This morning I drew my washing up brush. It has a compartment for the liquid and when you press the button on the top, the liquid comes out a bit. I bought a bunch of them when I found them, because I quite like them. They feel nice in my hand and comfortable to use.

Earlier I drew my toy mini car. When I grow up I want a real mini. Yes, with these colours!

I found a new paintbox for my watercolours. My previous one, though not really broken, annoyed me. Every time I would toss it around or hold it sideways or upside down, they pans would fall out and everything got messed up.

With this new one, the pans sit firmly between two metal bits, and I have enough space for two small tubes (black and white) and my (water)pencils.

I used one of my hemp sproutingbags to store some sweet potatoes. They liked it so much they started to grow.

I made the first drawing in August of 2009, of my precious toy. The second one I made today. Months and months of not drawing...

I spent 15 minute batches clearing and cleaning the desk and it went surprisingly well. The windowsill had (a lot) of dirt on it and some dead bugs, so I let my all-purpose cleaner do its magic -- spray on, leave for 10 minutes or so, and then wipe off. Works like a charm.

I'll have to figure out what to put where, for easy access, and I want all my creative stuff together. This means I need room for my pens, notebooks, yarn, needles, camera and such, and possible my seed-collection. It would make sense keeping that all together...

I've spent a few 10/15 minute dashes clearing out the desk. I got rid of some stuff and put other stuff in a better place. Found some sketchbooks in the process. I've almost got it cleared out and might even buy a chair tomorrow.

The side part slides in, very handy.

I bought a crochet-pattern on Etsy for a bull terrier and made it. My youngest sister has a bull terrier and a Bernese mountain dog, and I made this one for her. I hope to find a nice pattern for the Bernese so I can make that too, or I'll adjust an existing pattern to make it look like it (for a mobile charm for instance). Hopefully, she'll like it.

TG said 'Rude dog!!' :P (Now, who remembers Rude dog? Come on now, raise your hand!)

Hidden on the left part of that photo you may (or probably not) see my desk. I have stuff on it and under and next to it. Though I did tidy up the rest a bit (really!), my desk has remained a collection of... things...

I don't remember if I've ever really used it.

Right now I barely do creative stuff, and I wondered. Do I need a desk? Do I need a dedicated place in my flat to burst out into creative outbursts? A place away from my sofa and laptop. A place only for creative stuff (with a nice view of the park, I may add). You'd think I could do without, that I could do creative stuff everywhere. Do I use this as an excuse to not do anything creative (because the desk has so much stuff on it, I couldn't possibly do anything really creative), or do I deny myself a calm area for my creativity (because I don't get myself in that mode linked to the desk)?

I think my brain will implode soon. Advice needed!

p.s. I don't even have a proper chair and I would really need a proper chair...

I've had a hard time trying to get into some form of stability. I had a bad cold after Christmas and I thought it went away, but it came back. Whenever I feel ill / weak, eating doesn't go well either, which in turn makes me more weak and causes highly undesirable weight-loss. I take my (many many) vitamins and take my medication, and make my food and try to handle it all. Unfortunately, I haven't felt happy or stable for quite a while.

I don't seem to have the energy to do much, fun or needed, which results in TG doing my laundry, which makes me feel bad for not doing it myself. I do want to do fun stuff, but I feel so (physically) tired and my head just doesn't want to work straight. I so very badly want to do fun stuff and crochet and draw and be creative, but most of the time it feels like the button for my creative juices got stuck on 'off' and I don't know how to turn it on again. It makes me sad.

I've comforted myself by watching other people's drawings and bursts of creativity, and sort of feeding on that. I especially look forward to Michael Nobbs' 4th Beany and have splurged a little on some new crochet-books (I only had a twenty year old one...). I need to re-think my attempts to get some sort of schedule, I think I've based it too much on my old ideas of myself. I need to stop hanging on to the idea that I can actually do all those things I could do, before. I need to start over with many things, basically starting them at '0' again and see how far I can get.

I miss bread and pasta etc. I found gluten-free pasta and bread, but it just doesn't taste the same. The gluten-free baguettes however did work very well in my cheese fondue (I'll get some more). I've also eaten a lot of roasted vegetables, which go down extremely well, and I rarely feel ill after eating them and they taste good (big win). I haven't yet figured out how to optimise my eating, and I wish I could use the freezer more for that but somehow, that hasn't worked out so far. One of these days I'll get it though.

In the meantime, there's always tea. Tea fixes everything.

I've had problems crocheting with my right hand for a while, because my wrist and elbow often get inflamed. I decided to try my hand on some left-handed crocheting. My first try went slow and turned into a wobbly square (pictured on the left). I made one with my right hand (pictured on the right) because I couldn't quite remember the pattern. It turned out I made a mistake in the pattern so I did another one with left (pictured in the middle) which went a lot better.

After a break I made a hexagon, which also went pretty well. Really pleased with how easily I switched to using left, even though it goes much slower (the hexagon took me an hour) but I suspect it'll improve over time. I also need to relax my hand a bit more.

This year I decided on a slightly different approach for Nanowrimo. Other years I'd jump in with both feet on November 1st, and this years I decided to do some pre-work (which, in other years, only happened in my head). I've made notes about my characters, a timeline, wrote part of the backstory that will not end up in the actual novel, and I made an outline. I haven't finished it yet, still have 6 parts to go. Once I have 31 parts I can use those to write one part per day (a 1667 words). I like this approach. Somewhere halfway I got a little stuck with how the story should go from a certain point and I let it sink in a few days and then came up with the answer. If this had happened during Nanowrimo I would have lost several days (or at the least, spend them in great frustration).

On to the last 6 parts! [progpress title="Nanowrimo Outline" goal="31" current="25" previous="20" label="parts"]

Today we walked to the vet and back, a good hour and twenty minutes walking. Nano had to get her shots and we only spent about fifteen minutes in the vet's office. Her UTI has gone but she has to continue her special diet food for a little bit longer to make sure everything clears up.

When we got home I checked the mail and happily found two items from Spreadshirt in my mailbox. Both my scarves arrived at the same time. Ofcourse I opened them straight away, and immediately felt a bit shocked. I misguessed the actual size of the scarves and the design on them got a bit bigger than expected. No worries though, I still love them both :D

The scarf can completely wrap my macbook pro (always handy) and feels nice and light. The design-part feels a bit stiffer, due to the print on it, and I do think the flock-printing turned out really nice. Raah's scarf turned out less stiff than Robot, due to the large blocks Robot has (fixing that to make it thinner). Overal, very happy, nice large scarves might not fit the current warm weather, but with today being the last day of summer, can't get them early enough :)

Despite frequent hand-issues (just pain, it goes away with rest) I've managed to do quite a lot of drawing in phases. A few minutes on, an hour off, something like that. It worked out pretty well and I feel really good about the results. I've almost finished the four seasons set (always something left to tweak...) and took out bits to create two nice and calm backgrounds:

I made spring. With flowers and blossoms (or at least, I aimed for that). This probably means I finished the series, but I'll just let it soak for a bit. Probably want to tweak some more...

Tweaked some more..

I may have gone a little nuts / overboard, but they have so many things...

I'm currently in love with the scarves but have not yet ordered one. They look so nice and I especially love the two-tones. I've picked flock printing for most of the scarves, this means they'll use a soft print (velvet-y) instead of the more plastic-like normal prints. Aaaah....

I've also added a bunch of glow in the dark things, edited my designs so they would work better with light on dark.

Now excuse me while I go drool at the scarves some more...