How Time Goes Faster As You Get Older.blog

It was wonderful to photograph the moon over the ocean. I learnt hot to alter the exposure and take some videos.

I decided to make Sunday 17th August 2025 a crafting day. Firstly the auspicious number. 17 is a prime number and 17 + 8 = 25. Whoohoo!

I went back to Bad Coffee in Hackney Wick for a special morning cappuccino. Then scootered off to the Tufting Class. I wanted to make a mat for Harry and Gemma to stand on to change Luna in her bedroom. Boy oh Boy. This tufting gun is the best fun. As Luna is a moon, I made a green rug with a cream moon. So very satisfying.

After lunch with Nicky and Dee in Stokey, I scootered to meet Deborah for my lovely birthday treat – mending broken pottery with glue and gold!

I found this knock off Barbie for £3 and so just couldn’t resist. I come annually to stay with Fran and Phil in Mallety, France in the summer. We had fun and games.

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I come to Mallety, Limoges, France for a few days in the summer between work weeks when I am in the UK and stay at the most wonderful barn that used to be part of crafty retreats. I stay with a fabulous couple, Fran and Phil. I bought A4 sized card and used their guillotine to chop it in half to make 30 A5 pieces. I always make dreamcatchers and because I brought with me lots of ink stamps and a set of the English alphabet, I made a set of 26 using the letters and the stencils I had also brought with.

The letter stamps, the stencils and the whole alphabet. And the bags I made for them to keep them contained.

More items to come soon!

I found these two characters in Hydra, Greece and knew I could do something with them at some point. I took them when I went to see Sandra in Berwick upon Tweed for a wonderful 4 day visit early July 2025. It was wonderful to see into her new life after spending so much time with her in Long Buckby.

She volunteers at the honey farm at the Chain Link bridge with her partner Hugh and lots of other lovely people. We had an Indian meal out one night and she cooked all my favourite usuals (including fish pie). I swam early every morning and even did an aqua fit class. Enjoy.

I love to look at Eventbrite for last minute craft workshops. The one with Steph caught my eye. It was at 09.30 on Sunday 13th July 2025 at Hackney Wick. This felt auspicious. It was my oldest son (Harry’s) 28th birthday and we had cycled along this towpath without the use of phones from Highbury to the Olympic Park many moons ago. We were taught about foraging, what was safe, how to do it expertly and without significantly depleting natural resources. We had a tote bag with gloves, bags, scissors and secateurs for the morning.

Cardboard loom

This is a simple loom that is quick to set up but the cardboard always remains in place. I used the yarn from the baby blanket I am knitting for my first grandchild (now a week overdue). As Harry and Gemma don’t know the gender it is a lovely sage green colour.

Hazel loom

Steph brought along some sticks of hazel and I used string to tie them together and make the warp.

Foraged loom

I then made a loom out of some sticks I had foraged and used pink raffia to tie it together and make the warp. I found a piece of heart shaped bark and wrapped some raffia around that too and attached it centrally.

A wonderful morning workshop. Thanks Steph

And then I went to Mallety, near Limoges, France and carried on.

And this time used lilac embroidery thread to keep the moss in

One for Fran and Phil

This one needed reinforcement as the top branch broke repeatedly. I have put in moss with a ring pull just for Phil who is a coca cola addict!

One with some prickly holly and feathers

One for Miriam from the local area and her lovely garden

I spent the Monday with my colleague Eli. She suggested we go to an exhibition at Tate Modern by Do Ho Suh. He was born in Korea and lived in both New York and London. He uses embroidery, paint and builds amazing things out of brightly coloured nylon.

Embroidery pieces

Man at the end of a spiral

Man running with his house on his back

More buildings

Paper rubbings from a building, let it age for a year and then put up as a new “building”

Repeat patterns

Dress of Do Ho Suh’s children with memoroabilia

Putting his house from Korea into his New York appartment

My favourite bit – colourful fixtures and fittings from properties

Fixtures and fittings

Doors and walls

Eli and me!

See it for yourself!

I already had a Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Hindu Barbie. So it was time to address Bhudism. I started with a box that I planned to spray paint orange having ask ChatGPT to draw me a Buddhist Barbie.

And the box I chose was actually too big and the paint job not good at all. Then Debby gave me a piece of wood with a square platform that seemed perfect. The orange was too pale so I sprayed it gold. I crocheted a mat using a very large 8mm hook and ecru jersey. Round the end I glued the struts of a fan, then parts of a flowery tree around them and edged it with a cut down sushi mat I found somewhere in the street.

I had three small lego planters for the three corners, a plinth I sprayed gold and put on a piece of desert rock on top for meditation purposes. I used this particular Barbie as she had legs that bent. Not quite the lotus position but not so far off. I used some kebab sticks I had sawn off for both ends to support the meditation flags in green, yellow, white, red and blue velvet sewn onto black rope.

I made her outfit out of brocade my Buddhist friends Maria and Christian had brought me from Japan. She had trousers that came up to her chest and a shawl with sleeves. I decided I could not face shaving her head so she is going to have to reach enlightenment without being a monk or bald!

The parts needed

Making it all up

The finished Barbie attempting enlightenment

Tova and I decided to go on a trip to Akko late June 2025. This time Talulah didn’t come to Akko and we stayed in a marvellous stone built ancient house within the old city. We ate at Uri Buri and Doniana and had a wonderful hammam trip to the Ghattas baths. It was a sud filled experience.

Akko with cats

And of me!

And out and about – lots of art and pretty places

And finally – there were flowers and huge Barbies

Watch out for more Barbie coming this way soon!

Buggerfly Barbie

On the Friends of Jaffa WhatsApp group, Itamar who has opened up and new party shop near me was offering kits to make a butterfly and he was going to post them on social media. I popped along but it was all stuff I had and I had some ideas. I had a spare Barbie head and so that could go on. When speaking to Galina she reminded me about all the dead cockroaches I had collected. Ah ha. They could become the wings. I glued and them embroidered them in, used a black hair clip for the body, gave her earrings and antennae using puff paint with beads at the end. Hey Presto – not sure Itamar will put it on his instagram – it is rather creapy!

I had some very interesting feedback from my friend Christian that I have decided to include.

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Did you feel any urges to kill and eat people lately? 😬

Maybe the butterfly in the upper right corner is the reality anchor though, and the disturbing rest is just expression of the unconscious. In Buddhism, if you dream about creepy insects, it is seen as a sign of purification – the difficult impressions are leaving the mind and will cause no difficulties in the future. In this context, the eggs could be more hopeful – the probability of good things emerging is increased after the purification. 👍 

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… And the cockroaches are her wings, allowing her to fly… Wow.

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Anyhow, it looks like a very strong piece to me. I hope it doesn’t smell bad.

I showed this to a father of a patient and he said. The eggs were for life, the cockroaches for death and the female being is perfect as Barbie is perfect. Actually he said a lot more but I have a terrible short term memory!

Using artificial intelligence to change a renowned piece of art

I went to an amazing lecture about Hieronymus Bosch and his famous painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. As it is 500 years old, there have been many interpretations including recent ones using artificial intelligence. It is a triptych with heaven on the left, earth in the centre and hell on the right.

I copied this image into Chat GPT and asked it to redraw all the figures as Ken and Barbie. It came up with this

This felt a bit too blue and pink so I asked chat GPT to redraw it with all the colours of the rainbow! And it came up with a LGBT+ version with rainbows!

I wanted chat GPT to draw it with lots of colours but not as a rainbow. However the people looked rather modest in their outlook and rather dull. When I tried again this AI tool told me I had used up my free goes!

Freezing Barbie in ice and then melting her

I went to an exhibition in the Amiad gallery and it had two photos of flowers in resin. I thought I would reinterpret this with ice. I had to find the right sized receptacle and a Barbie that could fit inside.

This Barbie can fold up quite small – she can actually cross her legs so she is to become Buddhist Barbie soon! Here she is having been frozen in a round pyrex bowl and slowly defrosted.

I had the Barbie who was crocheted into a dress and was going to be made into Coffin Barbie – where her dress extends into a coffin. She is already with her bells as Victorians were often buried with bells in case they weren’t actually dead and woke up. They then could be heard underground. She could fit in a pyrex rectangular dish of Tova’s.

This to show the set up. The frozen dish with the Barbie sat on a radiator with my i-phone set at time-lapse. It is held still on with a tripod in a bowl of avocados and there is an extra bright light to illuminate the ice melting.

A Wigwam for Barbies

I was offered a cat play toy but took too long to collect it. It was always going to be for Barbie art and not the cats. So I improvised and used the bamboo sticks that Lucy gave me. Hey presto.

The comments were the best

Lovely now we can just start a campfire underneath Debby

They are looking slightly like they are about to be given the Joan of Arc treatment and burnt at the stake! 😂😂 Fran

Fascinating! This is an alien uplifting-experiment. The Barbies have been caught by aliens with a native American cultural connection. (Native Americans are descendants from aliens who crash landed a long time ago in north America.) So these aliens cought them and fixed them to their transcendence structure. It has a slight resemblance to the stakes that the American natives used for torturing, but has a different purpose, that got lost to the their crash-landed relatives over the 3000 years that they had to live on earth without connection to their culture. It is used by the aliens to achieve transcendence. It works on the outer level with fasting and fixation, so there is some resemblance to the practice of the native Americans. Only after transcendence are you considered a grown up in this alien society. They picked Barbies, because to them they looked very close to what they would consider high potential teenagers. The aliens are looking forward to making contact with humans from earth, but it only makes sense to them after humans are transcended. So this transcendence experiment is part of their outreach program. Very exciting! Let’s hope it turns out well!

BTW, the aliens that crash landed on earth were teenagers (pre-transcendence) who stole away on a rogue trip with a ship one of them “borrowed” from their parents when they were out visiting friends one night. 🤷‍♂️ So next to the hopeful essence, there is also an obscure cautionary element in this piece. Christian 

I added some more mesh and Barbies.

Barbie Brompton Bag

Leah and her siblings along with their mother and old friend of mine, Ayala made this Barbie Brompton Bike bag with 4 real actual Barbies in the front pocket.