How Time Goes Faster As You Get Older.blog

Yellow flowers

Red flowers

Pink flowers

Grasses

Tree bark exposed

I have been coming to Limnisa every six months since October 2019. Even during the Pandemic and was here when the October 7th war started in Israel. Except for October 2024 as I went with the wonderful Tanya to Rajasthan, India. But I am back and for sure, this is my most happy, happy place. I feel I can be me. I am challenging and being challenged. Not just in what I write but how I write. We have had lots of discussions around writing memoirs and using pseudonyms or not and that exceptional topic we rarely touch – death.

Every morning I write about three cards I randomly pick from my Angel Cards. These help get the creative juices going and I have done them here for years. My lovely friend Rebecca introduced me to them.

Tuesday 20th May 2025

Strength, Release and Purification

Wednesday 21st May 2025

Discernment, Willingness and Celebration

Thursday 22nd May 2025

Gratitude, Play and Efficiency

Friday 23rd May 2025

Openness, Respect and Abundance

Saturday 24th May 2025

Risk, Courage and Authenticity

Sunday 25th May 2025

Healing, Delight and Intention

Next up – flowers around Limnisa

Carly likes to be prepared and in control. She knows that usually, but not always, you can’t be in control of your own death. So, she tries to live life to the fullest, just in case. ​It might be one day that she does travel to Dignitas when she is older and greyer to end it all. But not yet. However, it is still important to, at least, make some contingency plans. Once her children all turned 18, she completed those nifty government ‘Lasting Power of Attorney forms’ for both health and wealth. However, she kept mucking one of them up because she made assumptions. She thought the forms would be identical and, in her haste, she kept clicking on and on without really paying much attention to what information they requested. On, Carly went, clicking here and there to get the forms finished as quickly as was humanly possible. So, she had to pay twice for one of them. Silly Carly. Will she ever learn? 

She has also done her will. That means the right people (her children) would get hold of her assets. Of course, the amount depends on how frugal she is (not very) and how long she lives​ for (hopefully a long time​, but certainly not for ever). Her son​, Haz​, who works in the finance sector, has to regularly check that Carly isn’t blowing her stash too quickly and making unwise investments. But Carly can be a bit frivolous and prone to clicking too fast on Amazon for things she neither needs nor can afford. Recently she nearly invested in an £5,000 electrical sun and rain awning for her garden. “It’s a rental, Mum” sighed her (sensible-but-not-always) daughter Boo. Instead, she bought a tarpaulin for £10 to go over the outside seating cushions. Carly was surprised that Boo didn’t petition for some of the £4,990 savings made. It was interesting, mused Carly, that you could underestimate people and their motives sometimes. 

For a long time, Carly had a tricky relationship with death. Funerals more so. But death​, nonetheless. Even though she had to dissect a cadaver as a 19-year-old medical student. And once qualified she spent years certifying patients who had died in hospital. She knew you could tell by looking at the people if they were about to expire. Near the end​, their mouth would be open (​’o sign’​) but when they had popped off their mortal coil​, their tongue would slip to one side (‘q sign​’). Sometimes she even earnt ‘Ash Cash’. This meant filling in a secondary form to verify someone had died of natural causes and no foul play was at work. If a person was to be cremated and turned into ash​, then their body couldn’t be exhumed, so that no further checks could be carried out. 

Carly had learnt a lot about cremations from her latest boyfriend, David, a crematorium assistant. He showed her proudly around his workplace and explained things in meticulous detail. They came up with a scheme that might have some business clout. Carly’s brother had told them about ‘Digger-Land’ where children would ride around with operatives on old and defunct tractors. David wondered if there was any scope for ‘Crem-World’? Probably not. Besides being rather morbid, the whole process was pretty automated. And it certainly explained why David was pretty useless when it came to lighting fires in shepherds’ huts. 

At funerals​, Carly does get rather overwhelmed. Gosh does she cry. She sheds more tears than any other mourners. To the point of embarrassment. So mostly she avoids them. And this has been the catapult for her to organise her own funeral. At least she won’t cry but she can still be the centre of attention and that feels good. She could suggest someone reads some of her poems. They could even read out this Carly Story. And she could recommend some music that she likes. Will she be there to enjoy it? Maybe? She isn’t sure. Anyway, the music will feature her favourite instruments – the violin and cello. She thinks these are her all-time favourites pieces of music; Bruch’s ‘Kol Nidre’, Karl Jenkins ‘Adagio’ and Hannah Sennesh’s ‘Ayli Ayli’. She would like her children to play for her at her funeral. They wouldn’t play at her 50^th birthday party, so, it is unlikely she can enforce this from the grave, and it seems too transactional to write them out of the will if they refuse. But she really would like to hear them playing the oboe and bassoon which are the woodwind double reed versions of the violin and cello respectively. 

Carly was recently quite surprised that Ades still expected her to be buried next to him. That isn’t the usual scenario when you get divorced. This leaves Carly open to consider where she would like to be buried. Highgate Cemetery is pretty cool. Full of famous people and infamous comrades. But probably quite pricey. It is cheaper if you get cremated and then only need a small space for your ashes and a miniscule gravestone. But cremation is against her environmental principles​, as so much energy is needed to cremate one person. Much better is to rot over time. She wonders how many years it will take if she wears natural fibres and is in a compostable coffin?

Recently she started a new ceremony. For the Jewish New Year. A new beginning. She created three beautiful fern-inspired paper cut-outs on different papers sewn together. This was a new craft for her, and it was fun wielding a sharp scalpel when creating them. She took them with her on the Purple-Ox trail. During her hike she stopped to burn one of them. This was to symbolise casting off what she no longer wanted. She also left another one there to decay over time. She liked the idea of something disintegrating slowly. And she brought one back. And this clarified things for Carly. Yes. She will go for burial in the end, for the end.

She recently learnt from her good friend and fellow knitter that it is perfectly possible to knit your own coffin. Carly cannot seem to find any patterns online but maybe she isn’t looking in the right place​. Surely there is a free download on Ravelry? And, of course, it must be purple. An abiding obsession and passion. And it should be made in a spiral. Crochet may be more suitable, thinks Carly. Anyway, who needs a pattern? It should be a bit like making a top-down jumper where you can keep on changing the dimensions, so in the end, the finished item fits like a glove. As long as she doesn’t get enormously fat between making the coffin and needing to use it. 

She probably also needs to consider how it will be stored. You really don’t want to see your coffin every day because it is large, and your home is small. You could even trip over it. Maybe it could be filled with linens and so it would have the intermediate use of being a storage trunk? But if it is to be stored flat like a piece of Ikea furniture, Carly will have to type instructions for how it is to be assembled when needed. 

And she’d like to be buried in a woodland with lots of bluebells which are really actually a version of purple. And her gravestone will say (NOT IN SHOUTY CAPITALS or annoying underlining)​.

Here lies Carly

Mother to Haz, Tobes and Boo

Lover of 

cats, yarn, coffee, purple, spirals, and prime numbers

and none of the RIP – rest in peace. That’s not Carly. She’ll be making a right old noise in her next life…

But for now, she is off to investigate further and plan better. 

In a death café meeting. 

Oh yes. They do exist.

In Hackney (obvs)…

Tuesday night are “Taverna Nights”. I wanted to walk alone and enjoy the peace and quiet – but still listending to a murder and crime podcast! I took these photos.

The landscape

The sun

Red and purple flowers

Carly has been making cups of tea all her life. Ok then. This is an exaggeration. She never liked tea as a child and would always drink Horlicks, Ovaltine or hot chocolate and this involved heating milk up in a saucepan. And then there was coffee. But certainly, for all of her adult life she has been boiling kettles. Mostly to make tea for her then husband. She has worked out that she made him at least 365 x 35 cups of tea. He wasn’t really well disposed to getting up in the morning and Carly has been bouncing around from 05:00 most days. So, she makes him a cup of morning tea. Usually, one but often more than one during the day. So, this figure of 12,775 is actually likely to be an underestimate. That is a lot of tea, boiling of kettles, squiggling about the tea bag in the hot water, removing it, adding the right amount of milk and bringing it to him. Say 15 minutes per cup of tea = 191,265 minutes. This is a total of just over 19 days. Carly is pleased. This is her favourite prime number after seven. All that time never to get back. And even then, she still ended up being divorced. She could put in a claim. Probably best not. And for many years she had one of those nifty taps that provides instant boiling water. Hmmmmmmmmmm. Is this energy saving or wasting? Certainly, boiling a full kettle for one cup of tea is not saving. And it seems that making all this tea didn’t save her marriage in the end. She will just have to notch it up to experience. 

She has noticed the trend for drinking just plain hot water. No. Even though Carly does drink herbal teas now she thinks that what with living in London with hard water, she doesn’t want to drink hot water that has a load of limescale in it. She would prefer to play pretend and have the taste of the hard water subsumed within the flavour of the herbs or flowers. Playing pretend is something we all do all the time. Well again. Here she goes. Exaggerating. We don’t play pretend all the time. We often just tend to ignore things that are difficult. Carly often does that to justify her insatiable appetite for going abroad. Mostly on aeroplanes. Are they the sole cause of the loss of the ozone layer and global warming? She was told it was the dairy industry. But she likes milk from cows and travelling. Oh dear. What a fix. Far more energy wasting than boiling the kettle.

Back to tea. When Carly moved into her current house, a new build, her mother gave her a travel kettle. That way she doesn’t need to stomp up and down three flights of stairs for a calming cup of tea. Carly tries to start off her day calmly. With fragrant tea lights, incense sticks and reading before yoga, as well as knitting to some podcasts. Carly’s son did insist on no noise before 07:00 or after 23:00. But Carly doesn’t need much sleep and she is up much earlier than 07:00. This isn’t to do with the light but her body clock. She always swipes left on those dating apps when she sees a potential date and is adamant that he needs to go out with a night owl. No, that would never work. Carly is in a bind. She needs to have an early cup of tea and has all the equipment upstairs in her bedroom, but she will need to walk about. Luckily the floors are wooden and if she puts on a pair of socks, she can glide across the floor like a ballerina. Carly smiles at this image. She knows that she is no more likely to be an elegant ballerina, than an elephant would be a skater at the local ice-rink.

But she now has her tea and that feels comforting. Really, she is addicted to coffee but the general feeling about tea and coffee is vastly different. Tea feels much more like a hug, a way of being without hurtling at full speed. Yes, being rather than doing. Coffee is more like being propelled forward. It gives you that buzz. She knows both regular tea and coffee contain caffeine, but she only drinks herbal or flower teas. So, no caffeine in them. Yes, tea for Carly feels like when she says “Just give it a rub” as compared “It is only an injection” which would be the coffee equivalent to how to manage a medical condition. They each have their place. But this is a story about tea. Carly has already written one about coffee.

And of course, tea has a wonderful history. And some lovely associated words like tisane. Oh yes, delights Carly – what a fabulous word. She thinks back to one holiday in India where all her family spent time in the hills. And watched tea pickers out for hours on the hillside putting the tips of the tea plants in their special satchels. They wore the most sumptuous and iridescent saris. She marveled at all those different colours – an entire rainbow on the mountainside. 

Of course, making tea can feel like a ceremony. Especially in England if you have a pot. Firstly, you warm it, and then you make the tea and steep it. Lots of people collect teapots. But all of Carly’s seemed to have gone now. She would use one for mint tea. And if she did have a tea pot, she could put on a hand knitted tea cosy. But she doesn’t, so she can’t. She does love to knit but really cannot justify, however utilitarian a cosy would be, to knit one. And then she moves on to egg cosies. Again, if you do decide to eat a soft-boiled egg, then just eat it.

When thinking of tea, Carly is reminded of going out for tea. It is something her parents liked. Personally, she sees it as a bit of a silly meal. It is too soon after lunch and too near supper. But you can have beautiful cucumber sandwiches and fabulous cakes all served on delightful cake stands. She went once with her sister-in-law and her niece and her fiancé to have tea at Fortnum and Mason. It was charming and pleasant. But oh, so expensive. And really Carly needs to keep the calories down. But once you have paid an extraordinary amount for the tea you feel beholden to eat it all up. She supposes that if it were a tea dance, then more energy would be expended to offset the extra calories. “But people don’t do these anymore”, she thinks. What a shame. Carly quite likes dancing but not the sort of tea dances where it requires you to be mindful of where your feet are. Maybe she could institute a tea jog. Well at least a jog beforehand to negate the guilt.

Tea is also synonymous with being ill. It is like the English equivalent to eating chicken soup. If you have a sore throat what could be better than a mug of scalding honey and lemon. Better still with some whisky. Carly’s current favourite tea is lemon verbena. It comes from John’s allotment. And as Carly likes it weakly, she can reuse it several times. It ensures she is kept hydrated throughout the day. Carly is remiss with drinking water as it is so dull. She is grateful that John grows it and knows just how much to give her regularly to ensure her pee is pale rather than dark yellow. He really is helping her kidneys here.

Finally, Carly thinks about the difference between tea and chai. She thinks that maybe they are the same. Then she remembers the chai latte. For sure totally different. The latter is a drink which is heavy on the milk and sugar and has a few spices in it. She says to herself that she will have to look that up later when she returns to Wi-Fi connectivity. But for now, she will have to muse without instantaneous answers. That is an odd place to be now when all information is not only publicly available but whenever you want it. She has decided. She will sit with this disquiet of not knowing. Yes, it is good to still be able to tolerate this.

February, March and April 2025

These are all taken on my morning walk around Park Midron with Talulah.

and on another walk I took photos of purple flowers

When you use your iphone you can adjust the photo of the “live” collection of photos and so I whizzed the phone across the sky

And then back to skies!

A bird and a dog

Puddles

Foggy, foggy, foggy

Rainbow kite stuck on a wire

Sunrise Tuesday 8th April

I signed up to an ESRA event – the English Speaking Residents Association and found myself in charge of laying out the table of refreshments and bringing a cork screw. This event was in an old factory and I went around the exhibit with my good freind Rebecca.

I have only chosen to put in work I liked.

My favourite was this Artificial Intelligence video series by Ella Uzan

Car Art

The ringing phones!

An office – really?

A day in the life of an ordinary woman in clock form

Sensory Room

Rug scrabble in Hebrew

Wolt

Sea monsters

Bags for sale

Work life balance

The rest of the art I liked

I am very excited to be exhibiting at Shuk Olim on Monday 5 May 2025 from 16.00-21.00.

About Dreamcatchers: Originating from Native American culture, dreamcatchers are believed to protect the sleeper by filtering out negative dreams and allowing only positive ones to pass through. Traditionally woven with care and adorned with feathers and beads, each dreamcatcher carries personal meaning and intention. The dreamcatcher hangs on a window where the person sleeps. Bad dreams are caught in the web and good dreams slide down the feathers and into the person.

I hope to interest people in the workshops I run and sell both dreamcatchers that I have recently made and some dreamcatchers I have made on card. I also plan to sell my embroidered ceramic Israel maps.

Dreamcatchers made this year (2025)

The yellow one

I used a chartreuse yarn to cover a hoop, and provide a loop for hanging and the thread to attach the feathers. I used a combination of yellow and ochre feathers attached with slip knots. The ends were all weighted with yellow bells. The central area has a ships anchor for interest and colour.

The blue one

I used some pale blue chenille yarn to cover the wooden hoop and make a hanging thread. I used thinner blue yarn to make the web and the centre is a Whittington silver cat pin. The white cockatoo feathers are attached by wooden beads to long chenille threads.

The pink one

This hoop I covered with strips of sari silk yarn. These are torn up raw silk in sumptuous colours. They are also used to create a hanging loop and to make the web and the long hanging strands for the feathers. The feathers are red, pink and fuschia and are attached using a large silver jewellery crimp. The central large silver “bead” is of a tree with 2 cats.

The ivy one

When I was with a friend Orli watching the sunset over Jaffa, she told me she made dreamcatchers from plants. So I made one with some of the ivy I needed to trim in my garden. Debby gave me a load of wooden beads and the web is made from some old dark green rope. I put feathers from my friend Lucy’s bird Paolo in each of the hanging threads and super glued them in!

The black one

I used a small hoop this time. The rope I used was quite thick and it covered the hoop nicely. I used an even thicker rope to make the hanging loop and the web using some black cotton yarn. The black feathers were attached via fish beads I had bought in Pushkar, India. The central bead is a steampunk clock face.

The sage green one

I was given some upholstery twine in sage green and wrapped it round a large hoop. It also provided the central hanging length and I made a loop for hanging too. I split some of the twin by unwinding it and made thinner lengths. The white feathers were attached via wooden beads and a central gold large bead. For fun I used some very thin green thread to hang two beads I had made decades ago from fimo (black/green/white) and finished this dreamcatcher off with an elephant pendant with bells!

The purple one

I covered another hoop with the sari silk fabric lengths. This time I used a varigated sock yarn for the web, a small Indian pendant and string to attach the feathers. I painted the string where it was tied to the hoop and attached purple, blue, lilac and mauve feathers using large silver crimps.

The wooly one

I bought a yarn necklace in Berwick-upon-Tweed when visiting my wonderful friend Sandra at Jennie’s Wool Studio. But it was rather itchy and also unravelled a bit. I used it bound up for the outside of the hoop, but in its curly for for the tassels (no feathers this time) and to attach some green beads. The central web was made from a cotton yarn and I sewed on a glass bead with black spots.

The lime green one

I am running a macrame workshop in Raanana soon and wanted to play around with ecru coloured jersey yarn. I covered a small hoop and made the tassels to attach the feathers from this yarn. I used a ecru thin cotton for the web and sewed in a green wooden leaf bead with it. I made a knot at the bottom of the tassles and weighted it with a large, white metal bead using a knot in the centre of the bead. I attached two different coloured green feathers and inserted them into the jersey yarn. I used PVA glue to seal them in.

All the dreamcatchers as they move!

Other blog links about dreamcatchers

When I learnt to make them on my Sabbatical in India

Getting into the swing

Lots of random purple projects including a dreamcatcher for Lucy

Random Purple Projects

Drawn dreamcatchers on cloth

Dreamcatchers

Dreamcatchers Thessaloniki

Dreamcatchers Thessaloniki

Dreamcatchers in the Peloponnese May/June 2024

Dreamcatchers in the Peloponnese May/June 2024

Dreamcatchers in Brighton July 2024

Dreamcatchers in Brighton July 2024

Dreamcatchers in Mallety, Limoges, France – July 2024

Dreamcatchers in Mallety, Limoges, France – July 2024

Dreamcatchers from Hook and Hove in August 2024

Dreamcatchers from Hook and Hove in August 2024

And finally…..

A Carly Does Story about Dreamcatchers

Carly Learns a New Skill; How to Make Dreamcatchers

Carly went to India for four months for her sabbatical. This was to allow her to immerse herself in her obsession of crafts, old and hopefully new. By chance, it was just before the dreaded coronavirus. She had chosen her time carefully, as all her children were now the age of majority and had some sort of a plan. Whilst she was away, they were all at university. It’s always imperative for someone like Carly to have a strategy. It keeps her grounded and focused. These are both really important concepts when Carly is going off into the unknown, by herself for a four-month craft adventure. She knew she had the boundaries of purple, prime numbers and spirals for her projects. 

She compiled a list of 133 crafts she wanted to undertake whilst there. She arrived at this number by multiplying her two favourite numbers, namely seven and 19. There are some of the usual candidates such as knitting, weaving, spinning, and crocheting and some less common crafts like quilling, cyanotyping and lapidary. Come to think of it, she cannot even remember what lapidary is. Actually, it is the polishing of gems and stones. Well, she didn’t do it anyway. When she counted at the end of her sabbatical, she had managed to do 89 of them. Some would come under the umbrella of hyperbole. She, for instance, counted banana bread as two separate crafts! Bread-making and cake-making. But it did have delicious lilac icing which tasted of lavender and was totally yummy! 

Carly looked back at the list for some crafts that weren’t really crafts at all. What was she thinking when she listed walking, animals, family, and mindfulness? Never mind. Nearly five years on, Carly, who never was great in the memory department, couldn’t fathom out what she had meant back then. She did see her family as they came for a visit, and she did some mindfulness, saw plenty of animals and walked most days. She hangs her head to the side and questions herself, “For real?” 

In the end, the only new skill she learnt in India was to make dreamcatchers. Well, it was the only skill she learnt from another person rather than on YouTube. She met Babu in Pushkar, and he was delighted to teach her. It was essentially pretty simple. Cover the wooden hoop with thread and then make a series of loops until you arrive in the middle. It needs adornments and embellishments to enhance its attractiveness and, of course, feathers to hang down from the hoop. In India, Carly made four dreamcatchers ranging in size from small to large. She used feathers she found and bought from Babu and jewellery items given to her by a fellow traveller. 

When she returned to the UK, she had an exhibition of all the arts and crafts she had made. It lasted four days and over 150 people came to see it. She encouraged all visitors to take pieces they liked after the show had finished. She was really surprised by what people chose. She, never in a million years, could have predicted what people liked and wanted. And it got her thinking. All these years, she made things for people. She knitted for them, sewed for them, and generally made all manner of items for them. But it was her choice for them. Not what they chose, and she kept this thought close to her, for the future. Certainly, if she is making something like a commission, she involves the recipient as much as possible, so they choose the pattern, colour, and size for example. 

And then Carly thinks back to all the presents she has received. Not just handmade items by her large circle of crafting friends. Everyone. Even down to her son Haz, who took a necklace out of a drawer and repurposed it and expected Carly not to realise. And her ex who used his secretary to buy her toiletries from just below his office or the very same chocolates each time, when she clearly neither needed nor wanted them. The worst present from him was an intricate piece of gold filigree jewellery. From Dubai. It was goddamn awful. And probably expensive and not returnable. Everyone knew it would never be her style. But therein lies the rub. You just never know what people choose to like and consider stylish as it is very personal and oftentimes unpredictable. Recently Carly has seen how Yemenite filigree work is made, she actually finds it quite attractive. Part of her change of mind is the ‘story’. Customers would go with a silver coin. The jeweller would keep a third as payment and then spin the rest into very fine wires and wind them round repeatedly to make these intricate designs. 

Carly liked the provenance of dreamcatchers, what they do and how they look. And it was a skill she wanted to continue. Best of all was the mantra she had learnt in medicine. See one. Do one. Teach one. That is for learning a surgical skill. But it would work well for making dreamcatchers. And she was asked to contribute towards a wellness day for paediatricians in training. She had done silk painting in the past with this group and this was very popular, but this time Carly offered her skills as an expert dreamcatcher maker. Carly knows all about imposter syndrome. But this is the opposite of that. She had made a sum total of four in her entire life and that was several years ago. Hardly an expert at all. A dabbler at best…

Carly is sure she can live up to others expectations of her. She just needs a little practice. So, she gets busy ordering vast numbers of wooden embroidery hoops. She buys brightly coloured feathers and uses her large stash of beads and yarn for her teaching. She is told there are likely to be about 100 participants. “Fabulous”, Carly says to herself. She loves to amuse a large crowd. The bigger the better.

On what, Carly thought, was the allotted day, a little ahead of time to be able to set up, Carly arrives with a vast suitcase of materials to make dreamcatchers. It is rather odd, Carly ponders. There is no sign and there are no paediatricians. And then she checks. Oh no! She has the wrong date. And she is abroad when she is supposed to be doing this teaching. Being a resourceful person, she makes some videos and leaves all the supplies visible for this to be a self-directed session on the right day. However, Carly refuses to let this crush her. She finds some maxillofacial surgeons on their lunch break that very day she has turned up with all these supplies. She persuades them this is a skill worth learning and they agree. So, all her preparation, which was minimal, is not lost, as Carly is comfortable improvising.

Carly has always thought of dreamcatchers as objects. Physical ones to catch dreams, obviously. When she went to a hippy-dippy village in the north of Israel she found an excellent coffee establishment that sold lovely temporary tattoos. She chose a few but the one she really liked was a pretty and floaty dreamcatcher in blues and purples. And this put an idea in her head. She has been looking for a logo to represent her, the creative Carly, and she thinks she has just stumbled across it. A purple dreamcatcher. And, also, it was flat. It was representational and not a catcher of dreams. But lovely with the iconic shape.

And now Carly has a plan when she is away from home to get her creative juices going. She makes purple dreamcatchers on khadi paper which is made from recycled cotton saris. She collects all manner of things to decorate them including local leaves, flowers, small stones and shells. As well as beads, buttons, tablets and sweeties. She uses pens, pencils, inks, paints and crayons for the basic shapes. And uses glue to attach objects and embroidery thread to sew items on. Carly is really a dreadful artist. She is, for sure, not a copier of reality. She cannot even draw an oval or circle, so, uses stencils to help her out. She only ever makes them on holiday and has made up to seven a day. They are labelled with the location and date. Carly has made several hundred to date. It seems to be something that both calms Carly and sets her up in an inspired mood for the day. 

And with this number of them, she must give them away. Otherwise, she will be overwhelmed with them, and they will get dusty. She catalogues all her dreamcatchers and has written several blog entries about different sets. And then they are up for grabs. She suggests people take one or two that they like and tells them that she won’t mind at all if they don’t take any. Obviously, this is a ruse because Carly sees it as an affront to her creativity if people cannot even find one they like. But what she does know is that people like to be able to choose them. In some instances, people like the same one, but the good thing is that there is likely to be some other but similar dreamcatcher in her stash that appeals and satisfies the loser. Carly muses that people who take over three are just plain greedy. 

Carly has recently returned to making real dreamcatchers. She has all these hoops and plenty of other materials. But she must never buy any more of those brightly coloured feathers. They are from China and cruelly removed from birds according to Carly’s new friend Linda. But that is ok. Linda has a parrot, Perro, who provides wonderful feathers for Carly’s real dreamcatchers. “Phew”, thinks Carly, “Everyone is happy now!”

Wednesday 11 June 2025 – Ra’anana Community Garden

I will be running a 3 hour workshop in the Ra’anana Community Garden

Please register here!

https://esra.org.il/events-listing-view/details/2025-06-11/1170-macrame-workshop.html

I went on a day trip to Akko from Dalyat El Carmel with my son Toby and dog Talulah. Always easier to get the dog to pose!

I just loved the whole art scene and vibe.

Talulah with blue doors

Talulah and art

Talulah by one rather nice street art piece

Art without Talulah

At the Hamudi Art Cafe

An archway with and without T

With Talulah up the stairs