Makes me happy

Today I'm here to share something that makes me so happy. As someone who read this blog or follow me on Instagram, you might have noticed the slight obsession that I have developed in the latest months about up\recycling, and lately, about my newest passion: baskets ! Yep, few weeks ago I started just for fun to make baskets out of old clothes striped down ( by me )  and hand sewn and I loved it. I find it so creative and relaxing and the idea that something so beautiful comes out from old items destined to the trash, well makes me feel so good at so many different levels. Back to the point. Few weeks ago I had the chance to visit this lovely shop here in Loviisa '' Krinti ''. I immediately loved it. It features only very high quality and high standard items, going from wool to espresso machines, from vintage to handmade, everything from local artists\artisans. Usually I am quite shy when it comes to talk about what I do, but something there made me feel at ease to just ask if it would be possible to bring few of my creations to see if something could fit the lovely atmosphere. Long story short, my baskets now are happily waiting for a new home from their spot in Krinti !!!! I'm so thrilled and excited about this collaboration. I'm so happy and excited that finally my creativity is finding its very personal way of expression. Litterally I let my hands and my soul do all the job while my mind just rests and I love the results ! Here few pictures I took today when I brought few more items to sell.

I'm really really happy.

This gonna be a great summer !

Spring and fairies

Hello world ! Wow it has been a long silence it feels almost strange to be back here on my apple tree posting. Very busy days in a rather demanding family with a lot of work to get ready for summer's markets and events in which hopefully I will sell some of my creations. My creativity has the tendency to roam very wide in very different fields, so I have busied myself with jewelry, mixed media, crocheting, painting\drawing and photography. Little by little I will show here some of my things and maybe I might consider to start selling also online (maybe on Etsy ? I need to check it out, prices and stuff ... ).
So as the title says it seems that spring is slowly showing up here in Finland too. It is still quite cold ( only we reached +9C only after hours in the sun - a cold sun it seems ) but we already have very long days with the sun rising around 6 am and setting past 8 pm so lovely ! I've always been an early bird, but the winter darkness basically switches me off and that is something that I really dislike, but the light of spring\summer !! It's my thing totally, I also welcomed spring with a two weeks detox\cleanse with no gluten, dairies, meat and filled with raw vegetables and fruit and boiled eggs. It's not much far away from the way I usually eat, but in normal 'days' I enjoy some cheese or latte and ocasionally some chicken meat. During my detox I also started every day with meditation and prayers and Bible reading, which usually helps me a lot to go through the day. Well this depends a lot on James, if he wakes up earlier I usually have to give up meditation or Bible reading, but accepting this season of my life I'm sure it's a big step in the direction of mindfulness and awareness and acceptance of the will of God.
Anyways, as I said today we had some sun, so with the precious help of two of my children I went outside to take some pictures. Well .... you won't believe what I found ! ...our garden was filled with fairies ....
(spoiler alert : it's part of a nice little project I'm carrying on ... ) so .... welcome in my garden  !

... As I was getting ready to shot some pics of the wild crocuses I realized that little friends had gathered around the flowers as well. I'm sure the fairies have missed flowers and sun as much as I did during the winter. I wonder where do they hide in the dark and cold months ...

 ... And look ! I'm not the only one who is excited about rhubarb season .... this little one is probably rhubarb fairy !!

Hopefully you're life have been filled with sun and joy and a little kind of magic as well.
Have a great week !

Alive

I really need to write it down, to share it, because it feels so incredibly good that I need to let it out and to give a readable shape to these feelings to remind them in the dark moments that will sure come again ( as it happens to everybody from time to time ). For the first time in many many years I feel alive. Not exactly alive, because it might seem that until now I was numb and depressed all the time, and it not true. I feel like if I found my true self again. Like meeting an old dear beloved friend that you lost any kind of contact with and all of a sudden you meet her again. She aged, she's greying, she's heavier, but it's her, and you're so happy about meeting her that all the changes are not important at all. I'm not really sure how it happened. I started meditating daily and praying daily and most of the time I'm doing both at the same time, Christian meditation that's it. And I tried to just soak in beauty, and to practice mindfulness and to be fully in the moment, whatever moment it might be. And I found myself sitting on the thick carpet of my living room, with a box full of fabric scraps, colorful wooden beads, tiny silver bells and my little one freely ravaging through it all giving me all the freedom to let my mind and soul go and I found myself sewing and arranging and playing and having plain old fun with it all and when i felt it was finished I felt like waking up from a very vivid dream, still a bit dizzy, with a beautiful piece of ... art ... do i dare to call it art ? ... Yes, I can only call it a small, lovely piece of my very own art. My. OWN. art ... So liberating. So invigorating. I read lately, that if God gives you a gift, He will give you the chance to live by that gift.... Maybe ... This is what I'm talking about. Welcome back Flavia, here you are, in your beautiful uniqueness. In your imperfect uniqueness. In your perfect God-made uniqueness. This has been a real Easter for me. I feel I'm born again to a new fullest life.

Creativity

Since I was a child I have always been very creative, and I have always loved drawing, painting and working with my hands. As a young adult I had so many dreams about my life, how to make a living from my real passions and skills and I'm pretty sure I might have succeeded if I didn't give up on my dreams because of other people expectations.
So when I became a mother 15 years ago ( almost) I always tried to nurture the creativity of my children. Their early childhood has been filled with glue, scissors, colors and dough, wool, yarn and papier-mache and whatever else can come to your mind. Now that they are older ( I mean the 4 older ones of course ) they all have an own creative life that of course not always, if ever, matches with my own interests. My children are into dance, minecraft, playmobil. Seldom one of them works with the wood or papier-mache or draws. I have to be honest, a couple of years ago this was very painful for me. Not only because I wished to pass them my knowledge,skills and passions, but mostly because I lost my creative buddies. But then, one morning, after they busied themselves upstairs in their big room for few hours the call you up with the camera, for some mementos of their last effort, and in a leap you realized that it might not be wool or watercolors, but surely you indeed passed them the burning fire of creativity, that one fire, I'm sure most of you know it, that makes you see the world around you in a total different way: a wonderful place filled with opportunities to create, to make beauty happen, to be happy in the work of your busy hands. Here what my camera captured a couple of morning ago ...

 After unbuilding most of their plamobil sets the painted and mixed them with wood and clay and what-not to create a fire station of their own.

 The fire station has many different room, filled with tiny details they build\make.

They prepare tiny food with clay\playdough, sew pillows for tiny beds, make doors and tiny books and newpapers for their firemen.They give birth to a whole world with their hands. It may not be made out of natural material as maybe i wished, but it is indeed a highly creative work.

 And there is the city on the side ( unfortunately you can't see in the pictures ) with hybrid houses made of playmobil houses with wooden roofs made by them and firefighter busy fighting fire, with books about firefighter open on the side to make it as realistic as possible in all the details.

I asked them to let me take a picture of them near their creation, but my boys declined, Milla instead accepted happily. So here she is, on behalf of her brothers Leo and Seba.

Way to go kids !

Nature Journal : Imboloc through my eyes

And so february is here. January has gone in a flurry of projects and ativities. Days are longer, energy is highier, house is much more tidy and things done are more and more lifting my spirit. In this month my youngest doughter will turn 11, she is leaving childhood behind too, but hopefully some of it will stay a little longer for me to enjoy.
This morning I painted an entry in my nature journal. Today for the Celts was the first day of spring or Imboloc. For Christians is Candlemas, actually there is a fun side, I only learned while studying celtic traditions that candlemas is celebrated by Christians. In my family there was just the saying that if today the weather was good it meant the winter was gone but nobody ever mentioned to me that today was the blessing of the candles for the year in honour of the virgin Mary. Another interesting finding of today was about this Scottish rhyme that basically states the opposite of what we used to say in my family : if Candlemas be fair and bright,come winter have another flight ...
But well, here Imboloc has been characterized by snow. A huge amount of it. It's three days that is snowing no-stop and today the snowfall was even heavier. I actually love this. The temperature it's not so low, we're at 0 C , and the world is white and magic. I not even mind the snow job. And the light ! So much of it comparing december, this morning the sunrise was at 8:30 and the sunset at 16:29, so 8 hours and one minute of daylight,five minutes more then yesterday, while the 20 of december the sunrise was at 9:23 and sunset was at 15:06 !!! So little more then 5 hours and 40 minutes. Incredible isn't it ? Our Creator makes wonderful things. But here few pictures ...

Here from my nature journal, this is what I see when I look the horizon from my kitchen window facing south-east. Unfortunately we don't live in the forest, it's just a small road with nice rows of nice wooden houses, but the forest is very close. So when I look outside I try to lift my eyes over the roofs and I focus on the trees and the sky and it feels like if we're in the forest, into the wild ...

This is the actual sight from the window, but I'm so used to my little game, that I hardly notice houses and roofs now ....

And this is how it looks from the north-west window, in my bedroom. Everything is so white out there. It looks like a dream :)

Happy february to all of you !

Nature Journal

Here the last two entries in my nature journal. I don't have the time to update it every day, but I try to paint\draw at least once or twice a week. It is such a lovely and nice habit. Now it's almost one year that I'm more consistently work on nature journaling and mostly on ONE nature journal ( I used to paint here and there always waiting to 'get better' before starting on a real journal ... sometime we can be our worst enemies isn't it ? ) and when I am about to start a new paint I love to flip the pages for a while and read here and there. Read about the nature, about its course, temperatures, rain and snow, darkness and light and the way it looked the world around in a certain moment. And all of this hardly ever going out of the house or away from the garden. As Clare Walker Leslie says in her Keeping a nature journal , nature can be found everywhere, you just need to look out from the window ... or in the vase on your table ;)

 Here the flowers that my husband and children bought for me on my birthday 

This is the big tree ( sorry I'm not good at recognizing the trees, I'm learning ) between our garden and the neighour's one. This monring was chilly, at - 7, but the sky was blue and the sun was shining. The east side of the tree ( trunk, branches ... ) were golden because of the sun, while the west side in the shade was still frozen, with a thin layer of white frost icing it. It was an incredible sight. Now forever in my journal :)

Lord of the Rings

My kids can hardly be described has children anymore, I mean the older four of course. In the next 6 months they will turn 15,13 and 11. In our homeschooling path we hardly ever followed a standardized curriculum and basically never used school books but when they were younger I could organize activities, mini lessons about subject of their interest or create with them booklets ( we had a ant booklet and a pirate booklet that were great ! ). In the last couple of years they showed lesser and lesser interest in whatever activity I had\have in mind and since I strongly believe in letting them free to build their own path to adulhood ( with my constant presence and help ) I let them decline and do whatever they thought it was better for them. But still I missed A LOT the time spent together sitting at the table working along. Then few months ago, thanks to an old Lord of the Ring video-game we found in the local second-hand store, the three middle kids, Leo,Seba and Milla started to ask me informations about Tolkien and the book ( I love LOTR ) and finally they asked me to read it aloud for them. JOY ! BLISS ! and few weeks ago we decided to make a big map of the Middle Earth to understand better the journey of the fellowship AND they agreed to collect all the poems AND to focus on the most interesting descriptions and make drawing out of it. I MUST BE DREAMING. I mean we're not only working together, but on somthing I love and they love, drawing and reading ( two of my all time favourite ways to spend time.
Here few pictures of our mornings...

 Here we are working on the map.

To make it a little more durable we covered it with transparent adhesive paper

Almost ready to focus on the description of the day...

 James works with us, he asked a 'workbook' for himself and he wanted his pencils and a sharpener :)

 And here we are all busy. Gaia is working on a project of her own since she doesn't like LOTR.

As you can see we all have a black cover workbook, I found them in a departement store at very cheap price ( 2 E and 99c) and they are especially for watercolour drawings.

Here the description and my watercolour

Here Milla working on her drawing, she still has not finished it, very detailed one .

Seba's

Leo's

And once we're finished ...

...everything goes back in the art basket.

I LOVE IT.

And now it's time for some outdoor fun ;)

See you soon !