Well, its been a month since I last wrote and slowly the depression I was suffering from is lifting and life is getting back on track. When I was younger, I didn’t realise I suffered from depression but now I know its a family trait and I let it takes it course. Mine has fairly routine aspect to it as I notice I will have a period of greyness (its not dark or threatening) that will always appear about the end of August or the middle of September when the weather here can be oppressive.  It would worry me at first but now I just go with the flow and know that there is always a light at the end.  Other times it will just suddenly descend and again I just have to suck it up and get through it. Occasionally I will need medical help but that only really happened when my Son was going through a difficult teenage period. Art has always been there to help me through as even if I am not painting, drawing or whatever else, I crave to see good art even if its only on the internet. Recently I took up running and that seems to have a similar effect. So although I really don’t like running I will keep it up as long as I can.

Unfortunately I have not got back into the daily sketching routine. I do intend to take it up again but it needs to come back in its own time. For the moment I am taking sojourn from painting and returning to a more textile based art.  I am really excited by this but realised as I have not really worked in this medium for a while, that I needed to ease myself back into that mode. So I have taken up a project I started with the Beaded Journal group  in 2010. I really didn’t realise it had been that long ago that I started this.  I am pretty much self taught in regard to anything to do with beads, embroidery and material so it doesn’t put the same restraints I put on myself with painting.  So the bead project has 2.5 pages to complete.  I am currently on October  and this is what it looked like at the beginning of the month.

I began by removing a whole load of beads.I then started hand embroidering the lake/sea but it wasn’t getting the effect I wanted, so then I free machine stitched the right side of the picture. I also removed a lot of the felt.  Now I working on the trees with some hand embroidery.

It is slow work but very meditative. I put on my ipod and listen to several hours of music and podcasts.  My 2 favourites at the  moment are the British History ones and a BBC podcast called Art and ideas.  I try not to listen to the news too much, just an hour or 2 to keep abreast of what is going on in the US and sometimes, if impinges on the US universe, world news. I want to put my head in the sand and cut out all the horrible things going on in the world at the moment.

This the current stage of my project and I expect to finish this page by the end of the week.

Not a great image as I am without a camera again. (using my tablet camera which isn’t great)  Obviously something I need to add to my Christmas list this year (again) I have gone through about 4 cameras in the past 6 yrs!

As this is slow work I have decided to restart using my instagram account to keep up a daily progress diary. I have also discovered that Instagram is a great place to fine other artists working in mixed media, drawing, painting and textiles. Yet another addiction for me to contain. I have also created a Facebook page just for my artwork however, I really haven’t worked on it it yet.  There is link to my instagram page on the sidebar. Once I have sorted out the Facebook account I will link to that.