Bet you wondered where I disappeared to?

Hi everyone

Well, its certainly been a very eventful 6 months.  I've had not one, but two top drawer health scares in 6 months, which is quite something.  Obviously I'm very pleased to say both turned out fine, but I have spent hours in hospital waiting rooms and long days and nights, over many months, tormented by thoughts of my own mortality.  I look back now and realise I was actually living in a sort of parallel universe for most of it?  Weird really did, get weirder??

And now, as if it was all almost imaginary, I'm back in reality, in the moment, in the throes of survival, work, relationships, responsibilities and basically real life again....?

Healing is a very mysterious thing, to be sure.   Its much stranger than we will ever know.  They tell you to be positive, well you know what, I found this time that trying to relax and stay positive was actually making me feel worse and as if I was hiding from reality - as it was then...

In fact I only started to really 'heal' when I resigned myself to the idea of my number being well and truly up and analysing how much of a mess I was leaving behind me?

I feel I have been on this incredible journey, or rollercoaster.......it wasn't a rollercoaster, it was more like floating in space, or at sea, being away from things that make you comfortable and somehow floating into the unknown???

It was hard people, I mean really really hard and it had to be kept private, totally private, or else I would never have coped.

Finally, I was given the all clear.  Well that makes you numb, then confused, then a bit angry, then very very relieved.

But the really weird thing was, after I was given the all clear, I noticed a very strange feeling came over me.

Basically I've lost a great deal of fear?

This has translated into all kinds of weird and wonderful escapades, where to put it succinctly, I now trust my instincts much more than I used to and this has altered my approach with just about everything.  This really is a new beginning for me now...

One of the really strange things that's happened is I've gone to look for things and found evidence of so much indecision?  So many things mixed in with ideas that should have been about something else?

So the operative word now is purge, and I'm certainly purging!  Huge chunks of detritus are just flying out of the door.  Things I've held on to for so long and realised they were in fact a waste of time all along.  The feeling of letting things go, of streamlining my life, of having a clearer direction, are all the result of this strange dissipation of long held notions of fear.

Anyway, enough about being a mere mortal, here's something I made a while back.  I remember I wasn't feeling terribly optimistic at the time, as a family member was becoming unwell and I needed something to take my mind off things, that wasn't too demanding.

What's interesting about this little appliquéd bird is I used Egyptian applique technique, as seen on YouTube.  Its a great way of applying complex shapes and I'll talk about that more next time.

Here are my ripening blackberries, don't they look promising...

Here is an image of textile blackberries from the Restoration mirror at Salisbury Museum I told you about last time...yum yum

I'll leave you with a picture of a rose I grew... remember folks, art only ever imitates nature...nature is The Queen!