New Year in the Highlands

This new year has  been the strangest ever,
All keyed up to go to a 'highland New Year' in my new homeland as we had been invited to join friends.
I visualised swinging kilts and great banter, my charity shop find of ladies long dress kilt and waistcoat laid ready to don. It never happened , tiredness and insular needs reigned. I stamped my feet and threw my arms up but it changed nothing and needing space and focus I went to the studio and worked.

It was temper at first I admit and this is not a good way to start a complex design I had waited to try for some time.
Calming music and soft warming colours calmed my soul- the rebel in me , the rapunzel locked in a tower of her own making, clung rigidly to her righteousness as I laid out the wool fibre on the soft hues of muslin I knew it was nearing the midnight hour but was surprised by the lone pipers music drifting to where I was, Old Lang Syne  curled around my workspace.
I took time to watch the fireworks above the railway cottages. Part of me was cross that I wasn't out there in the thick of things but as the sparks faded I began to be grateful for what I did have and thinking of the kind and gentle man I had chosen to be with sent my thoughts tumbling to the weeks events and the sad death of the student in India Nirbhaya. I thought of women everywhere and how such a death had provoked outcry from sometimes silent voices. I am a fortunate woman and so I poured my love and grief for all souls who suffer at the hands of ignorance and aggression and as I did ,beneath my hands what I was making changed and became its own entity.

I wetted down the felt and perhaps still bristling a little , I fell into bed and slept. Awakening fresh and rested on New Years bright dawn I went back to work on the piece developing it as it developed me and contemplating why I do what I do. I am a felt maker because it feeds my heart and my soul and if I can just still my head for long enough to listen to the fact this this is a very big part of who I am.

Instead for now I leave you with the lovely seal who delighted me with its presence on a picnic today.

                                       I promise I will put up photographs of the finished piece.