These monkeys are soooooooooo naughty!

They steal food from your hand at breakfast and take water bottles and open them. Amazing!

I am staying outside Hampi in a small rural village called Anegundi. I wander around singing the song about their hometown in Fiddler on the Roof – Anatevka (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWiRetxeviw). They are both poor but the kids are happy. Muslims and Hindus live side by side and join in each others celebrations but don’t tend to intermarry. The children are outside playing all day with no shoes. I was told this was cultural rather than because of poverty – they wear them in the morning for school. However it is much hotter here than Anatevka. They are both small agricultural villages with the same number of syllables and start with Ana….. Anyway I keep singing the Anatevka song as I wander around here!

Fabric Books

Knowing I was sending home a shipment from Goa meant I really had to put together my fabric books. These are like a personal journey of what I have been doing in India and also there are some items that I had brought with me specifically to put inside them. I wanted to make three and prepared the paper from wallpaper, crepe paper and tissue paper in Pushkar.

All were stiffened with glue and tracing paper. They would be 10 pages long and all the paper had to be protected by thin organza. And backed with fabric too. However, I couldn’t find organza and so bought a thin stole with gold embroidered circles I was going to cut up for this purpose. It was too white for me so I dyed it off white with tea.

I persuaded Pirkko from Olaulim Backyards to source a sewing machine for me as I was going to stay there for over a week. However, her machine she had lent out was returned without the presser foot. So, a friend of her lent her one for me. It was an old hand operated Singer. By the end my right-hand biceps muscle was pretty sore but I did have three finished fabric books.

I had learnt how to make fabric books on a week’s holiday in Limoges at Fran and Phil’s wonderful Crafty Retreats (https://www.craftyretreats.com/) with a marvellous tutor Anne Kelly (http://www.annekellytextiles.com/).

I placed all manner of things pertinent to my time on my sabbatical. I cut up cards people had given me to wish me luck, some old music, lots of bits of vintage textiles, fabric from Anokhi and lace from Slanchogled that I had previously dyed in Pushkar.

I used ribbons I had brought with and flowers I had bought to decorate items here. I had also (ridiculously) bought a whole load of wall paper of 16 different dogs from our downstairs toilet in our family house in Highgate which we sold at the end of October 2019. In Pushkar I coloured them all in with a variety of purple pens and each dog had a small “collar” sewn on. I also put in some felt I had previously used to make some jewellery in the Camel lodge and quite a few business cards I had picked up in India along the way. There were also some things I had picked up in the streets (and washed) like old fabric scraps (lilac) in Pushkar and some spotty paper purple tape in Devpur.

For the back I used the sheet I was given in the Dia Homestay so I could paint there without making all their floors and tables purple.

Some parts of the backing fabric needed extra embellishment and I used acrylic paints and some puff paint as well as sprays of small plastic and paper flowers I had picked up in local stationary shops. I also used the stencil I had used on paper and fabric in Mandrem, Goa. One book had a very long thin leather tie and other two used the gold embroidery fabric left over from the stole from Ahmadabad.

These will be lovely memories not least because of the hard work to get the machine to work!  

More montages

There are going to be several inserts like this. Finding 400 gm lovely white A4 water colour paper really has been a blessing here. It means you can glue things on it without it warping at all. Because the tape is often so unsticky it needs to be stuck down additionally! More importantly I do them when avoiding starting other projects.

This set was made at Vivenda dos Palhaços in Majorda, South Goa. This series is a bit of a hotpotch of bits and bobs. Using some stuff up and trying techniques like inserting niqab pins (dark pinky purple!) into a felt shape without pricking myself.

There is a bit of a heart theme with the felt heart I had brought out from the UK, a heart necklace I had bought with Betsy in Anjuna flea market and accidentally dropped and broken! This meant I could use the centre piece here but also I could utilise the black beads in other projects. They feature in my latest spiral mobile (see future blog) and of course more montages. The shell one photographed in the group shot has switched category and appears below!

Shells

These were made from shells collected when Harry came to join me in Goa. He would sit on the sunbed reading his book and I would wander off to collect shells on beaches around Majorda in South Goa. Some I painted with a dilute purple paint. Others I put lashings of thick acrylic paint. I picked shells with spirals or some that were still joined in the middle. They reminded me of butterflies. There were long thin white ones which were the remnants of the central part of the long spiral shells and they looked like hollow teeth.

I made them in Dudhsagar Plantation (http://www.dudhsagarplantation.com/) because I was avoiding doing my felting which I had set myself to do! Once all the shells were used up, I had no option but to do the felting!  

I photographed them in the early evening in this lovely and remote and pretty basic place. But I met some really interesting people here and felt a bit of a spice plantation expert as I had done two already in Goa with Betsy (Tropical Spice Plantation – http://www.tropicalspiceplantation.com/) and with Harry (Savoi Plantation – http://savoiplantations.com/) and Ashok showed us around his plantation. Here I saw pineapples for the first time (see blog on words with three Ps from 21^st January 2020).

Felting

I have been felting for many years. I always explain it to people that riders would originally put fleece between them and the camel under the saddle, ride across the desert and by the end of the journey the pressure and heat (as well as a bit of sweat I suspect) would have turned the fleece into felt.

For a long time, I did wet hand felting and even did a short course with Tania in Ireland but it is wet and hard work. Often, I start it off by hand and then resort to the washing machine. This means the job gets done and the felt is nice and thick but you don’t really have much control over it. I made a lovely grey felt hat with a white hatch work pattern and black edges I wore for ages.

More recently I have been on a needle felting course in Dunstable with Nic Cremona (an excellent tutor) where I made a dog which was dogish-like but not something I think is great! But I will return to further workshops (https://www.theworkhousedunstable.co.uk/) It does take time. I can be slow when I am knitting and crocheting but most other things, I like to be fast! Needle felting is very repetitive and you do get three dimensional results. And, as Sarah pointed out (see below) it is good for getting out any aggression! It is a bit like sculpture with wool using a hammering technique. I am just not sure that I am good at it? A bit like my painting!

So, I brought quite a bit of kit out. Felting needles and reverse felting needles – you do this at the end to make it look a bit scruffier but my work is scruffy enough without this extra level! I also bought pipe cleaners, a block to work on and quite a large amount of a lilac and purple merino fleece from the Handweavers Studio. I sent the block back a while earlier as I had a yoga mat which would serve the purpose.

Whilst in Dudhsagar I met Sarah who was volunteering and she was a felter. I felt inspired and off I went. I did have visions of making something pertinent to my theme. This large opening which was like a huge mouth and spiralled (solidly) down as a long hollow tube with kinks and turns. I just couldn’t work out how to do it so settled on making five flowers of three petals with stamens. I also made the stalks made from fleece covered pipe cleaners. I made five smaller flowers of lilac and five slightly larger ones of purple. Making flowers ensured the 10 vases I had bought and painted would be of use. I had bought them to satisfy a market spending need (all 10 came to 280 rupees) but I am not sure they will end up in pieces?

Also, I could utilise the excess fleece for packaging my montages so it all left India via my Goan shipment at the end of January 2020. A big phew! And a few needles – well two as I had broken five with my exuberant felting!

The Sacral Chakra (2nd)

Take a few cleansing breaths. Deep inhales and exhales. Notice any areas of tension and breathe into these areas and let this tension go.

Breathe in light, breathe out tension, breathe in love, breathe out fear.

The sacral chakra is our second primary energy centre. It is the centre for creativity, relationships, emotional body and pleasure. It is orange colour and it is 5 cm below the navel.

We need to let go of guilt that we have in our relationships, in our creativity, in our sexuality and in our emotions. Imagine releasing all guilt making room for joy and pleasure.

These are sacral affirmations.

I deserve pleasure in my life

I reawaken my passion

I release all guilt

I surrender to this moment

This chakra corresponds to the second seven years from aged seven to 14 when you are forming relationships and the world is becoming a much bigger place. You move from your close-knit family and community to having peers who become increasingly important. I will enter this when I am 56 in just over a year. Please take joy and peace forward into your day!

I shall be heading on from the wonderful temples, boulders and fields of wet padi this weekend. I have enjoyed the slow way of life here. The children who play outside after school asking me for “one school pen”, the women washing clothes outside every morning as few have plumbed inside water sources let alone washing machines and the men wearing dhotis for the most part (but over long shorts!).