It's so fluffy, it's so fluffy I could die!

I am officially a home-made gift giver!  It feels so great!  Granted the gift was two and a half months late (considering that it took substantially longer to make than I was expecting).  But I finally gave my very fluffy gift to my very precious Amy-friend last night (her birthday was in August)!!!

I am now walking in the elation of how lovely it feels to put time, effort, energy and care into creating something for a dear friend.  Now, the only problem is that I have many dear friends ... and each dear friend will have, on average, approximately one birthday per year.  Not to mention Christmas, weddings, stork parties, pamper parties ... gleep!  If my track record of two months is anything to go by, this means that I can give exactly six gifts per year.  This poses a problem.  I am also over a month late on giving a home-made wedding gift that I have been working on since August (granted, the project was a tad over-ambitious).

So, I have decided to put forth a proposal.  We all spend time and money donating to various causes: floods, earthquakes, orphans, trapped Chilean miners to name but a few.  Would anyone be interested in just giving me lots and lots of money so that I can spend all day making home-made gifts for my friends?  Such a person would really be quite a lovely person.  I would make that person many gifts in order to show my gratitude.
 
Sigh, I can only but hope ...

Baby Steps

I am a real gift person.  Not the receiving of, but rather the giving of!  I love fussing over presents and making them super personal.  I value my friends and want them to feel treasured and important.  At the moment I also feel as if my life is exploding (excuse the possible pun) with pregnant people.

Having been inspired by one of my friends who does felt work, I decided to look for some patterns.  To my unexpected delight I found a pattern for baby shoes.  I was trying to think of unique and personalised gifts for my pregnant friends and this seemed to be the perfect solution.  I eagerly dashed out to buy the necessary supplies and got to it.

After just one day I was addicted!  Yesterday I was sitting and making a little pair for my cousin's daughter, Grace, who will be joining us in January when a lady asked what I was doing.  I explained and she asked if she could order a pair!!!  She also asked if she could take a sample pair to her gift shop to take orders and sell.  How exciting - a random idea for a new hobby could have me rolling in the money.  Ok, maybe not really, but I can at least dream of a lucrative future funded by crafting and creativity.

I have decided to call the little shoes 'Life Steps'.  This was inspired by a course I did a few years ago that really changed my life.  The course looked at the importance of words and how they can become self-fulfilling prophesies that you speak over people.  So say for example a child fails a test and the parent responds by saying "I was expecting this", the child builds his or her identity based on the perceived truth behind the words that have been spoken over him or her by the parent.  So - through speaking affirmation and life-giving words over people, we can help to release them into large destinies and futures.  What better time to start than when you are a wee tot.  So - the shoes will have the baby's name on one foot and then a life-giving word associated with that name on the other foot.  For example: "Gideon" and "Strength".  I will post pics of my very first pair as soon as I have got my head around how to upload photos here.

I'm excited!

Dinner for one

I went to a great Lebanese restaurant with some good friends last night.  As I sat sipping my Turkish coffee and listening to my friends chatting and enjoying being in one anothers' company I realised that this was why dining was created.  A relaxed atmosphere filled the venue and all around were groups of friends conversing over something delicious or a hubbly bubbly.  No one seemed too stressed or too worried.  Within the walls of this space people seemed to understand life.  The ambiance seemed to spill out onto the pseudo-European street below and everything somehow made sense in the laughter-filled air.

I realised that my day-to-day dining experience is quite different from this.  In fact, it is usually the kind of dining experience that would encourage indigestion.  I live alone in a space that optimistically names itself a 'flat'.  My entire life actually fits above two parked cars.  I suppose you could make it sound grand by calling it a 'garage loft', but no amount of fancy linguistic manipulation will change the fact that my abode is small.  So small in fact that I only have a counter top and no stove.  I have a microwave and an electric frying pan, but when I place the electric frying pan onto said counter top, I have no space to chop my ingredients.  A dilemma indeed!  I also find it somewhat of an anti-climax to spend ages preparing an intricate meal only to eat it by myself.  Doing this somehow seems an insult to the very nature of dining.  It reduces the event to a mere act of consumption (the activity, not the illness).  As a frequent solo-diner, I am prompted to not only ponder but also solve this problem.  I arrive at three possible solutions:
1) Invite friends to my 'garage loft' to enjoy the fruit of my culinary labour.  I love doing this and do it as often as possible, however, a further problem with my space is that there is no space for a dining room table and there is only seating space for three people (two of whom need to be dating because the double couch is actually more of an intimate 'one and a half' couch).  In the summertime, this option extends to another favourite: garden picnics.
2) Create quick, easy yet satisfying solo meals.  This option is a winner.  I have been experimenting with couscous of late.  Chilli flakes, avo, feta, peppadews, olives, tomatoes, some pepper and olive oil all mixed in with a bowl of freshly made couscous is enough to make me smile for a while.
3) The all-time favourite (which is hindered only by budgetary constraints) ... spend lazy evenings eating in exotic restaurants and enjoying the company of good friends over a glass of red wine.  Bliss.

Of course, I could also toss all the above solutions and just continue with 'the same procedure as last year'.

Inspiration

To get the ball rolling, I'm going to add the links to the four webpages that I love visiting.  They all give me ideas and inspire me.  I wish I could take credit for the ThreadBanger one, but it's thanks to my precious Jen-friend that I found out about it.
Have a squizz and enjoy!

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/
http://www.threadbanger.com/blog
http://www.backyardbill.com/
http://www.craftideas.info/index.html

Hello World, this is me!

The pressure of writing the first line of your first blog is quite overwhelming.  You want to be profound, quirky and interesting without sounding pretentious or cliched.  I'll just kick-start by saying that I am a 28-year-old Drama teacher.  However, I'm sure that sentence is not quite enough or quite sufficient for an introductory blog ... the blog that is meant to 'wow' the world.

So, I'll start by explaining why I decided to start blogging ...

Growing up in a small Eastern Cape town was not exactly the most inspirational experience for anyone who had even a hint of creativity within them.  So, in order to channel my energy, I wrote ... and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.  However, when I got to university there were endless opportunities for artistic expression and I somehow managed to stop writing creatively.   I then started a Masters degree in Drama; ironically at the point in my life at which I should have been the most creative, I was sucked dry by cold academic writing.  This blog is thus an attempt to bring to life again the seed that was planted when I was at school.  Forgive me if it rambles ... it is a personal exercise in re-inspiring a love of writing again.

I also feel as if I am at a point in my life when reflection is neccessary.  I am at that age when my inner adventurer longs to pack up and go, but the emerging adult within is begging me to be sensible.  I feel as if my life is filled with paradoxes at the moment.  It is a time when I am realising that I have held onto the 'if you can dream it, you can achieve it' mantra just long enough to realise that it isn't neccessarily true.  However, I have also come to realise that sometimes the unexpected paths that life takes you on can be even more fulfilling and exciting.  It is a time when I am facing real disappointment, but I am also enjoying real excitement about what lies ahead.  It comes at a time when I am frustrated by what I hoped life would be by the time I was 28, but I am also excited by what it can still be because of the very fact that it is not what I had hoped it would be.  At the moment, life is a threshold.  It comes at a time when I have a salary, but not such a good one that I don't need to phone my mom to help me out when the steering rack on my car breaks; a time when I know exactly what I want my home to look like, but can't yet quite bring that vision into reality.  I think this is what they call the 'quater-life crisis'.  Mine just arrived three years late.  This is the time in which I can see, enjoy and appreciate what I do have, but I am also aware of the picture that is just over the horizon.  Most importantly, it is a time in which I am making sense of my faith and of my Creator.  I question, grapple and grow day by day.

I have also recently started crocheting.  I always loved crafts and grew up in a home where it was not unusual for my mom to arrive with all the equipment that was needed for us to do some or other artistic activity (this creative outlet was possibly what saved me from becomming an accountant!!!).  As a result of my journey into the world of yarn and needles, I have also discovered many other artistic outlets (thanks to my precious friends Jen and Zanmarie) and this blog will serve to journal these discoveries as well.

So, (to quote Austin Powers) - "this is me in a nutshell" and this is a space for me to grow in my ability to write, to grapple with life and to share any bits and pieces that inspire me.  Basically a creative mish-mash of what's going on in my mind and life at any given time.

I hope that you enjoy what is to come.