Bunnies and Bears

I have a real love/hate relationship with crafting. I desperately would love to be one of those calm, serene folks who floats gracefully around, absorbed in craft work. They seem to find it effortless to decide what to do and for what purpose.

I, on the other hand, am pretty much a disaster area when it comes to crafting. Having my hands busy helps keeps the symptoms of my bipolar disorder at bay and I genuinely love seeing things emerge.

BUT...what to do, what to do? And, equally important, how to keep my craft area in some semblance of order?

I start a project, I get fed up with it and abandon it. I buy a new pattern, sure that this will be THE thing that will satisfy my crafty cravings. Then I trawl the Internet and find something else.

This all brings me to my Bunnies and Bears. There are 3 people whom I particularly admire for selling their toys. One sells crocheted rabbits (Green Rabbit Designs), one sells linen hares and mice (Patchwork Chickens) and one sells knitted bears and hares (Cotuit Bay Knitter).

So, I have decided that I need to focus myself more and to that end, I have started making Bunnies and Bears, sticking to one basic formula. 

I have put some up for sale on Etsy and this morning, I got a sale. So, I will try not to flit around as much and see if I can concentrate more.

But I don't know if that's the right way to go ...

I could have had a baby in the time...

Looking back to my last blog, when I declared I would not absent myself again, I see that 9 months have passed ... hence the title of this post.

Life has been pretty challenging. In fact, I have felt much like this picture of Whisper, one of my cats - being on the inside, looking out on the world, but not really participating in it:

Being deemed unfit to teach again, permanently, because of my bipolar disorder hit me hard. I have always self identified as a
teacher and my job gave my days structure and meaning. This caused 
pretty severe depression.

I was unable to cope with the house, became increasingly agoraphobic and put on lots of weight, which increased my inability to move well. This led to more depression. 

Lots of projects were started and then abandoned:

The next few photos are a foretaste of future blogs, as each of them      

represents a step in my healing journey, which started in September 2014 and really took off from the beginning of 2015.

Do please pop in to share this journey with me. 

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