Arte y Pico

Annica of Fabulous Threads gave me this blogging award – thank you, Annica, I’m very honoured to receive it.

There are 5 rules attached to this award and they are :

  1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter what language.
  2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his/her blog to be visited by everyone.
  3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her/him the award itself.
  4. The Award winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte Y Pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
  5. To show these rules.

And five bloggers who I think deserve this award…

Caroline :: Carolineinckle’s Weblog
Monika :: Red 2 White
Margaret :: margaret-cooter
Liz :: Dreaming Spirals
Amy :: Red Fish Circle

awards

I’m feeling doubly honoured this week at receiving two blogging awards and I’m going to post about each one separately to avoid mixing myself up… so…

Monika of Red 2 White gave me the Thinking Blogger award – thank you, Monika, you made my day 😀

Now the hard bit – there could have been many more on this list but these are five blogs that have made me think recently:

Magsramsay
Solveigh Goett’s The Textile Files
FlyingColours – Juanita Sim
Neki Desu’s A Moveable Feast
Inspiraculum – Melinda Schwakhofer

plus – always – Jude’s What If

And these are the rules…

Congratulations, you won a thinking blogger award!

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme. 

The participation rules are simple:

  1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
  2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
  3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

That was that! Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all – blogs that really get you thinking! It is the first time I am starting something with my blog so I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt me.

Happy link-love-sharing, whatever it is!

Happy Easter

I’ve been away a lot over the last week or so, and seen both daughters (which was lovely) so I haven’t done anything textile-related, nor been reading blogs or blogging. But I didn’t want to let today go by without posting Easter greetings. Though it felt more like Christmas this morning as we woke to the heaviest snowfall of the year so far – Tansy thought it was wonderful – here she is wading happily across the garden.

dog in the snow

At our church we have a tradition of decorating an empty cross on Easter Sunday morning with spring flowers to celebrate joyful new life after the darkness of Good Friday. Each person comes to add something, and in a few minutes wood and wire are transformed into a vibrant swathe of colour.

cross of flowers

“Spring comes: the flowers learn their coloured shapes.” Maria Konopnicka

TIF Challenge March 1

Sharon’s Take it Further Challenge for March is about small things

Do you ever notice the little things, the small moments, the details in life? This month’s challenge is to do just that, pay attention to the tiny details. Sometimes the small things become emblematic for something larger.

This reminded me of one of my favourite quotes – I heard it on the radio, and later tracked down to an American writer, Donald Windham:

It is ordinary to love the marvellous. It is marvellous to love the ordinary.

However, while I aspire to a mindful, noticing way of living, my brain has never really cooperated. I’m either not paying much attention at all – I wander about in a daze, life gets very black and white and the small things pass me by. Or else I’m getting so focused on the detail that I stop making connections or even remembering why I was there in the first place. Finding the middle ground where I really breathe and look and listen… it’s a struggle, and it takes a lot of energy.

So, I’ve decided this month (thinking small) just to spend a bit of time focusing on two little things I like a lot.

1. dots – look around and find them, draw them, paint them, stitch them. I’d like to join them up too. Maybe I could take my February challenge a little further by experimenting with joining dots by machine.

2. dogs – (actually just one). Tansy, being a Tibetan spaniel, is very little and very much emblematic for larger things – joy, love, faithfulness, for example. Sometimes I draw her and as I’ve been thinking for a while it would be good to have a go at drawing her with the sewing machine, I’m challenging myself to do that this month .

tansy.jpg

I think, too, during March, I’ll seek out poetry that inspires me to stop and look, starting with the wonderful celebration of difference, Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins.