Sketchy Potion

It's been a horrid day, hasn't it? And I've been feeling very sorry for myself. In fact, I've been feeling so (perhaps literally) under the weather that I spent most of the weekend sleeping. This did not afford much time for stitching, and so I present to you last week's #secretsofselfpreservation potion, with apologies.

I am more determined than ever to conquer my fear of drawing. In fact, after writing this post I fancy doing a bit of scribbling in my visual diary. It has languished unloved for months, and I want its pages to be a little fuller.

I have used some potions sketched in the diary over the course of #secretsofselfpreservation thus far shrunk down to fit inside the potion bottle.

The ingredients read "Draw, despite your fear".

This project is a very small undertaking really, a bit of a throwaway thing, but I think as a whole it is rather effective. I can't wait to share it with the public and get them uncorking potions!

Remember you can get involved too, via the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation, by writing about a simple way you plan to, or already do, take care of yourself. Alternatively, you can create your own embroidered (or written on paper) potion - just remember to include the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation along with your snaps of it.

Postponed Potion

I've been a bit poorly this week, so whilst the potion ingredients are stitched up, I haven't assembled them yet. I'm afraid they will have to wait until tomorrow. I'll try to be more timely in future!

Life Buoy Potion

As #secretsofselfpreservation / Apothéké progresses, one week's potion is beginning to have a dialogue with its predecessor.

This week's continues a thought which making last week's Piggy Bank Potion elicited; that self care is an ongoing process through which you save yourself every day.

So I have stitched, simply, "Save yourself every day", and accompanied it with a miniature life buoy. 

This is as much a feminist statement as a therapeutic one; in the age where we are fed drivel such Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey it is perhaps more pertinent than ever that women take their destinies into their own hands and seek self-salvation rather than waiting around for a knight on a white horse to come riding in (particularly if these fictional "knights" we are supposed to swoon over are thinly veiled abusers). I'm very glad I have left my years as a submissive, passive damsel in distress behind.

It's summed up in a quote I have seen floating around the internet: "I don't want you to save me. I want you to stand by my side as I save myself".

Remember you can get involved too, via the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation, by writing about a simple way you plan to, or already do, take care of yourself. Alternatively, you can create your own embroidered (or written on paper) potion - just remember to include the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation along with your snaps of it.

Piggy Bank Potion

Being a vintage and cocktail aficionado can burn a hole in your pocket when you're on a shoestring budget. I'm having to learn to scrimp and save, with fond memories of student loans (which I honestly wonder if I'll ever be in a position to repay) a distant blur.

I'm not complaining; it's the life I chose, and working part time means I'm able to pursue my artistic endeavours and can get my work life balance just right, and, crucially, enjoy my job rather than resenting it.

Thankfully, despite my predilection for mid century frocks and old fashioneds, I'm pretty thrifty. And whilst shopping can make me feel guilty for a whole host of non-financial reasons (consumerism and privilege, hello), I firmly believe in "treat yo'self".

For those not in the know, "treat yo'self" is a phrase coined by Donna and Tom of perky sitcom Parks and Recreation. One day a year, Tom and Donna do just that; treat themselves to, amongst other things, mimosas, new clothes, and massages. It's a whole day dedicated to luxury self care, basically.

I don't have the self-restraint to keep my version of "treat yo'self" to one day. Neither would I want to. It's taken a long time for me to realise that I deserve to take good care of myself, and it's helped me survive. Many small rewards for getting over life's little daily obstacles seem much more effective in keeping well than setting myself (potentially impossible) large goals, only to be rewarded with a windfall once they have been achieved (if they ever are). It's about being realistic and keeping moving forward.

This week, despite having to mind my pennies a little, I decided to take a trip around the charity shops of the borough. I couldn't afford to splash out on a knockout piece of vintage or British made reproduction (though I have been eyeing these superb trousers lately), but I was able to pick up a pair of shoes, a cardigan, and a ballerina top which all fit seamlessly into my (curiously ever-expanding) wardrobe for a song.

This is my "treat yo'self"; small, inexpensive gift to myself which recycle unwanted items and do good. I've spoken to other mental health sufferers who, for example, take themselves on a date one day a month; it's the same principle. Any tenderness we can show ourselves has got to be a good thing when we have been dealt such a devastating and cruel hand in life. I really believe that you have to save yourself, and self care is part of that ongoing process; you are choosing to save yourself every day.

So here is my "Piggy Bank Potion", filled with some receipts from my charity shop "splurge", with an ingredients ribbon which reads " 'Treat yo'self' needn't cost a fortune." Good advice to keep in mind whenever I stumble across a particularly intoxicating frock on Etsy.

 I am very much looking forward to the point with #secretsofselfpreservation / Apothéké when I have forgotten precisely what my ingredients were for every week. Then I can pull out a potion and find a custom-made self care tip which may be perfect for that very moment.

Remember you can get involved too, via the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation, by writing about a simple way you plan to, or already do, take care of yourself. Alternatively, you can create your own embroidered (or written on paper) potion - just remember to include the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation along with your snaps of it.

Punctum Potion

This week's #secretsofselfpreservation / Apothéké potion links in very nicely with last week's "Selfies Are Self Care" potion.

In the accompanying blog post, I wrote about how selfies are a means of recording and capturing the moment; much as this entire project is. After all, as well as a self care tip each week, I am including a diaristic element of the week in the form of small objects in the potion bottle. So far these have included tea bags, Love Heart sweets, glitter, and plastic animals.

This week it's a miniature camera, because I have been sharing lots of photographs via my Instagram this week, and I have been following my instruction from last week to "Take more selfies".

Life is going surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) well at the moment. Therefore, I really want to stock up on good memories, both to help me over the next little inevitable hiccup, and also to cherish what I have. Photographs are a handy way of doing so, but I also want to get back to my visual diary and write more regularly in my written diary, too.

I have named the concoction "Punctum Potion". According to literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, the "punctum" is the aspect (often a tiny detail) of a photograph which "pricks" us with personal feeling and associations; it jumps out at us, causing a sense of deja vu or nostalgia, causing us to fall in love with the photograph.

The small objects inside each potion bottle are punctum too; as I take out individual bottles as the project progresses, their contents recall where and what I was doing that week, how I was feeling. Of course, they do not have the accidental quality of punctum I would encounter in an art gallery or magazine, as I have selected each object because it elicits associations for me. However, I think if someone else were to unscrew the lid and tip the contents into their hand, they would discover a punctum, with a whole range of responses and associations as diverse as the people themselves.

Remember you can get involved too, via the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation, by writing about a simple way you plan to, or already do, take care of yourself. Alternatively, you can create your own embroidered (or written on paper) potion - just remember to include the hashtag #secretsofselfpreservation along with your snaps of it.

Flowering

By the eighteenth century, embroidery was referred to as “flowering”, cementing its importance in cultivating the image of the English rose, and the inseparability of needlework and floral motifs. So long as such stitching was undertaken for the greater good and was not an exercise in vanity, it was permissible. Vanity, after all, is self-regard; looking at oneself, and not letting men do the looking. Why else are selfies so reviled?

Instructing women to stitch for the church or their husband denied women agency over their creativity. If pleasure was sinful, then needlewomen, ever pious, were not permitted to take pleasure in creating their art. In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker suggests that “the endless assurances that embroidered objects were necessary and useful were prompted perhaps by the guilt women felt that they found pleasure in embroidery”. By the Victorian age, lived experience was all about repression, to keep up the appearance of the angel in the house. This, after all, was an age in which women were told to “lie back and think of England”. The ideal English woman was fragile as the rose that gave her her namesake, pure, and far too calm for anything as frenzied as pleasure. Her physical and emotional helplessness was a reflection of her status as a commodity to be acquired by men; women could not own property or money they had earned until 1870; before then their assets automatically became their husband’s upon marriage.

The fear of sinning through embellishing garments to adorn oneself with (which was so popular in the eighteenth century) may have led to the Victorian craze for embroidering for the man in one’s life; from slippers to the rather frivolous smoking cap, all men’s accessories were to be covered in stitches. This corresponded to the ideal of the self-sacrificing angel in the house, who existed “to soften and sweeten life”, as Mary Lamb put it in her caustic essay On Needlework. A literal softening and sweetening was taking place here; women were creating textiles, and covering them with sentimental stitches.

By the 1830s, the most popular form of embroidery was Berlin woolwork. And the most popular motif? Flowers. Little has changed there, then.

Here is the beginning of a piece based on Berlin woolwork (and on some of the ideas explored here) though stitched in cotton, not wool.

Slowly, the embroidery is flowering...

Selfies Are Self Care Potion

There's a Tumblr post that's garnering notes by the thousands. It goes something like this: selfies are a product of teenage girls being in control of their own image and its dissemination. Of course they're going to be criticised.

When I post a selfie, I am posting it mainly to an audience of other women. I am luxuriating in my own image, for me, and for them. I am circumnavigating, perhaps even blocking the male gaze.

Another note-rich Tumblr post reads "I post selfies for myselfie, not for youie."

Women are often accused of being bitchy, competitive, throwing other women under the bus for the attention of men. In my ventures into the worlds of Tumblr and Instagram (there are currently 238,955,445 posts tagged "selfie" on Instagram alone), this is not something I have encountered.

Instead, women compliment each other. They congratulate each other on their appearance, and, more importantly, on their achievements and personal celebrations in day to day life. 

But my selfies are not just for my "audience". They are a means of recording times when I feel most content with myself, most excited about what my day has in store for me, and even a way of validating myself when I feel less than rosy; a slick of red lipstick and I'm ready to face the world. And perhaps, when I look back on the photograph I took that day, I will realise that it wasn't so bad in the end after all, and that moment of recording myself quite literally putting a brave face on it was the turning point in my day.

In this spirit, I got myself all glammed up, scrawled "Selfies are self care" on a chalkboard, and spent four pounds in a photobooth, to create this week's #secretsofselfpreservation potion.

And the "ingredients" for this potion? A beaded lipstick red ruffled ribbon bearing the ultimate 21st Century self care instruction: "Take more selfies".

Selfie esteem.
Selfie validation.
Selfie worth.

Selfie care.

(With deference to @angstravaganza.)