I still haven’t decided what the other three coffee themed art pieces are going to be. See my previous post here.

My creativity is currently hindered by some not so pleasant happenings in my life, and while I find myself with supposedly more free time than before due to be on sick leave for the last two weeks, I’m also spending a lot of this time sleeping or waiting around. I’m not going into details here on what’s going on as I want to keep it happy crafty, but I started a new blog to chronicle my life in the next few weeks on the road back to normality. It’s about a pink emotional support elephant.

Good thing I still haven’t finished my 10 year temperature blanket, so that’s an easy one to pick back up as it’s all planned and I can just crochet to my heart content. And it keeps me warm while I work on it.

For the not crafty hobbies, a while ago I had the insane idea of picking up a diamond painting set from Lidl. They have been tempting me for part of the lockdown from Instagram, only I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it plus the shipping costs on something I didn’t know I would enjoy and not throw across the room in frustration. But hey, a fiver from my local Lidl seemed like a reasonable price to pay to give it a try.

It’s going well enough, I’ve probably been working on it for about two months while watching shows. I use a couch eating tray so I can carry it around to work on it, and of course my house is now plastered of colourful stone. Thanks goodness for my hard working E-Wall-E, my robot vacuum. (If you are wondering where the name comes from, it’s a Dublin North Side based pun.)

Why do I like it? The repeated movement of picking a stone with pen and sticking into the canvas lulls me into a sort of mindfulness. This is the same with my second non crafty hobby, which judging from the increasing number of boxes arriving at my dwellings might be a little out of control: puzzles.

This is something that comes back from my teenage years. I always loved puzzle and many are still hanging on the walls in my parents’ house. I had this 1999 piece puzzle of Picasso’s Guernica, odd size I know, for about a decade. A friend got it do to it together, but we never finished it because he then left Ireland. Many times I was close to bring it to the charity shop, but decided to keep it and one day I reached peak lockdown and started it.

Since then I have finished this, a Disney villain one, and now I have a Magician workshop in the making. And four more in the queue.

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Three I bought myself, but one was a pleasant surprise from my team: cats and yoga, two of my favourite things.

This one is going up on the walls of my yoga room, which is nothing else than the guest room I haven’t furnished yet…

For now the complete puzzles are waiting in a pile on my desk hidden by cardboard, but once things reopen properly and my life goes back in track I plan to frame them all to decor my too empty walls.

For now I enjoy the mindfulness of it all and take a bit of respite from everything.