Turkeys.

I stare with sad fascination at the little crinkle in the middle of my neck.

I remember when my mother, probably at a similar age announced to me “My neck is going!” Going where I wondered. How does one’s neck “go”.  Well, the mirror shows me, this is how it goes.  Gravity.

A thought intrudes – “It’s a shame I’m not a man and can grow a big bushy beard to hide this business.” And then admonish myself because aging should not be, is NOT, shameful! It’s a testament to having survived – living well and laughing long and loud.

I will remember not to wear anything too tight around my neck, because, and I have seen this most often with men… if you wear a shirt collar that’s too tight around all that loose, saggy skin you end up with a vagina – or to be more precise, a vulva in your neck. It’s true. Look at Trumps neck.  

I stare at this little crinkle in my neck with sadness because it’s a reminder that I’m going to die. Morbid I know, but it’s true. Sadness because I’m no longer young, even though inside this head of mine I am still sixteen and full of nonsense, silliness and exuberant passion for certain things – like art, and creativity, and justice, and being kind to animals! Sadness because time is just passing so very frighteningly fast and I worry that I haven’t lived or loved enough.

I stare at it with fascination because this human experience has been and IS fascinating. There’s a part of me that has always felt like I’m living some kind of weird science experiment. In this head full of nonsense I sometimes wonder if I’m an alien in a human body sent here to experience this thing called “being human” because for so much of my life I have felt like I just don’t quite belong.

I suppose the reason why I am noticing this crinkle even more is because I will soon be travelling back to the mainland and time has passed since I’ve seen family and friends. I wonder if they will notice it. Give me a hug and then stand back and exclaim.  “Oh my, just look at that major crinkle you have going on there! Or…. “Gawd! What on earth happened to your neck?”

 I will take a scarf. Or quickly grow a beard.

Of course they won’t say anything. It will be like the elephant in the room the whole time.  “Psst… for Gods sake, don’t mention her neck!”

Ha! No I will stick my neck out with pride…It’s only a short neck mind you, but still I will stick it out and waggle all the crinkly bits with wild abandon!

I cannot stop the passage of time. Have no control over gravity, but I “can” control how loud and long I laugh, especially at the ridiculousness of this business of  being human.

From the mouths of babes.

My daughter, two year old grandson and I went to the doctor the other day . My appointment was first. When I’d left the waiting room two elderly ladies came in, sat down and were smiling at my grandson. He stood there, as two year olds do, staring at them, sussing them out. Then he pointed to his nappy and announced “Penis in there!”

Oh God. I mean, do little girls declare their private parts to strangers?

This is the beginning of a lifelong affair.

Someone on Facebook commented “Heads and shoulders, penis toes….” Now I will never get that out of my mind.

Loki – the Sphynx.

This is our new family addition. Loki. He’s 12 weeks old and full of energy! Loki loves to sit on peoples shoulders, or heads, loves snuggling round your neck in bed. He “talks” a lot, even to himself! As I am typing this he is playing with a toy on the floor where they can bat at a toy mouse and it spins round and round inside the toy giving peeks of it as it whizzes around. He’s having a very loud animated conversation with himself about it.

We have two other furry adult cats who have seen him only through glass and they are very confused and concerned. I’m a bit concerned because his hairless tail looks exactly like a thick rats tail! We will take it very slow with the introductions until we are sure they know that he is actually a cat.

My husband for whatever reason was determined to get a Sphynx. I would have been happy with another rescue cat but after all these years he wanted a “fancy cat”. I must admit, one you get past how odd he looks (and I think he looks perpetually worried) he is pretty cute and very very affectionate!

So just a brief introduction. I’m sure there will be many more photo’s to come!

Oh and the reason we chose “Loki” as a name is because, from our reading to sum it up it means the Norse God of chaos and mischief” I hope we are not dooming ourselves with that name. Ha!

Long time no see – (can’t see.)

For a week now I’ve been spraying Dove Dry Shampoo under my armpits wondering why my deodorant had stopped working.

This is what life is like now at 55.

If only I could see to read labels on bottles.

It’s  been a long time since I started this blog and even longer since I was writing with frequency.

I don’t even know if people still read blogs?  So much has changed and is changing in this crazy new world.

I came back here to find a post that it seems I never wrote which is quite strange because it was one of the most defining moments in my life so I can’t understand why I never posted it. I was in such a hurry to write it recently – (“Three strangers in a dark night”) that I never even paid the courtesy to my almost non-existent followers to do a “Hey I’m back and this is why I was gone for so long” post.

I’m well and truly middle aged now and life has completely changed.

We were stagnating before, living in the same place, doing the same thing, year after year, rinse and repeat.

We took a giant leap of faith and left everything in NSW and moved to Tasmania.

After a lifetime of renting we finally bought a house – a beautiful 100 year old house in a tiny country town in the North east.  Our friends didn’t believe we would actually do it!

It’s a large house and we’re living with my youngest daughter, her partner and my new 2 year old grandson (fourth grandson!) We’re paying it off together until my husband retires and then we’ll move into the second house we just recently bought. Never thought we’d see the day.

It’s heaven here. So much glorious nature. Peace and quiet, beautiful long walks through the countryside. There is a pond with two platypus in it a short walk from home. Pademelons on the rail trail that we walk regularly. Fields of glorious green, misty mountains, honestly it is like paradise compared to our years of living in stifling suburbia.

My husband and I often pinch ourselves looking at the beautiful surroundings and say “We should have done this years ago.”  Things happen for a reason though and all the planets aligned the way they did and I truly believe we moved here right when we were supposed to and that was, of all years, the year that Covid hit.

What a year!  Of all the moments to risk everything and buy a house in a place where we didn’t know a single soul – during a pandemic. “The Great Toilet Paper Apocalypse” as I refer to it now.

I continue to create art, in many forms. My husband and I still make candles so we frequent the market scene here. It’s been a rough start with that. Times are tough, people don’t have a lot of money these days, especially here, but I cannot NOT create.

I’ve joined a belly dance group, made a few friends. People in Tasmania are overwhelmingly friendly and chatty! It’s lovely to feel part of a community and to have “roots” now.

So, life is pretty darn good, we thankfully now have plenty of toilet paper and my armpits are squeaky clean, dry, and I won’t need to shampoo them for quite some time.

The breathing.

I know it’s been years since I’ve written in this blog but all of a sudden I feel compelled to write again and at the moment for whatever reason the memory of these experiences are resurfacing for me and I just need to get them down in written form.

When I turned eleven my parents separated, and my brother went to live with my father and I stayed with my mother.

We moved into a small flat in the middle of “flat city”.

It was a hard time for us, especially for my mother as we had just moved to Australia from Africa a year before, so there we were without the support of extended family and my mother had to find a way now to support us.

We had a few odd things happen in that place pretty much from the beginning. One of which I clearly remember was that the TV would keep turning on by itself in the middle of the night and this was back in the day when there were no TV remotes so you had to actually push a button to turn it on. It could have been some electrical fault or something, but nevertheless it was a bit unsettling especially to my mother.

I was about twelve when two of my friends started sleeping over and I had told them about some of the odd things happening so we decided to have a séance. I didn’t have a Ouija board so we created our own version of a séance using a candle. We would sit in a circle around the candle and ask questions “Is anyone there, please make your presence known.” and the candle flame would either flicker or suddenly grow really long and tall and we’d pretend that “something” was communicating with us. It was all naïve playful foolishness and we enjoyed scaring ourselves every time we did it. Something began to change though over time.

It was a tiny flat but my father had bought me a piano which was in the lounge room. After these “seances” this piano began playing notes by itself in the night. Not just “ping”- one note, but several, very softly, sometimes not so soft. The TV kept doing its thing, there were random bumps and bangs but the worst was yet to come.

As I lay in bed at night I began to hear a breathing noise in my bedroom. At first it was subtle and I’d lay there thinking, ok, maybe it’s the sound of cars in the distance swishing on the road…maybe it was the wind. I’d try to explain it away but every night it would start up until I developed a real anxiety about going to bed.

I told my friends about the breathing but they didn’t know what to make of it either.

It got worse. The breathing sound was now very obviously in the room with me and I felt it sounded like a mans breathing.

I could no longer try to blame it on outside noise. Sometimes it would scare the life out of me by happening right in my ear, like a long loud exhalation. It began to feel like torture every night, like something was messing with me. I became quite distraught by it and honestly wondered if I was losing my mind. It took it’s toll and I would lay there for hours trying to fall asleep with my arms pulling the pillow over my ears trying to muffle it or I’d leave the radio on all night to try and drown it out.

Things were happening to my mother also, and although she never told me the extent of it, I do remember her bursting into my room in exasperation one night, accusing me of knocking on her bedroom door. It wasn’t me.

On the last night we were there, all the boxes packed up ready for moving day both my mother and I witnessed something which we could not explain. See I had one of those old fashioned single bed head boards at the time. Wooden with a bookshelf and a built in radio.

As I lay there trying to fall asleep, suddenly the radio turned on and began to make a loud cacophony of sounds. I sat bolt upright and my mother came into my room switching on the light looking confused. We looked at the radio which was still blasting noise and both of us could see the line indicating the stations moving quickly up and down switching through all the different stations making quick static sounds, snippets of music, talking, etc. Up and down it went as the dial moved through all the frequencies.

My mother ripped the plug out of the wall and all was dead quiet.

We moved and I never heard the breathing after that. My mother has never spoken of the radio incident again.

Since that period in my life I do not have any desire to play around with Ouija boards, but I don’t think one is necessary. I believe you can invoke the spirit world just with your words and your intention. I don’t advise it.

Three strangers in a dark night.

When I was nineteen years old and three months pregnant with my first child, I had begun my nursing training which entailed a long commute. This journey took two hours by trains and buses from Bondi beach to the Western suburbs of Sydney.

Feeling the strain of having to travel so far each day I had applied for a room at the hospitals nurses quarters I was working at, but there was a waiting list so it was organized for me to stay at a different hospital a few suburbs down the train line.

It was the first night after finishing my evening shift that I was to travel to the other nurse’s quarters to stay overnight.

I got off the train at around 11 pm and proceeded to walk to my accommodation carrying a large overnight bag on my back. Back then, at nineteen though I “thought” I was pretty sensible, but really I was like many other young people who just never expect that anything bad will happen to them.

It honestly never crossed my mind that walking alone at that time of night was a stupid, if not quite dangerous thing to be doing. (A year prior to that, nurse Anita Cobby had been abducted and horrifically murdered a few suburbs away.)

So, I began walking along this long road which had another major public hospital on one side, set a fair distance away from the actual street with lawns and bush land between it and where I was. On the other side of the road there was a school, which sat in complete darkness.

I was just walking along, thinking about my day and the day ahead, when suddenly a voice that seemed to come from nowhere, spoke clearly and distinctly into my ear as though a person were standing right next to me. It said in a very loud urgent tone…

“If you scream, no one will hear you!”

I’m not sure whether it was the voice itself or what it said that scared me more (For a second there I thought I’d gone completely mad!), but there in that moment I suddenly became completely aware of all that was around me and I realized that whoever, or whatever it was that had spoken those words was exactly right.

I WAS in a place where if something were to happen screaming would not do a damn bit of good because there WERE no houses. Just that hospital and an empty schoolyard and that long road ahead.

It was then that I saw the man step out from the darkness of the school buildings….

I cannot begin to explain the rush of terror I felt, but before he even walked out of the gates I knew I was in danger.

All I could think to do was to cross the road and begin walking under the street lights, thinking if I were more visible… Well, it was a thought anyway. Who on earth would see me at that time of night in such a deserted area?

The man crossed the road behind me and began following me.

Now I was really panicking and those words kept echoing in my head….”If you scream no one will hear you!”

I couldn’t tell how much further away the hospital was but I knew I couldn’t out run him, not with my heavy nurses shoes and the bag on my back, but I began walking faster anyway.

So did he.

Funny how time seems to slow down in these situation. Like nightmares where you try to run but your legs won’t move. My legs had turned to jelly. I couldn’t have ran even if I tried, in fact I was shaking so badly I was having trouble even walking!

Complete panic was overtaking my senses and I remember feeling surprised at my own body for betraying me. How dare it do this to me? I had always thought that if faced with such a situation that adrenaline would take over and I would be able to kick, fight, scream?

In that moment I was most powerless and vulnerable I have been felt in all my life.

I kept turning my head to check where he was behind me. He was still there….closer, but as though it was a game he seemed to be pacing himself as though he knew he still had time to make his move, but his intentions were obvious. My instincts were fully able to comprehend the bad energy coming from him.

It was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced.

Finally, with him now gaining ground behind me, panic won and I lost it and tried to run.

I heard him start to run behind me and at that very moment a car pulled up beside me – traveling from the direction I was fleeing towards…

The passenger door was thrown open and I heard a man’s voice say “Quick, get in!”

I didn’t even THINK….couldn’t think. I was simply putting faith in my instincts, so I did as he said, and jumped into his car.

It was all complete confusion at that point.

As we sped away I burst into tears, so relieved to be rescued, not even for a moment considering that this person could be an accomplice of the man chasing after me.

By some miracle, he wasn’t.

It was an uncanny coincidence that this man – a nurse, told me that he had left for work earlier than usual that night and I think he, as well as I, was totally surprised by this unexpected situation we both found ourselves in.

I hadn’t seen him but apparently he had driven past and happened to catch a glimpse of me and had felt something was just not “right” seeing me alone out there.

After he’d passed me he realised there was someone behind me.

When he got to the hospital he said he felt compelled to turn around and drive back just to make sure.

Now perhaps it was all just coincidence….luck or whatever you want to call it, and to be honest if it weren’t for that strange voice that I heard prior to everything then I might be inclined to put it down to sheer good luck as well.

But that voice…….?

It was like someone (something? A guardian angel…some strange external forces at play) saw the situation BEFORE it unfolded and tried to warn me?

I have the feeling that whatever it was, it was responsible for intervening somehow; putting my rescuer in the exact place he was, at that precise time where he was able, and willing to come to my aid.

Perhaps if I hadn’t heard the voice and become aware of what was happening around me…if I hadn’t crossed the road to walk where the street lights were, maybe I wouldn’t have seen by the man driving past in his car?

The stranger following me?

He bolted as soon as I jumped in the car and although we drove around trying to find him, and rang the police…well, who knows where he went or WHAT his true intentions had been that night.

Deep down, I feel that if it weren’t for the kindness of a stranger…or guardian angels – forces of the universe, whatever you want to call it… I might not be here today.

Though I did thank the stranger who came to my aid that night, I am eternally grateful to him for trusting HIS instincts, and being a good person, willing to turn back for a girl he didn’t even know.

Thank you…whoever you were.

I want to add that the voice I heard was not my inner mind voice – the one you call “instinct”. This wasn’t a gut feeling, or vibe, it was like nothing I have ever experienced before, nor since that night. It was a real audible voice. I had no sense of danger at all before I heard those words. It was as though a person were standing right next to me and put their mouth to my left ear and sharply, urgently said what it said.

Sticks and stones will break your bones…

We all know the saying, and it’s got to be one of the most untrue statements we could ever be told.

When I was fourteen years old, at that painfully awkward age when self image and self confidence were confusing things to be grappled with I had an experience that stayed with me for many years.

A boy in my class approached me in the hallway and said, in a flirtatious, soft spoken manner…  “Tracy… I just want to tell you, you are sooo….. UGLY!”

The laughter of he and his mates is still a humiliating memory and one that added significantly to my own “story” that I’d subconsciously been writing from a very young age.

We live in a world, now more than ever where words are powerful tools.  From the reporting media, to our social interactions online, words are incredibly significant to our perception of society and ourselves.

Time and time again I witness the cruelty of words on social media as keyboard warriors spew forth a barrage of ugly assaults on innocent victims.  It astounds me, honestly it really shocks me to my core that behind screens there exists so many truly nasty minds.  I cannot even begin to understand the impact this is having on young developing children.  My experience as a young girl pales into insignificance when I think about the name calling – the brutal bullying that is happening online.

Labels stick. Unfortunately.  Words create stories and stories are hard to rewrite.

As a female I have been called many things.

I remember being aged about twelve or thirteen and going to a local swimming pool where for a day I was called “Juicy arse” by a group of boys.

As a ten year old I was taunted by the term “Crazy Tracy”.

I’ve been called a “Stupid bitch” by a stranger.  “Morticia” when I was in a band and dyed my hair dark.  I’ve been called fat, skinny, ugly, punk, big tits, – been asked to show my tits, frigid, plain, cute, sexy, a dumb skank….  And I’ve probably been luckier than most.

For some time now I have had a photography shoot in mind. I could see the image in my mind so clearly!

I asked a large number of women online to tell me the words and labels that they hate being called, or have been called. I was stunned at the overwhelming response and experiences they shared.  The thread took on a life of it’s own and even when I had received enough responses for a project I had in mind the replies just kept on coming. There was this overwhelming outpouring of…outrage underneath it all.   I sensed a NEED in these women to purge themselves of these deep hurts that they had carried.  Hurt that WORDS – LABELS had inflicted upon them. They told me of the ugly hurtful words as well as the demeaning and sarcastic. Sometimes it wasn’t the word itself but the tone in which it’s often used.  It was truly eye opening.

I set to work and created a dress out of newspaper.  Then I painstakingly cut out hundreds of letters to form the words that these women had given me. It took forever. My lounge room became a sea of newspaper and snippets of letters.  I spent a long time just sitting and staring at the dress.  There were some words that really made me cringe to glue on.  Words I never even WRITE because I find them so awful.   I found myself feeling a multitude of things. A lot of anger!  Sadness, shame, embarrassment.

Even though I knew that many of the words would be out of sight when I photographed it I still felt compelled to keep adding them, because they were ALL part of the outfit.

At last the dress was done and I was satisfied with the result. There it was…the truth of the matter.  The reality! All the ugliness and pain in a garment that has been worn by so many.

I asked my daughter to be my model.  Not an easy task for her, but she was willing because she understands how important this was to me, and to so many others.

By creating this piece I wanted to empower women, myself included, to be rid of those labels and names by symbolically burning all that they represent.

There IS an outfit equally as disturbing and powerful for a male. This is not just about women and the harm that words cause to females alone.

Forget that saying…”Sticks and stones……”  They DO cause harm.  They ARE causing harm.

I have titled this piece “The dress we refuse to wear”

 

 

 

 

 

The longest Uber drive EVER!

At the moment though we are travelling overseas….well, trying to get home! My husband frequently flies to the Philippines for work and sometimes I accompany him. Here’s a little story that might just give you a chuckle.

We just missed our flight home – breaking our record of never having missed a flight!

We were supposed to be on the 8 pm flight from Manila to Sydney, so we left early -at 4pm- booking an Uber , knowing how unpredictable traffic can be we thought that would allow for plenty of time to get to the airport. How wrong we were!
Three hours and forty minutes later we arrived back in Manila, having spent that entire time in various states of distress and hysterics in that very same car.

See, at first when we left the hotel I began to notice that traffic was heavier than usual. The driver seemed to be taking us on a route that didn’t seem familiar. I wondered if he was just trying to avoid the worst of the traffic?
But further and further we went into the heaviest traffic I have ever seen in Manila and we seemed to be going deeper into unfamiliar territory, like into a mad tangle of Manila suburbia.

There we were, in the complete chaos of people and motorbikes and shonky ramshackle shops lining each side of the insanely busy streets and all the while the driver kept going down side street after side street.

I became alarmed because Richard was looking at his GPS on his phone and we just didn’t seem to be getting anywhere close to where I thought the airport should be.
“Shit, we’re being kidnapped!” I thought. Of course I did, because I always jump to the worst possible scenario.

After giving Richard the “What the hell is going on!” look for about the fifth time he finally said to the driver.
“You ARE taking us to the airport aren’t you?”
To which the driver checking his GPS, sounded a bit confused and then started laughing in great amusement.

Richard had somehow given him the wrong address (!!!) and we were now in the middle of God knows where, in this shanty town suburban insanity, with only half an hour to spare before we thought our check in would be.
And to make matters worse…I needed to pee.
Of bloody course I did!

I don’t know about the rest of you but I now have severe pee anxiety after all our travel experiences and it really sends my head into a spin. I mean, it’s all I can focus on and I start thinking irrationally because nothing else matters except my bladder and everything becomes a desperate possibility for how and where to relieve myself.

The only thing is….there WERE no possibilities. We were in this unbelievable situation of having crawled to a complete stop in this narrow street that was crammed, and I mean jam pack crammed with cars and motorbikes, and whatever those bikes with sidecars are called, and people on bicycles and people on foot – absolute madness! On either side of the road were tiny market stalls and hole in the wall shops and a sidewalk about a foot wide and people just EVERYWHERE! There WAS NOWHERE to pee!

I had to take some deep breaths and tell myself to just calm the heck down!

That’s when I heard the Uber driver start to moan.

“Ohhh. OhhhHHH… I need to vwee vwee!”
At first I thought he was mocking me but it soon became evident that he too was busting to pee!
(The way he said “vwee vwee”, had me dying laughing. I felt his pain! )
“So do I!!!” I said.

Traffic was crawling. As soon as there was a break and cars inched forward about ten motorbikes squeezed in front of us. We were going absolutely nowhere and time was ticking away and there I was playing a “Would you rather” game in my head asking myself if it would be better to squat in the gutter in front of a million Filipinos or just pee myself in an Uber car?

Meanwhile the Uber drivers groans were getting more intense and I could see his eyes darting around – like me, looking for “possibilities”. I was thinking, right, if he gets out the car, I’m running after him.

Richard by this time had begun swearing his head off because it was evident that we were now almost certainly going to miss our flight!

“ I don’t even have bahttle” said the Uber driver, laughing but serious.
That made both Richard and I crack up in hysterics.

I had a full water bottle in my handbag but I wasn’t going to tip it out the window and offer it to him because by the sound of his groans and the wiggling he was doing in his seat I figured he could have filled three!

It was at this point that we introduced ourselves to the Uber driver, properly, and he told us his name – Ray. What a great guy, with a good sense of humour too!

Finally, after being stopped, literally trapped in the traffic, Ray suddenly jumped out of the car and ran through the chaos across the street to go and relieve himself somewhere.

I was mad with jealousy and my eyes were beginning to cross.
You know, when you are busting for so long it almost feels like your bladder becomes solidified….like concrete. It’s weird, and agonising.

Ray returned, jumping back into his seat saying “Oh My Lord, thank you my Lord!!”

“ I still need to pee!” I said from the back seat.

Richard was by then on the phone, cancelling flights and trying to get us new flights but all I could thinking about was where and how I was going to be able to VWEE VWEE!
To make matters worse, Richards phone was running out of battery and he HAD to organised these flights then and there or else it might have meant us flying home separately.

I was mentally sorting the contents of my suitcase…Was there something in there I could pee in! (Seriously can’t believe I’m sharing this with you.) Was there some article of clothing Richard could spread out like a bull fighter holding out his red cloth, that I could duck behind in a corner some were. Could I somehow open both the car doors and get between….

I was almost having a full on panic attack when I spotted a shop that looked like a Hair Salon.
“Right…I’m getting out this car now and I’m going in there to ask them if they have a toilet!” I said to Richard and practically pushed him out the car.

Like a crazy woman I flew into this tiny shop, ran to the girl at the counter and said “PLEASE, do you have a toilet I can use!!!”
I must have looked so distressed and flustered that she timidly pointed to a door at the back of the room and nodded yes.
Skidding by I blurted…” Oh thank you….we’re on the way to the airport….missed our flights….the traffic OMG!”

Can I just say, that toilet, even though it was tiny and so low to the ground that I was almost lying down….pure bliss. Even though I could hear the women customers outside giggling at me. I did NOT care! When you gotta go, you gotta GO!

Just as fast I ran back out of there, hoping our Uber hadn’t rolled on forward leaving me behind. The gay sounding guy manager of the shop had just enough time to swing the door open for me, gesturing with his hand and utter “Thank you for coming!” before I was back in the car and thanking the Lord myself.

We had been stuck in this car for three and a quarter hours by now! I felt like Ray was an old time friend. I wanted to invite him to dinner with us. We had shared some intimate stuff. We were bladder buddies!

So here we are now….back in Manila, in a new hotel…a really fancy hotel too.
Both Richard and I laughed, bent over like crazy people as soon as we got into the lift…

“I need to VWEE VWEE” will now become a part of our vocabulary.

We will not forget poor Ray. He probably won’t forget us either for being his longest, most torturous fare.

We will try to come home tomorrow.

Crazy minds, Zentangles and Swirly People.

Every time we have gone away I’ve taken my pens and Prismacolour pencils with me and a drawing pad with the best of intentions of having time to just sit and unwind and do some Zentangle type drawings.  Has this ever happened?  No!  In fact I was quite distraught on our first trip away in the caravan when we stopped and found that the cupboard I’d stored my art supplies in had come open as we drove and not only did all my pencils fall out ALL OVER the floor – and a few broke 😦  but my laptop fell out too. (Thank goodness it was ok!)

Anyway, I have a lot of trouble sleeping. A busy mind.  I find that instead of spending hours tossing and turning it’s better for me to try and focus ( and calm) my thoughts and this happens for me through Zentangling.

What IS Zentangling?  Well, it’s just a more fancy name for doodling really.  Patterns.

I love patterns! The more intricate the better….swirly patterns especially.  It’s funny because some people are very geometric and square, and others are swirly circle people.

I’m a swirly circle kind of person. My sister is square, so is my husband. I wonder what this would mean to a psychoanalyst?  What do you think you are?  Look at your home decor – your quilt cover for example. I bet you’ll find your answer there.  Unless everything in your house is just blank and un -patterned.  I think I’d be a bit afraid of you if it is, because…well, that’s just weird.  It’s like standing in a completely white room…I think I’d lose my mind and HAVE to make marks on the walls. Swirly ones.

So…I’ve been wondering if there could be any actual USE for these Zentangles I’ve been creating, and then various people on Facebook kept saying to me – Get them printed onto fabrics!  In fact they have kindly come forth with a whole RANGE of ideas. Cushion covers, throws, scarves, mouse pads, phone covers, wallpaper, wall decals, one lady even suggested shower curtains. Well, whatever.

I don’t know. I’m sure someone could find a creative use for them, so I’ve added them to my Etsy store.  If the calming of my crazy mind can be of some use to someone else with a creative mind, well that’s a wonderful thing!

https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/TheStockGypsy?ref=seller-platform-mcnav

So here’s a few designs that I’ve created!  I do hand draw these in a notepad with fine liner markers – sometimes coloured, sometimes not, and then take them to my favourite playground – photoshop, and digitally play with them some more until I find the right look that I want.

 

Tell me what you think?  Can you come up with any creative uses for these besides the ones I have mentioned?  I’d love to know your thoughts.

For all you creative people!

As you might know, I love travel,photography and everything that falls in the fantasy realm.
As a result I have become totally addicted to creating photomanipulation art from all of my images that I have collected over the years.

My daughter and I have a facebook page called Twisted Gypsy Creative Photography https://www.facebook.com/twistedgypsyphotography/ where we regularly post our finished creations.

I have now decided to create an Etsy Store where I am selling digital backgrounds for other creative people to utilize – since I really can’t STOP making them! 🙂

People can use these to develop their own skills in composite work, or even as fantasy backgrounds for their own business. I’ve created the scene so all you need is a willing model, photoshop, and your own creativity!

Please feel free to share this post around to all your creative photographer friends, writer friends who may need book covers (My daughter Shai is a graphic designer and is proficient with Book Cover Designs.)
Even your musician friends who might need CD covers designed…

Some of these would even be perfect as stand alone art prints – and don’t forget…Christmas is fast approaching, so perhaps even as gifts for your fantasy loving friends and relatives!

Here is a small sample of some of the images available in my store!

https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/TheStockGypsy?ref=seller-platform-mcnav