The kindness of strangers

Well, after my post of yesterday, I felt I ought to re-dress the balance.   I recently placed an order for some cards from March Pane Pig.  The wonderful Gretel from behind March Pane Pig & Red Flannel Elephant came on over to my blog and read about the troubles I’d been having and took the trouble to drop me a wonderful convo.  Its was breath-takingly kind, and a much needed boost.   Well, the cards arrived, and they are some of the most beautiful cards I have ever seen.  The illustrations are simply gorgeous and if I can bear to send them to my very nearest and dearest will be very well received. The quality is fabulous too, so if you fancy some beautiful cards I’d heartily recommend them.

Here’s the listing I purchased.

 

The gate behind the name

Okay, so I said I would explain about the name behind the new shop.  Well firstly, as you can see – it’s a gate!

I’ve passed this gate so many times over many a year, and it has become something of a joke between my husband and I.   I still remember the first time I saw it – the metalwork all glorious in white, livestock in the field behind it and on a lovely sunny evening.  I remember exclaiming how beautiful it was.  I did the same the next time we drove past it, and the time after that.  When we next passed the gate and right before I could say how much I liked it – my husband told me how beautiful it was.  Naturally that prompted a wry smile and a comment about how I always comment on the gate.  Now, whenever we pass it we both comment on it, and give a silly smile to each other.

It has aged somewhat since the first time I saw it. Its metal work now covered by a creeping sea of lichen. It doesn’t diminish its loveliness, just makes me worry for its future. Somebody sometime had this gate made – was it the name of the farm, their family, an animal? Now it just looks a little lovelorn, a bit forgotten. Clearly the field is still in use – a hardy flock of sheep were grazing when I arrived to take it’s photograph.  I did remark to my husband that I’d like to buy the gate one day… he thinks I am joking, or maybe he hopes I am.  Actually I think I might be quite serious about it.  Its strange to feel such an affinity with an item that doesn’t even belong to me, but the gate means a lot to me.  It’s got a shared history with my husband, and it reminds me of my childhood – standing on a 5 bar gate at the end of the drive watching the tractors and farmers pass by.  The gate harks back to a time long ago – a comfortable past, it’s friendly and I know I should be upset should I ever drive past and the gate is missing.

For me Turvys the shop is about good old fashioned customer service, providing a useful, beautiful and unique product, and creating memories for the recipient.  Look out for silk lined tea cosies in the shop tomorrow.

 

I’m back!

Whew – I can’t believe it has been almost a month since I last posted.  A lot has happened.  Some of it good and some of it not so good.  Firstly lets deal with the not so good.  I suppose that anyone who ’speaks’ in the public domain has to accept that there will be those who decide to be critical.  Well it happened to me, I was contacted via my Etsy store and suffered a fair diatribe of unpleasantness.  It wasn’t nice and I don’t think it was deserved, but it made me question my approach.  How much did I want to expose myself to criticism? How much did I actually want to carry on anyway?  What was the point?

Things with our daughter haven’t been much better either.  She has decided that she no longer wants to live with us, and so she is being so very unpleasant so that we might indeed change our mind and no longer want her with us.  That isn’t the case and its not likely to be.  That’s not to say that it isn’t hard to listen to her hurl abuse at us or scream or rage or be violent towards us, but we love her, and it really is as simple as that.  No matter what I’ll always be there for her, but it hurts that she just can’t let herself trust in us.  Just how much pain and suffering has she gone through to have an inherent belief that adults can not be trusted.   My current favourite tune is Adele’s ‘Make you feel my love’ – the words are just so appropriate for us, the following is the very last verse.

“I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
Nothing that I wouldn’t do
Go to the ends of the Earth for you
To make you feel my love”

We will get there and one day I’m sure we’ll all look back on these dark days and feel grateful that we hung on in there together.  I’ve also realised that blogging does me the power of good.  It keeps me focused on what’s important to me.  It makes me take time for myself, so I’m going to commit to being a better blogger too!

In other news – the enforced break has helped me to re-evaluated where I am, where I want to be and more importantly how I’m going to get there!  When I first started making things – almost 10 years ago, I just made things for me, and then I started making things for others, as gifts, or because they asked me to.  Then we adopted and I started making things for the children, and then for their friends and eventually I realised that I would get no peace from my friends and family if I didn’t start my own online store.  My little sister is fairly formidable and so she was the final one to convince me.  Thanks Casi!   Now how I went about this wasn’t really thought about rationally but rather a bit hit and miss, and suddenly Made by Cara was created.  I’ve been online now for just over a year and its been good.  I’ve made mistakes though, and gone down paths I really wish I hadn’t!  I’ve enjoyed attending craft fairs and meeting people, something that’s quite hard for me, as I’m actually quite a shy person.  I’ve made friends in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible.  Above all else though is that I’ve changed and MadebyCara just wasn’t really everything I wanted it to be, and so at the end of October I opened another store on Etsy with my new moving-it-forward plan.  The new store is named Turvys and in time will be the new permanent home for me.  I’ve got a few listings in there, things from the old store that I’ll be carrying forward, and in time the old store will just lapse into the ether.

For now though – thank you for those who’ve been popping back to see where I am, and send me supportive messages, you know who you are, and you have been a real prop to me.

She’s back and we’re moving forward

C x

 

Dark evenings

The dark evenings seem to be catching lots of us out in blogland.  It seems to be a re-curring theme on many of the blogs that I read.  It caught me out again today – the light was just wonderful this morning, so I sat and sewed, and then round about an hour ago it dawned on me that I still have no photos of the new tea cosies and aprons I’ve been working on this week.  Hopefully I’ll have good light tomorrow and I can release some pictures to you all

In other news – work on the house continues, the bathroom is getting there – although the plumber brought me a crate of cooking apples, so he is in my seriously good books.  I just have to get baking now.

The Vomiting Veronica’s that were my children over the weekend are now all fully recovered and back to true health, and I’m almost caught up with the ironing pile – thanks to the lovely assistance from my husband

My daughter wanted me to share this with you, she isn’t always the demon child , she loves Strictly Come Dancing (as do I) and this was her a couple of years ago getting her dancing certificate off her beloved Vincent and Flavia.  On the anger front – therapy continues, and I just have to remember that when she is angry although she is lashing out at me her anger inside is really directed at birth mum who didn’t look after her.  It’s a tough one, but we’ll get there.

 

House Work

Gosh it’s a dreary old day today.  Its raining that ‘drizzle’ that just gets everywhere.  The clouds are hanging low and there’s a real chill to the air.  Of course it also means that the ‘light tent’ that I decided NOT to get would have been really useful today.  I’ve no new photos of the new things I’ve sewn to show you yet, but I think you’ll like them.

Anyway – here is a shot of our apple harvest, which incidently was so much better than last years 3 apple offering.  Together with some photos of the work on our house… which is taking forever !!!

You’ll have to forgive the state of the floors and the not finished walls… work is still continuing, with a new bathroom going in today and tomorrow.

 

Christmas Puddings

Not the felted variety but rather the edible variety

The point of me going for lunch with my dad and his wife yesterday was to take over my pudding basins so they could be filled with pudding mixture.  I arrived without the basins, which wasn’t very bright!  Jane thankfully got me out of a hole by measuring out the right amount and putting it in a bag for me.  So this morning I’ve got two puddings steaming with a further 4 individual ones in a bain marie in the oven.

Not to outdone by all this steaming – I’ve decided to add to it by making a steamed steak & kidney suet pudding for tea.  I’m not a great pastry cook – but suet crust I can do, I mean how difficult can flour, suet and cold water be   I love that this takes such little time to prep – the butcher cut up the steak for me, the kidney is hardly taxing to dice, and neither is slicing an onion, and in they all go, uncooked in to the pastry lined bowl and then its just a quick steam* and tea is all done.

*quick steam = 5 hours!!

 

We Make Christmas

Yep, I’ll be there – because nothing beats Christmas, hand crafted and London!

 

Lavender & Flowers

My scrap tub is looking a little full, so in an effort to use a little of it up I’ve been cutting out petals to make flowers for some more lavender sachets.  Cutting out the petals, pinning and sewing them onto the cotton fabric takes a little time, but they are so pretty, I think its worth it.

Now I just need to get them into the shop...

 

The joys of BBCi

When BBCi first launched I downloaded the iPlayer – only for it not to work on my computer, which was fairly rubbish!  However, being addicted to costume dramas is fine – but not if you miss the final episode of said dramas.  I missed the last episode of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and I wasn’t terribly happy about it.

Last night I thought I’d see if I could get the iPlayer to work – and they’ve changed it, its no longer a download programme thingy-me-bob, but more like YouTube.  That brought a smile to me, particularly as I was then able to watch the said last episode – and get some sewing done too, well at least that was the plan.  In fact I got very little done, the drama was so captivating, and I certainly couldn’t sew at the end for all the tears.  I wonder just how many real Tess’ there were.  Such a sad end.

 

Absence makes the heart grow fonder…

I’m really not sure how to start this post, or even particularly where it will go, suffice to say I have not blogged for a while and felt that there really should be an explanation as to why.  It also might explain periods of quietness in the future too.

We are having a really tough time of it at the moment, and I’m finding it hard to carry on.  Our two children were diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder earlier this year.  We met the very lovely and inspirational Nancy Thomas, and 4 months from starting the theraputic parenting things have changed.  Our son seems much more centred and at peace with himself.  He has his moments – but no more than I’d expect any 8 year old child, and least of all a child who suffered such trauma and neglect in his early life.

Which moves me on to my daughter.  She has always suffered with violent episodes, directed at me.  These were very intense and frequent.  Following a period of play therapy these calmed somewhat, and whilst the violence increased – the episodes decreased.  However she was 5 when she came to us, five years ago, and considerably stronger and taller than she was then.  Over the summer – and possibly as a result of the theraputic parenting techniques we are using following on from Nancy’s Eagle Camp, things got worse.  She’d have rages more frequently – accusing us of being bad parents, bullies, mean etc, and whilst I accept that most children have these feelings towards their parents (who clearly have never been children themselves…), she truely believes that our sole purpose in life is to be unfair to her.  Then the rages progressed from just angry rages into violent rages directed at objects in her room, and then finally back at me again.  Whilst on our family holiday she tried to run away because I ate a chocolate bar – evidence of just how truely awful I was to her.  It took both my husband and I to physically hold her for an hour before she calmed down.  I pitied the other campers on the site, who’d witnessed the raging, swearing, kicking, biting and hitting from her to both my husband and I.  Since then we’ve had angry rages at least once a week, typically over seemingly trivial matters, and combined with this she always hits or kicks me now with these rages.  This morning she told me that I “deserved” it as she hit me.  Life here is really hard at the moment.  I love her, but I seemingly can’t reach her.  In our therapy session yesterday she seemed a different girl, snuggling up to me, smiling at me and I find it difficult to correlate that to the raging child I had this morning.  I’m left feeling hurt and sad, mainly because I find myself starting to wonder about her true feelings towards me.  I’m wondering how honest her protestations of love were yesterday whilst in the therapy session – or were they just words to placate me?  And I feel truely awful for even thinking those thoughts.  I find notes from her telling me she is sorry for stealing money from me, and the next day my purse will be lighter again.  This morning started because I wanted to talk to her about why she ate all of my hot chocolate – my father treated me to a gift bag of luxury foodie treats for my recent birthday, including a tin of belgian chocolate drops to make chocolate milk, of which I’ve been saving for the colder weather.  My husband found the tin empty this morning.  Isolated this incident sounds trivial and indeed it is, but I wanted to ask her why she’d done it, and instead both my husband and I were subjected to a barrage of abuse, swearing, a threat to run away and culminated in her hitting me.

She’s ten, physically strong and I don’t want anymore bruises and cuts from her, and yet, I love her more than she’ll seemingly ever know.  This pain is causing so much stress and hurt in our home, its keeping me from my friends – I don’t want them to think ill of my beloved daughter, my mum is worried for my safety, as is my dad, and our once happy home is currently just a house full of tension, regret and guilt.  Its not a good time.