Month: December 2020

Spring crafting and summer canning

jam jarsSeasons turn, planets (obscurely) align and here we are post-summer solstice, at least in these southerly climes, and zipping towards the finish line in 2020. Even though clouds and rain stopped me from seeing Jupiter and Saturn putting on the bling, it still seems a propitious time to look back at the year and… *shudders*

OK, maybe not. I can report, though, that I had a productive spring. Not in the traditional way of springtime being time for spring cleaning. But who can get excited about that? Woo! – my cupboard is neat. Yah! – the skirting boards have been dusted. Clean all the things and then, before you know it, it’s time to clean again. Bah humbug, I say.

But I was productive in regards to crafting…

Craft stuff. It’s so satisfying. Fun to do and lovely to have an actual thing that I’ve made at the end of it, which I can keep or give away. And while, as usual I have more plans for lovely things that I could do, I’ve actually finished some projects which I’m happy with.

I stitcpatchwork bed runnerhed up a patchwork bed runner for a friend’s early spring birthday…painted globe

I repair glued and painted a mini globe with black and gold nail polish. I really should have taken a ‘before’ shot on this one, which was not only damaged and hence a clearance item, but that awful old orange-pink map colour…

I sewed some cute, up-cycled bags from old jeans which will be used as Christmas gift bags and I drew portraits of Medusa and the Sphinx – neither of whom look exactly thrilled to be involved, but you can’t have everything…

I sewed tentacular tie-backs for my library curtains (Ia! Ia! Curtains fhtagn!) because they are ridiculous and they make me laugh every time I  use them…

tentacular tie backtentacular tie back 2

 

 

 

 

spring flowersAnd it’s not like I’ve only been doing craft. I’ve been writing and reading and baking and, as I said at the start of the season, gardening.

Super, super productive.

And WAY more fun than cleaning.

And now it’s summer and I’ve segued neatly into a frenzy of making jam and sauce. The lovely productive garden had, er, produced. Mostly cherry plums, which I’ve canned as jam and as BBQ plum sauce and a delicious plum and beetroot chutney. I’ve also made a peach and vanilla jam, nectarine jam, and a lovely spiced limoncello peach jam, which is looking likely to make the acquaintance of my Christmas ham, when time comes for a bit of friendly glazing.

My 2020 seasonal gifts will be jars of jam in up-cycled bags, and I figure that’s a fine way to end out a weird year – by spreading some good will and sweetness in the world.

 

The Apocalypse? It’s not all bad

2020 was not the year for writing grim apocalyptic fiction.

Well, not according to me anyway. If that’s the jam in your jelly roll… okay, I’m not judging. You do you, Boo.

Nevertheless, ‘Apocalypse’ was the theme for the 2020 CSFG / Conflux short story competition that I wanted to enter. No. That I wanted to win – because I was so very pleased when my creepy little tale of an archivist and a skin-bound book won last year’s competition.

So, it was just a matter of writing my way into an apocalyptic story which wasn’t unbearably grim. Simple, right?

Step 1 was the opening lines of Lord Byron’s poem Darkness:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space…

Alright, still a little grim, but cut the guy some slack – it was the Year Without Summer so pretty gloomy all round. Anyway, I liked the idea of a dream which was not all a dream.

Step 2… I thought about making a character who had been born on the 10th of August 1997. Why? Because according to Aggai, the Bishop of Edessa in the 1st Century, that was when we could expect the Antichrist to be born and the end of the world to begin. Errr… still a bit grim, I suppose.

But… step 3, there were lots of apocalyptic theories for 2012, which would make someone born in 1997 just 15 years old and that could be fun…

Inspired by a dash of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic and a pinch of Maggie Stiefvater’s Blue Lily, Lily Blue (Book III of the Raven Cycle), I came up with the Delangeur women who foretell the future by various means – cartomancy, ailuromancy, augury and scrying  – and Molly Delangeur, a teenager who dreams of the end of the world.

I just needed to set it in a small hinterland town, surrounded by dairy farms, so I could lighten the tone with an apocalypse cow, a cash cow and the sort of cheerfully cheesy, regional festival that rural Australia does so well and I had my story – Herding Cats.

And the really great thing?

It won the CSFG / Conflux 2020 short story competition, and you can read it here, on the Conflux site, along with the apocalypse stories The Cusp by Kathryn Gossow and Yestermonth by Tim Borella.

Let me know what you think – still too grim or did it make you smile?

 

(The apocalypse cow banner image was cropped from a photograph by Cally Lawson on Pixabay.)