What's happening here?

Today I want to talk about something that's kind of personal.
If you have been following me for a longer period of time, you know I don't share much from my personal life.
You do get a glimpse into my brain weirdly jumping between randomly selected topics which also says something about me, but you don't really know what I'm doing between those brain jumps.

Do I like cooking (no), what books am I reading (mostly vintage crime at the moment), what am I watching (okay, you do know about the silent movies, but there is more), do I have hobbies beside crafting (movies and TV shows), how do I feel (all over the place), what do I play (this and that), what do I look like (very long hair and glasses)?
Of course there's much more.

This blog has been mostly about crafty things for many years. I showed you what I made, I showed you what others made, I told one or the other story and for a while I shared movie quotes, but all in all this has been a blog showing my creative side and that's what it has always been supposed to be.

When I got back into blogging more again, however, this changed, and if you have been around before you may wonder why that is.
There are several reasons and not wanting to be creative is definitely not one of them.
My brain is still coming up with more ideas than I can realize in general and especially at the moment, and that has to do with both ability and motivation.

There are more days now when my hands just won't play nicely. If I don't think of taking a break at the right moment, I start messing things up because of that, then I start ripping up, but instead of stopping there, I get stubborn and try again which usually doesn't work out well. It's amazing how angry you can get over tiny beads (and yourself).
My problem is that it seems my head doesn't want to acknowledge those new limitations and adapt to them ... or maybe my muse doesn't.
I used to fiddle for hours without a break, but as much as I tell others it's okay to take breaks, I have a hard time accepting it for myself.
Having to rip up a WIP, however small it may be, because of a stupid mistake - oh, so stupid sometimes! - can get very frustrating which isn't good for motivation. Having no motivation means I sometimes don't even start.

Another hit for my motivation was that my sales have dried up. I'm not talking trickling, but dried up.
Don't get me wrong now, I'm not begging for sales here. I get it, times are getting harder and harder, postage is high (my customer base was overseas), jewelry is not a necessity, but the web still abounds with it and I'm just a tiny fish in that sea.

It has changed my view on my personal crafting, though.
I'm hardly ever wearing my own jewelry for lack of occasion. I don't get out often enough to and that's not going to change. I know there are people who say you should wear jewelry and clothes for yourself, but I never felt like dressing up at home and wear much jewelry.
So why make more just to stack it in a drawer? Or rather, where is the line between making something to feed my creative urges and making something just to - well, having made it?
For me, there really is a difference which is one reason why I could never have done this full time.

The same goes for embroidery. How many embroidery hoops can you put on a wall, especially if the walls are full already? 😆 My favorite pieces - Nadine on her island, Foxy, the cat inspired by dem Dekan, and the Guardian of the Woods - are set up between my Steiffs now.

I'm definitely not saying that I'm going to stop making things, not even jewelry. I have to find a way, however, to make it work for me, my muse, and especially my body (and my available space).
For years, I had been filling a lot of my time with making stuff, though, and now I needed to find something for the times when I won't be able to do that.
And that's the reason for my blog having changed. Something I can always do and actually love to do is diving into rabbit holes. I've always done that more or less, but haven't shared it as much before and I try to stick with certain topics now.

Valerie Hinojosa from Washington DC, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0,
via Wikimedia Commons
"Down the Rabbit Hole"

So this might not be as much of a crafty blog as it used to be, but it will definitely be more of a trip into my weird brain. Often I don't know myself why a certain rabbit hole looks tempting to me.
Anyhow, you are most welcome to visit and I hope you will be finding something interesting and maybe surprising 😉

The "Queens of Crime" - Agatha Christie, the life

In this post about Agatha Christie's work and my personal dilemma with it, I mentioned her interesting life.
What do I mean by that?

Agatha Christie was born in Torquay on September 15, 1890 as the youngest of three siblings in a wealthy upper middle class family.
Although it wasn't encouraged by her mother, she learned reading at the age of four, and she was home-schooled in reading, writing, basic arithmetics, and music.
At the age of 11 she lost her father, a year later she started attending a local school, and when she was 15, her mother sent her to Paris where she completed her education.
When she came home again, she and her sick mother decided to spend three months in Egypt.

In 1912, Agatha was introduced to Archibald Christie whom she married in 1914. While Archie was in France during the war, Agatha first volunteered in a hospital and then qualified as an apothecary assistant working at the dispensary which inspired her to use poisoning as the method in her first detective story featuring Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who had come to England as a refugee.

In 1922, the Christies joined Major Belcher's promotional tour for the British Empire Exhibition. During this tour they learned for example how to surf and were among the first Britons to surf standing up. I don't know about you, but the picture of an old/er Agatha is so ingrained in my mind that I have a hard time imagining her on a surfboard, but she enjoyed surfing thoroughly.

In 1926, Archie asked Agatha for a divorce after falling in love with a friend of Major Belcher's, Nancy Neele. After a row, Agatha disappeared which of course led to a huge news story, but also to an extensive search with hundreds of police offers, thousands of volunteers, and even aeroplanes.
11 days later, she was found at a hotel where she had registered under a false name. She never gave an explanation and opinions about whether she disappeared in a fugue state or consciously are divided. Public reaction was mainly negative, also due to the costs of the extensive search.
The divorce went through in 1928, Agatha retained custody of their only child, Rosalind.

In autumn of 1928, Agatha travelled to Istanbul with the Orient Express and on to Baghdad where archeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine, who was a fan of her novels, invited her to the site of Ur. She became friends with them and they invited her to return in 1930.
During that second trip, she met Woolley's assistant who was ordered by Katharine to take Christie on a conducted tour of the country - Max Mallowan who was 13 years younger than her. The way she took everything during that tour in good humor, even getting stuck in the sand of a dry river valley, convinced him that she would make a wonderful life companion, and so he proposed to her just six months later.
This was the beginning of a second life on a different continent for Agatha beside that of a successful writer.
Katharine Woolley, however, didn't want another wife at the site which is probably the reason why the couple went to Nineveh next. In "Murder in Mesopotamia", which Christie - she used the name Mallowan outside her writing career - dedicated to the Woolleys, the victim was inspired by Katharine. According to Mallowan's biographer Henrietta McCall, Katharine was aware that the as difficult portrayed character was based on her and enjoyed the notoriety.

In 1932/33, Max and Agatha worked on their first own dig in Tall Arpachiyah near Nineveh. Both Agatha's celebrity status as a writer and her money helped Max' archeological career as this was the time when digs still had to be sponsored with private money, at least partially.
During the season - fall and spring - they were at the sites, in summer they were in England with Rosalind, and the rest of the time they spent either traveling or staying at home.
Max led the excavations, Agatha, who had taken a drawing course, started by doing drawings, but that wasn't really her thing. So instead she wrote in the morning, in the afternoon she recorded finds and put together broken ceramics.
In 1934, they travelled to Egypt and took a Nile River cruise which inspired one of her most famous novels, Death on the Nile.

Eventually they moved on to digs in Syria.
Agatha found her role by becoming the official photographer which was a hard, exhausting, and demanding task, both the photographing itself, but also the developing of the negatives. She didn't just take pictures, however, but also filmed, black/white and in color. In 1937, she even took a photography course in London which led to more creative experiments, not to her husband's joy as he would have preferred purely scientific photos to creative ones.

Part of their team in Syria for several years was the young architect Robin Macartney who not only assisted by drawing finds, maps, and plans, but also designed an expedition house.
Fascinated by Macartney's drawings, Christie asked him to design a book cover for her. In the end, he designed four dust-wrappers between 1936 and 1938. What she liked best about them was that each cover told something about the story by using elements from it, such as the Ramesses II statues and the Nile cruise steamer for "Death on the Nile", and I totally understand that because it seems to be a concept that publishers struggle with from covers I have seen myself.

First edition of "Death on the Nile"
with the dust jacket by Robin Macartney
via Wikimedia Commons
under CC BY-SA 4.0

Excavations came to a halt when WW II broke out, but after the war they came to Nimrud, a site Mallowan had long had his eye on. He became the first director of the British School of Archaeology and thus secured the necessary support for the excavation.
The couple was there throughout the 50s, they lived in the School's building, and while Agatha had a small writing room added to the team house, she also assisted again by collecting, recording, and cleaning artifacts, taking photographs, and restoring ceramics.

Nimrud Ivory "Lion of Nimrud"
By Unknown - M0tty, CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

During the war Christie had written the book "Come, Tell Me How You Live" about their time in Syria.
Nimrud was the last site she went to.

Bull plaque, one of the Nimrud finds,
via Wikimedia Commons,
by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)
under CC BY SA 4.0

Agatha Christie died on January 12, 1976 at Winterbrook House.

Did you already know about Agatha Christie's "second life"? Have you maybe even read her book about it? If so, what did you think?

Sources:
- Agatha Christie's adventurous 'second act' plays out in Mesopotamia in: National Geographic March 21,2019
- Bridget Roddy: Agatha Christie and Archaeology, An Understated Connection on: Trowels and Tribulations: IUP's Archaeology Blog, March 11,2022
- German documentary "Agatha Christie und der Orient" 2021
 - BBC Archive 1977 - The World This Weekend, Sir Max Mallowan
- Agatha Christie on Wikipedia

Welcome back to me! ;-)

Yes, I'm still alive!
It has been 4 1/2 months, I know. A few things have happened during that time that had robbed me of my motivation to blog, even put together the Oldies but Goodies. One of them took up a lot of my time for a while and when I was done with that, well, once you have stopped doing something, it can be hard to get started again.
And then something has happened that has changed my daily routine and that needs a lot of my attention. That wasn't helpful, either.

That doesn't mean I have stopped making things, but lately I have not been able to make things as much and especially as spontaneously.
Enough with the vagueposting.

Number 1 was that I lost my online shop. Zibbet where I had my shop for more than ten years, suddenly announced that they had sold the marketplace to a mysterious buyer, one of the big ones in the business, and that we sellers had two weeks to download everything before Zibbet would be shut down "temporarily".
If I hate something, it is not having information or feeling ignored. If I sit on a train that has stopped in the middle of nowhere, don't just let me sit there, but at least tell me that you don't have any information yet, either. If you have information, let me know about it (seriously, as someone who has been commuting by train for 35 years, this is one of my big pet peeves). It's even worse here. On the train all I can do is wait, but how am I supposed to make a decision in this case if I'm not told what's going to happen?
To be on the safe side, I started listing all my items, including descriptions, a picture, tags, materials, in an own file, so I would still find things easily and have them available for transfer to another shop. While doing so, I decided on items to get ripped apart or given away.
As you can imagine, this took me so long that my anger had plenty of time to bloom.

I still haven't decided on a new platform to sell on and at the moment I have no idea how long that decision will take me. So for now, I'm selling in a few Facebook groups and of course you are always welcome to contact me if you see something on my Facebook page, on DeviantArt or here on my blog, for example on my new gallery page which I have set up to show at least some of my available items while I'm shopless.


Number 2, the attention seeker, has entered my life at the end of June and was quite small and very cute. His name is der Dekan (English: the Dean, after one of the wizards at the Unseen University from the Discworld books).
He's 6 1/2 months old now and still not suitable for a university job, I'm afraid. He's half angel, half demon like every good kitten, some days it's more like 75% demon - we are having one of those today why I'm hiding behind a closed door right now with him having the run of the other rooms. I can hear him. He loves the computer and this post would look very different with him helping ;-)
He's also quite the master thief already which means I can't leave anything out (I have already begun packing a lot of things into cupboards and drawers) that may be a toy to him - so, anything from a piece of felt to bead tubes, tools from crochet hooks to pliers, and of course loose beads or cabs.
Sometimes I even have to lock myself in to have a few undisturbed creative minutes. Only when he falls asleep and I have already everything on hand, I can work for a longer time.
Gundel can't believe I let such a brat into our lives, and honestly, I have never appreciated her more than now although I thought that wasn't possible. Gundel is an angel cat and she deserves wings ... if only to get away from the demon quickly! ;-) She will also keep you up-to-date on that once she starts blogging again, by the way, about his addiction to trash, for example ...

Ok, that's the long-winded explanation for my absence, and I will probably not be around that regularly for a while, but I'll be trying, promise!