Tag: Susannah Conway

Happy New Year!

The Challenge

I was going to try and catch up with what I’ve been doing since the middle of November, when I last posted, but honestly I don’t really remember! I know there have been two craft fairs (a small one and a big one), and I’m sure Christmas was in there somewhere, amongst a whole lot of germs, but mainly I’ve just been going to work, coming home again, being ill, making hats, and trying to sell them. Not a lot else going on really. I was so poorly over Christmas that my niece doesn’t even have her annual dress yet!

I’m currently panicking like mad about having to go back to work on Monday, and still being a bit ill, and not having actually achieved anything with my time off over Christmas despite having lots of things planned. I’m trying very hard to take a little bit of time to myself, to write my work rota into my diary, get myself organised, and have a good think about what my goals need to be for the year ahead.

Honey and Ollie "One Word" bracelet

I’ve downloaded Susannah Conway’s Unravelling The Year Ahead workshop again (it’s free! go for it!), and have just completed a rather puzzling Oracle reading that I hope will become clearer as the year unfolds. I pulled an extra card to try and find some clarification, and was met with The Challenge… so that didn’t help much. I didn’t buy Leonie Dawson’s workbooks again this year, entirely because I never actually filled them in. The thought of having to make plans and examine my life in detail when all I wanted to do was NOT BE ILL was all a bit too much, to be honest. I may have rather cheekily printed out a clean copy, and am merrily changing all the 2014s into 2015s with a big fat marker pen. Sorry Leonie! Maybe next year…

I have, however, chosen a word that I want to be able to embody this year, and that word is focus. (I’ve also ordered another One Word bracelet from Honey & Ollie, to wear with last year’s.)

Last year I tried to do far too many things, with the net result that I didn’t put as much time and effort as I would have liked into the things I was really enjoying. I spent too long thinking about what might sell rather than what I wanted to make, and that just made me miserable.

This year it’s about three things:

HATS, SHOES and DOLLS.

Hats first, as I have a stand at a local wedding fair in three weeks’ time. Lots of preparation to do for that. But from February onwards, I’m hoping to be able to do some work on the other two.

Mind you, such a lot depends on my health, and of course first and foremost I need to be well enough (and stay well enough) to go to work. Whether I have the energy for HATS, SHOES and DOLLS after that remains to be seen.

Diary Time Again.

It’s that time of year again. It’s September, there’s a faint hint of autumn in the morning air, children are going back to school, students coming back to campus, and it’s nearly my birthday. (40 this year. How did that come around so quickly?) That can only mean one thing – time for a new diary.

This, as you can see, is last year’s photo. For 2013 I bought a Llewellyn Witches’ Datebook and a Spell A Day Almanac… both of which have remained almost entirely unopened, and definitely unwritten. A lot of the information was the same across the two books, so I could have easily picked just one. Next year I’m quite tempted by the Herbal Almanac, but whether I’ll actually use it or not is another matter.

This year I have been mostly using my phone as a calendar, but I have to confess that it hasn’t been going that well. I don’t synchronise my phone with my computer very often, and I add appointments into both, so when I do eventually get around to making the phone and the computer try to speak to one another, the poor things end up very confused. (As do I, of course.) This has resulted in family members not receiving birthday cards, my work rota being on my phone twice over,  and lots of bits of paper with appointments scribbled on them, which is what I was trying to avoid by keeping everything on the phone in the first place!

We’ve got the birthday thing sorted out now – or at least we will have when we move house. There’s a handy space on the side of the new fridge, so I’m going to print out one giant list of everybody’s birthdays, and pop them inside a picture frame. With the aid of a whiteboard pen, we can then write on the glass and tick off each birthday as we buy a gift or send a card. Perfect.

Despite years of rigorous searching, I still haven’t managed to find the diary that works exactly as I need it to. One day I’ll get around to designing my own, but neither Blurb nor Lulu offer the format and size that I really want, which is spiral bound A6, or thereabouts.

Photobox, on the other hand, now offer this:

It’s a standard photo diary, roughly 6×4″, which is spiral bound. It doesn’t squash the two weekend days into one space, which is a pet peeve of mine given that I work on some weekends and need a bit of room to write down what I’m up to. I like that it has appointments, and that you can start it on any month you prefer. You don’t seem to be able to change the layout for the smallest size, and I don’t know that I actually want a photo for every single week… but I could very easily drop in some jpgs of pretty frames or speech bubbles, which would give me a space for writing notes.

I’m balking slightly at the cost… £11.99 plus another £3.99 for shipping seems like quite a lot of money for a very little diary. But then if you consider the cost of all the diaries I’ve bought and simply never used, £16 suddenly seems not too bad. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.

And then, of course, there’s the other kind of diary. I’ve been reading The New Diary by Tristine Rainer (albeit an out-dated edition) as part of Susannah Conway‘s Unravelling course, which has a lot of writing exercises and prompts for different ways of using your diary as a resource for creativity as well as personal clarity. Although I’ve been keeping an online journal since 2002 and a public blog since about 2006, I haven’t kept a paper diary just for myself since I was a teenager. (I stopped being a teenager in 1993. Ouch.) My favourite Barbara Sher book, What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything?, recommends keeping some kind of planner which you can use to write down everything except for daily appointments. Thoughts, feelings, plans for the future, that brilliant idea that’s bound to be an overnight success… all the stuff I usually keep on bits of paper and discarded envelopes that later turn up all over the house. Now that we’re moving I think I have at least managed to corral them all into one box, but what I’ll do with them next, who knows.


Image © British Library

I don’t think I can quite aspire to the levels of creativity displayed in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (which is what many diary-writing aficionados will recommend as inspiration), but I can certainly aim for variety in subject matter. Scattered across various folders and envelopes I currently have ideas for aromatherapy products, herbalism studies, the conservation of Natural History collections in museums, dyeing textiles with plant material, making shoes… sewing plans of many different kinds… the list seems endless. However, I have now bought a simple spiral bound A4 sketchpad, that I can write and draw in with a nice ink pen. Perhaps if I have one central place for writing down ALL THE THINGS, it’ll be easier to make sense of it all as I go along. Chances of me actually writing in it on any kind of regular basis? Who knows. I haven’t even finished the writing exercises for Unravelling yet, and the course ended yesterday! I’m full of good intentions at the moment though, as I always am at the beginning of the academic year. So many possibilities, so much to learn! We’ll see how long it lasts…

Unravelling

27/05/2012

Starting today, and for the next eight weeks, I’ll be taking part in Susannah Conway’s “Unravelling” e-course. A bunch of women from all over the world will be getting together online, to share photos and respond to writing prompts, with the aim of getting in touch with our “real selves”.

See, I’m already so nervous about what anybody who might be reading this will think about it, that I’ve put “real selves” in inverted commas as an act of self defence. To show I’m not taking it too seriously. Except I am. I’m taking it very seriously indeed.

There are a lot of things going on in my life at the moment. You’re aware of the surface details – my job has changed, I’m struggling with my health, we’re moving house. I’m also going to be 40 this year, and phrases such as “mid life crisis” are being thrown around. After we’ve moved, Paul and I want to change some of our routines, improve the way we live. I certainly want to improve and change the work I do outside of my “proper job”, and to think more deeply about why I’m doing it, and what it means to me.

I won’t be sharing everything I do for the course here, although I will certainly share some of the thoughts that come out of it. The first assignment will be posted later today, and I’m both nervous about it and looking forward to it at the same time. Let the unravelling begin… I can only hope that I don’t fall apart in the process.