Relax and Ephemera ~ 3/7

Had a quiet day. I was planning to work on and hopefully finish my patches but the eczema in my elbow was playing up and I didn't want to make it worse by having my arm all bent working so I spent some not very productive time doing nothing except worry and feel guilty about the idea of not working. Then I sorted myself out and started reading a book I got out of the library last week and had an actual day off type of Sunday. I read while Will played playstation, we had naan bread pizza for tea and then I hung out with the rats (after they'd had a lazy day too, all their days are lazy though). It was suitably chill and now I'm ready for Monday. I like Monday's, I always feel productive and ready to get on with stuff on Monday :)

An extra thought: I love it so much when I find things in library books, even if they're super mundane it's like finding a little treasure. Ephemera is one of my favourite things. I don't know what it is about little scraps of paper but I get a lot of joy from them.

Hating Hayley ~ 2/7

Today I've been listening to some old Paramore stuff. I don't really know Paramore, when they were getting big, Misery Business sort of time maybe, I was sort of past my Kerrang era. I wasn't so much in need of angst, I think it was probably around the time I was really into eighties hair metal lol. Anyway, I thought Paramore were lame, I thought Hayley Williams was a twat and I had no time for it.

It's really interesting to look back on it now and realise that not liking the music was totally valid, you like what you like and at the time I didn't like it but thinking anything negative about Hayley Williams was just internalised misogyny. I feel like I heard people saying things about how "actually she's really difficult and annoying" "she's just a bitch" and if I hear things like that now I instantly question it but I just accepted it because I didn't know any better. "Yeah, she probably is." Why though?! I didn't know anything about her.
Looking back at it these claims don't seem to have had any basis in anything except people hating on her because she was a girl. A successful girl, that probably wasn't doing as she was told.

A typically pretty girl too, they were the worst. There was an ingrained hostility towards other girls. If a girl turned up and was lame, she'd make us all look bad. Plus she probably wasn't even actually alternative, she was probably just doing it for attention or something...It's all pretty fucked up, we were (are?) taught to hate each other so that we could fit into what the boys had decided was cool.
I was always a tomboy and as I got older I had to reclaim a lot of love for "girls" things because without even knowing it was a thing I'd taken on the whole "girls stuff is lame" "not like other girls" "urgh, I hate pink" sexist mentality. Not that you need to be into "girly" stuff but I definitely noticed times as I was getting older when I've liked something and felt like I had to justify it because it was pink and frilly (read: possibly lame) or whatever. And don't even get me started on the nonsense that is gender anyway, tbh using the binary "girls" and "boys" as "me" and "the other" has made me feel kind of weird but that's how I was experiencing it and how almost everything in our society is set up so let's keep it simple for now.

I love getting older. I like what I like now, and I like a confusing mash of things that doesn't make any sense, without worrying about it. I mean, I didn't consciously worry about liking the right things when I was a teenager but I've noticed since then that I must have been missing out on stuff. The not liking of something would have been genuine but I just didn't know it was because I was living surrounded by a quiet hatred of girls, especially in the alternative scene. Listening back to some music I did love is kinda horrible, singing along to some of that toxic bullshit was bound to worm it's way into how you see the world. It's nice to know it now and to know that something being made for and by girls doesn't make it lame. Ever.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm better informed now. And don't get me wrong, I thought Hayley Williams was lame and it turns out it was based in misogyny but I didn't think everything by women was lame, I was very much in love with Brody Dalle for example, oh Brody...

Finding out about how sexist everything is as I got older really opened me up to a lot of stuff and now when I hear something bad about a front-woman or equivalent I always question it for myself. I'd rather blindly have faith in someone and be proven wrong than to dismiss them based on false ideas.

And, for the record, I quite like listening to old Paramore now and let's face it, Hayley is super cool. And I kind of enjoy the irony that based on the lyrics in Misery Business, she was probably having to deal with similar issues.

Blog Challenge Start ~ 1/7

I'm not sure if this is just some sort of weekend frenzy that will stop being appealing in a day or two but I've had a thought.
I'm going to try blogging something every day. In my head I keep thinking "30 day challenge! 30 day challenge!" but I'm going to be more reasonable and set myself the goal of a 7 day challenge. One whole week of blogging.

In general I don't really want to blog just for the sake of it, without having something particular to share but I do want to get back into the habit so I'll try this.

When I was looking through photos for my 10 year post I realised that I don't really take photos of random every day things so much anymore. As phone cameras have got better I figured I was taking more photos day to day but just not with my fancy camera and I think I probably do but only of me, what I'm drawing and the rats. I obsessively document the rats but my phone camera isn't actually very good (not just low quality but in a frustrating, weird way, I think it tries too hard to be clever) so I don't think to take photos of other things with it but because I have in my mind this idea that I always have a camera on me I don't have my "proper" camera to hand as often. When I was going through photos from years ago I found myself wondering why I'd taken a particular photo that seemed to be of nothing or something mundane but at the same time I really enjoyed it and as I got further through the folders there was less and less of it.

I love love love documenting my life and I love seeing other people do it and the tiny little things that seem to not be important are often the nicest things to look back on, even when they don't make sense anymore.

This isn't a photo challenge though, just a blog one. Prompted by the want for more photos but not dictated by it so I can keep it easy.
I want to take more photos, share drawings, talk about things I've watched or read or listened to or maybe even to just write down ramble-y thoughts. I don't mind. I just want to blog more.

I feel like I had a period where I was more creative and growing in that way and then it dropped off while I had a difficult period of self-reflection (panic and breakdowns and crying) and realised a lot of things about myself and the world (wow that sounds corny) and now I just want to merge that all together and actually be content and happy with myself.

Patches and Salads

I'm almost finished with this batch of patches I've been working on. My new problem is that sewing the edging to finish them off is hurting my wrist so I'm having to take my time with it. Gotta look after your body.

Some lunches I liked the look of purely because of the cabbage and carrot. Adding a salad to a plate always makes it feel fancier lol I don't know why but that's how it is. With spring and the longer days I've been really craving fruit and veg. I'm also trying to take advantage of the fact that I can make myself a lunch if I want to. What's the point of giving up the routine and securities of a "proper" job (like getting paid >_<) and dealing with the difficulties (like not getting paid >_<) if I don't take advantage of this un-conventional lifestyle? So I've started chopping veg in the middle of the day without worrying about how long my lunch break might be. It feels pretty good.

Bondaweb upadate, it didn't really work lol. I don't know if I bought a crappy, cheap version or if I used it wrong or what but it was lame. Nevermind! You don't know till you try.
Hope your day is going better than my bondaweb :)

10 Years Old

I made my first post on this blog 10 years ago today!
I love blogs. They've changed a lot I think because of how many places there are now to share online and maybe because it became something that could be a job. I don't post as much as I want to because I worry about repeating myself across platforms, because it might be off-putting to people who follow me in more than one place but also because is it a waste of my time to upload things and talk about things in more than one place and then I should probably share where more people are looking if what I'm sharing is somehow linked to work. And I think most of what I have to post now is linked to work because I also wonder if at the minute I'm actually a bit more boring than I used to be and don't have much to share! Or maybe I've just lost the knack for it and I need to find it again. I don't know but I do know blogs feel special and I plan to keep having one.

I think maybe blogs having a smaller audience will help let me just have a place to share and ramble without worrying too much about it and it can be more and more like when I very first started blogging, even before this one, when there weren't established ways for a blog to be, people were just doing whatever they thought was cool. I think it's more common now for people to try and have an "online presence" that fits into certain rules of "successful" (to attract sponsors maybe) and these blogs seem to be easier to come across but don't tend to interest me and it seems harder to find personal blogs because I guess people just use instagram or twitter or tumblr because it's easier?
I wonder if it also has to do with more people being online. I feel like the internet used to be more for the weirdos and now it's for everyone and the average person is not a weirdo so there's going to be more stuff that I find boring and it's just harder to find the thing you like if it's mixed into a bigger pile of stuff than before.
(I'm using weirdo in a very broad sense, covering a variety of weirdo types. I'm not articulate enough to explain myself any better!) (And I'm not saying that if I find it boring it's bad, that's just personal taste.)

I'm not complaining, things change and that's fine. I'd love blogs to have a comeback though, they give me similar feelings to zines. Zines and blogs aren't quite the same but they do have that aspect of being able to just share whatever you like without it being attached to a load of other stuff. How you feel looking at something on a feed is going to be influenced by the other thing you saw a second ago and the thing you're already seeing next, whether you notice it having an influence or not. How you would connect with a post on a blog and the same post on a feed you're scrolling through is different and it's just something interesting to think about.

There are probably loads of active blogs that I would love, I just need to figure out how to find them! Please share yours if you have one! Or point me towards any you like.

Most of my posts on here will be broken now because I was using flickr for hosting my photos and they made changes recently and will have deleted most of my stuff :(
I went through my hard drives though and put together a little 4 x 4 for each year because I love a look back at photos and an anniversary is an obvious time to indulge in it ^-^

Thanks for reading to the end :3

Patchy Mistakes

I've been making some new embroidered patches this week. All of them except the newest one have gone wrong so far but it's ok because I can see why they've gone wrong and I will do them again better.

I have a really hard time doing things if they might go wrong. When it's work, wasted time and wasted materials can matter a lot. If I spend a whole week making mistakes then I haven't made anything I can get paid for. (even when I make lots of good new things I still might not get paid if they don't sell. haha, laugh away the panic.....)
But sometimes I worry so much about getting things wrong that I do nothing and that's so much worse than making mistakes.

I've said that here before I think but I'm saying it again because I'm now actually teaching myself to just do things and see what happens. It's hard to re-train yourself out of bad habits but it's really nice when you start to see it working.
So this week I spent time on these embroideries even when they started to go wrong so I could fully figure out what worked and what didn't and now I'll make some edits to some designs, choose some different threads and make them again and be proud of them.

I'll also be trying out some bonding web stuff (I've forgotten what it's called) to back them with instead of using felt like my other patches. I've never used it before and so need to learn it and also I want to see if it is something that can make my patches be "iron on" instead of "sew on". I'm happy to sew my patches and like that I could take them off and use them somewhere else but I assume a lot of people would prefer iron on? It'd be nice to have it as an option.
I can use the gone wrong embroideries to test the new webbing stuff so when I make mistakes with that it won't matter so much!

I also ordered a couple of coloured fat quarters on ebay, all my patches have been on calico till now, I'm looking forward to trying some coloured backgrounds. See how many mistakes I can make choosing threads to use on them :)

New Growth or something

I just wrote a very long, negative blog post and deleted it because it was not helpful.

I am tired, I have a poorly rat on my shoulder who every time he seems to be better gets worse again, I have eczema in my elbow that won't go away and is sore, I have no money and am in the middle of a creative block that is making me feel awful about myself and I feel utterly useless.

I am tired.

I don't think that talking about the negatives is a bad thing but I do think dwelling on them doesn't help either.

I need to figure out what I can do to make me feel better and focus on that.

What can I get done on the sofa while keeping Sharky company while he's ill.

What can I get done without needing to buy anything.

What can I do to improve my work and share it around online and maybe gain more audience.

I'm not sure I have any answers yet tbh but I need to change the direction of my thoughts. I need to take control, not everything is something I can control but I still have a lot of power over what I can and can't do and I need to figure out the best way to spend my time and how it will help me.

I need to make some positive changes. I'm going to be better.

Hello! I wrote the above last week and never posted it but here it is. I'm still feeling lost but I'm also feeling a bit better than I was. Nothing has really changed except Sharky is staying in the cage much more which makes things easier and although nothing has really changed I feel like I maybe can start changing things. I don't know, sometimes I feel like I'm just going round and round, not getting anywhere but sometimes I feel like maybe I can change that.
I need to get out more. I need to do more. I need to make more. I need to relax more. I just need to live. I let too many days pass me by hoping for better but then I'll run out of days right? Gotta just enjoy what I've got.