In a world where everything is breaking, mend whatever you can.

The words have been stuck. As though something in the smooth flow of brain to fingers, heart to throat, soul to spoken word, has shattered into irretrievable bits that I couldn't put back together, and the words were all everywhere and nowhere, building up like water against solid rock. What has always come so easy, …

Creative Call : #redflagsproject

When I was in my early twenties, I went on a date with a man who, as my Gran would say, could have charmed the birds from the trees. He was polite, opened doors for me, did that old fashioned waiting-til-you-sit-down-before-he-does thing. I remember sitting across from him at a Chinese restaurant he had chosen …

The Ballad of Lockdown Life

I don't think I have ever, in my life, struggled with finding words as much as I have this past 3 months. Lockdown life is bewildering, challenging, tearful, gloriously quiet, restful, heartachingly sad, furiously angry, grief filled, joyful, and all the feelings inbetween. Often all of the feelings all in one go, which is a …

Crafting Our Way Through Corona

Craft, whether of words or paint, yarn or cloth, has always been the beating heart of my life. The fuel that takes me through each day of my journey in this world. There has never been a time when I have not used creativity as a crutch to hold my head above the stormy waves …

Death in Corona

  My Dad died on the 17th of May 1996 - a Friday afternoon in a busy hospital, a stones throw from what is now my children's favorite park. I'd traveled up from Uni that morning, jumping on the first train I could get out of Liverpool Lime Street. Mum said he waited, as the …

Breathing Room and Rainbows

It is the strangest feeling to sit with the cursor blinking, unable to find enough words, the right words, any words to properly describe what is happening in the world right now. I've been writing, deleting, writing, for what feels like weeks. Feeling battered by the storm of stories, like an ocean full of currents, …

Can Hemp Equal Hope? Bringing Cannabis Sativa to The Climate Conversation.

In the time before plastic permeated every part of our lives, hemp was a valuable, sustainable, versatile plant that was cultivated without the hugely negative associations that have been fashioned around it over the last 100 years. A plant that can become food, medicine, textiles, shoes, rope, animal feed/bedding, building material, paper, insulation, bioplastic and …

Make it Better Soup

It's been a quiet start in our little house to this new decade. Much of December and all of January so far has been a blur of illness as one child or other, or me, has succumbed to the coughs, colds and winter infections that fly about so freely as this time of year. We've …

Thirteen. Waving All The Red Flags High. Unpicking the Stitches of Silence.

I've always loved it when the thirteenth day of the month falls on a Friday. Friday 13th, despite the negative patriarchal influence, has always been a positive day for me. Maybe somewhere in my DNA, there is the remembrance of the feminine importance of 13. The number of the divine feminine, representative of the thirteen …

Mending Clothes as an Act of Rebellion

I have often wondered when it was that Western society collectively decided that visibly mended clothes were a mark of reduced status. Of a life worth less. Where a patch or a darn was certainly not acceptable in polite company. Many cultures across the globe value and respect the energy that is used to create …