The latest and lovely crochet project on the go. The pattern, ‘Marigold’ is from Bernioli Designs available from Etsy. The yarn is King Cole’s, ‘Riot’ in Juniper.
Wooly Minded
Queen Gracie
Cat lovers are called “Ailurophiles”, derived from the Greek word ailouros, meaning “cat,” and ‘phile’, meaning “lover”.
I have three. Love the bones off them but they can be right nobbers!
My little princess Gracie, though technically a queen as she is 10 now, still acts like a kitten:
Here’s Charlie Chops, or The Chopster, as we like to call him.
DH stretched out to have a nap. Charlie decided he was the perfect slave bed. He eventually settled down and did the full Chopster sprawl and went to sleep. I walked in at one point to find both gently snoring.
I didn’t disturb them. Cats have to have several naps a day to give them the energy for a proper good sleep later on.
Charlie demonstrating his petrol head knowledge. He found the secret sunroof I didn’t know I had.
Terry Pratchett famously said that thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as Gods.
Cats have never forgotten it.
I’ll try and get some pics of Jess. She likes her sleep more than most. She’s about 16, we think. She was believed to be 5 or 6 when we got her 10 years ago. A very sweet and beautiful lady. Why the vet should have the label ‘aggressive’ on her file its anybody’s guess! Joking, of course.
We KNOW why.
She obviously had some early trauma and still has triggers. We know the signs and keep clear of the shooters! Aggressive is an understatement.
So, lovely Monday cat cuteness and love.
Notes to self : Part 2
This one is to make a note of lessons learned recently.
Always believe and trust in magic. It’s true and comes from within. We all have magic; we are all magic in every way.
Lesson 2
This one is more about protecting the self. Never make a priority of somebody who only sees you as an option. Learned the hard way very recently.
Thought about lesson two while painting this rabbit over Easter. Symbol of rebirth and new beginnings. Apropos.
Notes to self
It’s okay to just not be bothered.
I have so many things on the go, it’s not true. I keep lists of them. But sometimes I just don’t want to do anything, really. Just day dream.
Apparently, maladaptive daydreaming is a ‘thing’. Creating scenarios in the imagination, populated with characters and narratives and immersing oneself within it isn’t as mainstream and common as I thought. To me, they’re like parallel universes that offer wonderful escapes and freedom to just BE. And occupy the mind in a very comforting way unlike hyper-focus that absolutely locks you into intense processing with the ensuing disorientation when you come back into ‘real time’.
So, no idea where the ‘mal’ comes from to describe the very pleasant reveries and escapism MD affords. But just sometimes, I like to lose myself or, possibly, find myself, in the magical worlds inside my head. No masks.
MD is my magical world where the acceptance of authenticity and real me can exist can never be maladaptive.
So, sometimes, I like to do nothing. Just be.
Original Illustrator paper cutting design from a while back.
No More Mondays
Mondays used to be a real downer so I decided to give them up.
No more logging in to a Monday inbox full of tragic deadlines and twenty impossible things before breakfast.
No lemons in my lucozade. No pi** in my porridge.
You got mail!
It’s a good feeling.
Here’s Gracie on the maracas:
Yay!
Create an elastic background shape for text with Adobe Illustrator
Hi There!
Today I’m sharing a fast tip to show you how to create a background shape for text. The power of this tip is that the shape will extend or shrink to the length of the text automatically. Edit the text and the shape will stretch or shrink to fit. A one-size-fits-all and it’s fabulous because it’s so easy.
The steps are in the pdf here:
🙂
Shape Theory
A quick guide to Shape Theory to help inform your design choices and improve communication.
Noise
This is the result of a drop motion and bleed animation created in After Effects.
Gimme an ‘A’
Remember the tutorial from a previous post back in Dec 2020?:
Do you wonder if there’s a quicker way to do something in Illustrator? There’s a tutorial on there to create the As in illustrator.
I used them to create a very quick and simple animation in After Effects
Import the file you would like to apply the explosion effect to. You don’t need layers.
Select Pixel Poly from the Effects & Presets – tweak the settings how you like.
I made it a sub-comp because I wanted to use Time Remapping and it doesn’t seem to work unless it’s applied to a sub-comp.
Select Time Remapping. This will insert a keyframe at the beginning and end of the composition (mine was 5s long, if I remember correctly) then swap the two keyframes over so that the end position becomes the start and the start becomes the end.
Then it’s up to you to play with the speed, Easy Easing, Graph Editing etc.
Finally, I imported a sound effect called ‘slurp’ from Envato Elements.
Render to format of your choice and done.
Beeing Happy
Taking a break from tech stuff today and taking time to enjoy the natural wonders of the world.
A good while ago now, I noticed that a hedgehog was visiting our garden—so I bought a hedgehog house for him/her. Pronoun unknown. 🙂
Then found she had already built a proper and far superior, hibernaculum. So she has already moved in.
The hedgehog house was taken over and usefully repurposed as an Air Bee & Bee.
Yes, it now houses a busy nest of Irish bumbles 🙂
It’s under the cover of bushes— so relatively dry and out of the wind. The hedgehog house has a curled entrance, like a sea shell, so it has a built-in wind baffler. Delighted the clever queen spotted it and saw the potential.
We never use pesticides, herbicides, weed killer, glyphocates in any form whatsoever. The slugs and snails will be organic and healthy for the hedgehog and the flowers clean and healthgiving for the bees (and other garden insects).
The garden is also a home to many Nursery spiders.
Look at that whopping egg sac! The Nursery spider rolls it along till she’s happy she’s found a spot to anchor the sac to until the baby spiders hatch out.
There are lots, possibly hundreds, of baby spiders that eventually emerge. You can see a couple under the bottom-left leaf. They disperse and go off on their own spider travels.
So, hope you enjoyed a quick look at my garden residents and feel the love.
No More Mondays 