense in my private life, and started a new job, and it didn’t really work anymore. Up until the beginning of September I’d not really worked on either project for 12 months and was not feeling great about that as I really wanted to finish something well enough to send it ‘somewhere’. I also have a film maker in my family, my dad, who kept gently reminding me that I should, ‘Work on my film’. And he’s right, I should be working on my film, because I got lucky with a really good story and could do something really interesting with it.
It took me a bit of time to work out what the blocks were on continuing with both projects, but I think I have a list now.
- Space – I was living with a friend of mine at the time and didn’t really have a huge amount of space. I’m kind of messy, and didn’t want to leave my mess all over his flat, so I ended up with a kind of squashed psychological space to work in.
- Teaching style – on the doc film course at least I felt a little as though I didn’t gel with the tutor. I think she’s great film maker, and loved talking to her about films. But she’s very much from the observational documentary style school. I wanted to work with other artistic things, like animation and set up pieces of film. I think I felt at the time that I wasn’t really able to make ‘my’ film so I did’t make a film at all.
- Time and Timing – the timing was bad, I was sad and exhausted. I was still getting used to living in London having moved from Cardiff, which is a much smaller, calmer city and one that I knew very well. I did’t have time to feed my creative self and that meant I couldn’t really put the work in that was needed.
- The fraud police – would anything I produced actually be as good as I thought they could be?
Above are some images I finished off yesterday that will part of an animation for the documentary. I’ve been writing new scenes for the play. So what’s happened? What has changed? I can think of two things that have really worked in ‘unblocking’. The first is that I cut out a load of things that I was doing, including socialising with some people that kind of drained me a bit, and carved out that time for doing creative stuff. Small, achievable projects first, at which step by step led me back to the ‘big’ ones. I’ve also come to realise that part of my creative process involves giving projects long ‘down’ periods as this enables me to come back to them with a new perspective. So not working on either project for a year doesn’t feel un-natural with hindsight.
Second, and I think this is the big one. I moved in with the boyfriend. We got a place together that gives me more space, and that helps. But I think the real key here is him. He’s constantly and consistently supportive, and frequently cooks the dinner so I can get on with something else. He’s such a tidy organised person, and yet he tolerates my creative mess everywhere, and he does it all with humour. He’s always happy to listen to my ideas, and talk to me about that, while never once said ‘you should do this’. I think that’s enabled me to regain some creative confidence. I had been told in the past that picking the right partner was really important, and I had been a bit dismissive of that, because at the time I was single and thought I could do it all myself. Turns out that advice was pretty good advice, after all.
You are here by Jenny Lawson
So being ill can have an up side sometimes. I’ve been unwell with some awful head cold [wo]man flu and haven’t been able to do much work. I’ve been mostly sleeping, drinking honey and lemon, and watching telly, with a little web surfing on the side. The web surfing turned out to be a little too exciting for my ill brain and I’ve had to wait a few days before I was able to form a coherent thought about this.
I came across Jenny Lawson’s memoir Furiously Happy, at least a year ago through one of those Amazon ‘and you may also like’ recommendations. I loved it, having been bought up in the country with my own bunch of eccentrics, and from there I went on to read Let’s pretend this never happened, which I also loved. These books are very funny, and great books for anyone who has ever wanted to hide under a table at a public event (or regularly finds themselves taking a ‘time out’ in the office loo). Earlier in the week I wasn’t very well and couldn’t do much more than sit in bed and surf the internet. I spent some of that time diving into the Bloggess website and it was the first time I was able to have a really good read about her colouring book You are Here.
I really think this post is worth looking at for anyone who uses arty creative things as part of their efforts to manage mental health. Jenny Lawson writes vividly about her own arts practice (I have no idea if she would call it that, but her drawings are works of art) continually using drawing and doodling as a way of channeling negative or distressing thoughts or emotions. She is releasing a colouring book based on these drawings, alongside some short stories that work with the drawings, and what a beautiful thing it is (at least it looks that way from the pictures – the physical book won’t be available for a few months). Just go and look at the sweeping curves and swirling lines of some of these drawings. I really love how these drawings are intricate, and delicate, effective in evoking fairytale and myth. Somehow exciting and soothing to look at at the same time. I’ve ordered my copy, and I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying getting creative with this set of drawings. Or just owning them. Anyway, go and look. Now.
The Magpie at Midnight 