My creative journey on my sabbatical in India and beyond
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
When I learnt to make them on my Sabbatical in India
Lots of random purple projects including a dreamcatcher for Lucy
Drawn dreamcatchers on cloth
Dreamcatchers Thessaloniki
Dreamcatchers in the Peloponnese May/June 2024
Dreamcatchers in Brighton July 2024
Dreamcatchers in Mallety, Limoges, France – July 2024
Dreamcatchers from Hook and Hove in August 2024
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!”
I will be running a 3 hour workshop in the Ra’anana Community Garden
Look here for details
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.
The Eretz Israel traditional Jewish (and a few Palestinian) costume collection from all over the world was photographed on 80 models by Kyris an Athens photographer. It was printed on cotton which meant many of the photographs had sumptuous embroidery as well. All the models had smokey eye make-up! Ruty and I loved this exhibition and enjoyed different bits and challenged each other as we often do!
This was billed as a fantastical show.
Germaine found two blank canvases painted black. Being a klutz I dropped one and made a hole. So Barbie could now crash inwards. Loni helped my hang the canvases level and Miriam started by applying the clouds. I had envisioned this being a community project again but I wanted artistic license here so only Miriam was involved! Tanya told me it had to be more than just Barbie breaking through a canvas – so I made it my world.
I collected loads of stuff over many months and played around a lot with ideas.
It has lots of animals (cats/dogs/birds) as well as a cow (India). I have designated anything that is red, amber, green a traffic light and there are three sorts of these (small plastic cups/sweets that look like lego/popcorn). I found a road marking tape in the Flying Tiger store. I made the Belisha Beacons (that stand either side of a zebra crossing and flash) from painted sticks that I made stripey with white stickers. The yellow beacon is a flock bauble I found in Next in Milton Keynes! The pin broaches I get from one of my favourite Archway coffee shops – Crick’s Corner – and the money goes to the RSPB and my sister-in-law Tracy manages their supply. There are birds, small mammals, butterflies and flowers. I made the clouds from lego style blocks in pink, white and purple. There are snowflakes with whales for fun and gold sprayed terracotta pots which I used for coffee in India. They have black flowers, fishing wire with Rudolf the red nosed reindeer earrings and flat bits of plant.
One of my constant shape themes are spirals and I have illustrated them here with blue earrings in the shape of a spiral and two interlocking silver spiral earrings.
Purple is a go to colour and there are three wooden trees all painted with different purple inks. One has heart earrings and the other one animal earrings. At the bottom of each tree is a duck.
I bought astroturf with Caroline FC when I arrived to make it into small mats for use as Talulah’s garden toilet. At the bottom of these pieces is a small thin (unused!) piece. The gold sprayed Barbie torso’s came with a set with 4 Barbie outfits. The glue from the gun was so hot it melted the handle! To make the painting lie flat I had to saw off Barbie’s legs and it seemed a shame to waste them so they are at the bottom next to one of my favourite flowers (frangipane). On a wooden curved piece of thin wood I placed 6 skateboards with 6 firetrucks on top. There is a green bicycle on the grass as well as a London red bus and red post box to remind me of my UK roots! My children Betsy and Harry are very happy to see my Barbie projects. Toby less so. For him I have put in two gold elephants underneath 4 mermaids. They are surrounded by various shades of blue puff paint
Neeta and I went on our last morning together to the Art Museum. We had a rainy last morning and before we went to the marvellous Itaka Library Café (where we had had sumptuous cocktails the night before) for coffee, we went to this museum and essentially had a private tour by one of the staff – Ljubica. We went to the permanent collection which had traditional dress from three eras and archaeological finds from the site we’d been to the day before – The Duklja Ruins.
The highlight were the two art exhibitions. Both by Montenegrin artists still alive.
He is 95 and all the work on display is from the last 2 years. There are a few watercolours but mostly are oils. And the first set are painted to look like watercolours and are of local places like Kotor.
We really liked some of her work. She is in her 30s and has some very vibrant paintings.
Neeta and I posing by the front entrance! A diptych from the 1950s showing all the famous parts in Montenegro’s history and architecture
When my friend Tracey went to visit family in South Africa she asked me if I would like anything. I just love anything beaded from SA and so asked for 5 small dolls. I have called them my Voodoo Barbies – not that look anything AT ALL like any Barbie I or anyone else has ever seen!
I took them to Mexico and mostly photographed them in the old and wonderful city of Taxco, home to silver, VW Beetles, a huge Christo up a hill and a city build on a very steep hill.
