Goodbye 2014, Goodbye Blog

What a year 2014 was!

 When I filled out this workbook on 31 December  2013

I couldn't imagine that I was in for some serious magic in 2014.

(you can find the workbook for 2015 here).

Not that my life has changed so much on the outside:

same Hubby, same children

(Carolina liked to nap and I liked to photograph her)

(so thankful that everybody was healthy and happy this year),

same house

(got massively decluttered),

same vegan life

(even though Hubby learned to cook),

same yoga job.

Great travels.

But then,

there was my word for 2014.

*create*

I sewed and knitted only a tiny bit this year.

Mostly I painted.

An avalanche.

One little day at a time,

sometimes only a couple of minutes a day.

And now,

at the end of the year,

I have a portfolio to show on my new website:

www.cathringressieker.com

I painted, got addicted to art e-courses

and also learned some Photoshop and Illustrator skills.

I will have an art exhibition 

at a place where I teach yoga in January.

Some of my paintings will be published

in Alena Hennessy's new book " A Year of Painting".

A word of the year is a very powerful tool.

A direction, a calling.

So I would like to say Goodbye

 to this miraculous year

and I have one more thing to announce:

This is my last post here,

this blog also gets decluttered.

From tomorrow,

1.1.15,

you can find musings from my pink studio over there:

https://cathringressieker.wordpress.com/

Thanks for reading my blog over the last four years. 

I wish you a happy New Year

and really hope to see you again in 2015.

 

Love and Light, 

Cathrin

Live in the Moment

Gently recovering from fever and other symptoms.

a quote by Yogananda

inspired by Danielle Daniel's lesson

in Life Book 2014

Chocolate on Monday

Valentine's Day is over.

But feel free 

to help yourself to a little self-love this Monday.

Hubby cooks vegan

I got a totally unexpected Christmas gift from Hubby - a voucher for a vegan meal once a week for the whole year of 2014, cooked by him. Fittingly he not only got a sweater from me, but also wished for this cookbook here. I expected him to choose the receipts and me to do the cooking, what a surprise. All of his own accord he read Eating Animals, Peace Food and Anständig essen last year (I have never read these books). The man of spaghetti-and-pesto (and recently a very good vegan pizza) started the new year with a self-proclaimed 30 day vegan challenge. And I can benefit from it culinarily. Like last weekend - just imagine, the kitchen taken by Hubby, me in the living room resting and just occasional questions coming from the kitchen, where the vegetable broth or cumin are. Ta-dah!

Red lentil-coconut-curry

(German recipe here)

It looked really good and it also tasted very good. Subtle and sublime. Clara ate it, Carolina ate the rice and the rest of the four servings were finished off by Hubby and me. Just one thing I would change in the recipe -  I would take reduced-fat coconut milk, as I have noticed a certain intolerance lately to the full-fat version. But maybe it's just me.

As you can see, a new series on this blog is born. Stay tuned for more of Hubby's vegan culinary creations.

1.1. 2014

 2014 - I love that number!

And I also love New Year resolutions.

You might have already noticed in the top right corner of this blog, I am starting another 365 days project today - a year of daily decluttering. I have tried before in 2011 (here) and I am a lot better now at cleaning and house-keeping, but there is still too much stuff. We moved into our house 1,5 years ago and decluttered then and we did a flea market last year (here), but still stuff accumulates. Stuff, you have forgotten about, stuff you don't need and stuff that doesn't make you happy. This year I am serious and what helps me more to keep decluttering than blogging about it? Just the good feeling it gives me. So if you are interested in how decluttering is coming along, you are kindly invited to visit my blog:

http://365declutter.blogspot.com

Maybe you would even like to join me in this project and we can share experiences and be happy with less stuff in our lives.

Less clutter means also more space for creativity and fresh ideas. My inspirational book stack for things I would like to try in 2014 looks like this:

The other day I found this yarn graffiti at the door to a local bookstore:

 (Read again)

And of course!!!, there will be knitting and sewing. Last year I wanted to make socks and I managed to knit three pairs (here, here and here), each pair trying new techniques. 2014 I want to knit a pair of green socks, toe-up, on one long circular needle. I also will finish a green knitted spring dress from 2011 and and a white summer sweater from 2010.

The rest will be a surprise. I already love it.

Carolina sleeps

For her second birthday I gave my lovely Carolina a birthday present she couldn't care even less about than last year's lovingly handmade (here). It is just for my pleasure. Her own blog. No, not really a blog. A 365-day-project. Inspired by what I had read in Flow magazine, I felt the creative desire to start one, too. But it had to be simple and not tot far to seek. The magazine gave a whole long list of 116 project ideas.

Evaluating my time and possibilities, I wouldn't be able to crochet a granny square (like here) or make a stamp a day (like here). As a yoga teacher, I very much liked the 365-grateful-project (here), but that has been done better before. As a mother, a quick photo project that could be easily fitted into the everyday still appealed to me and an idea, that rang a bell inside me, was:

* a daily photo of your sleeping child *

I can do that. Carolina still takes her afternoon naps. And this will be probably the last year of her taking them. But I also had my doubts - do I want to expose her sweet slumber in the name of creativity? It can be done gently, I hope. Just a daily photo after she has fallen asleep, no staging (that has been done magnificently here), but still enough space to explore the project in a number of ways, in 365 days. This project is mainly for me and the blog helps to stay motivated.

If you want to take a careful glimpse, head over to http://carolinaschlaeft.blogspot.com/

And now, hush, Carolina is sleeping...

Flow

A new magazine at the news stand caught my attention last week - Flow magazine, the first German edition, saying: "the magazine for women, who want to see life a different way" (ahem). The magazine started in the Netherlands five years ago and also has an English edition since 2012. Now it was time for the German marget, target group women aged 30-45 (ahem).

It is a magazine for paper lovers - up to last week I didn't know I was one... (ahem), the magazine is printed on different kinds of paper and comes with free paper goodies, e.g. this time: wrapping paper, gift tags and a specially designed notebook by artist Natascha Boels (who is also featured in the magazine).

Other main topics are positive psychology, creativity and the ever-popular mindfulness (see also the last magazine I bought here), the different sections are titled: "feel connected", "live mindfully", "spoil yourself" and "simplify for life".

Craft-wise,

I found an article about granny-square-mania all around the globe ...

... and another inspiring article about 365-day-projects 

to boost your creativity. 

You can also learn how to make your own stamps, 

glimpse into the lives of creative women,

read about the 5 favourite books of a bookseller 

or just look at clouds to practice awareness.

I will watch out for more.

Pink Moment of the Week

Emil - the bottle has entered my yoga bag.

Instead of plastic bottles, I use this glass bottle now, secured and stabilized with padding and fabric. 

Potatoes

After the zucchini (here) it was now time to harvest the potatoes in Hubby's little veggie garden.

They look like potatoes, the taste like potatoes (good potatoes, for their pure taste best cut in slices and simply baked in the oven for half an hour), but they are something more to us. Our potatoes, from our backyard.

And even though I must have eaten hundredweights of potatoes in my life, only now I understand their true earthy quality, a food so grounding - coming from the ground.

Green

This summer we really harvest our own-grown zucchini (last year's was fake... remember?). Hubby's little vegetable garden worked some zucchini magic over the last months. So now Clara has the real green deal in her hands.

Clara was very interested to know how much such a zucchini would cost at the supermarket and how much we paid for the original plant...

... while Carolina went straight for the taste.

Two plants, four zucchini so far.

And there are more to come.

Vegan Progress

I was really amazed when I went to Oldenburg's main bookstore the other day. Just there to get a present (a pumpkin cookbook) for a friend's birthday, an unexpected vegan section caught my eye. No, catching my eye is too soft an expression... totally hit me... in a very pleasant way.

3 shelves of books about veganism and vegan cookbooks (one raw).

Shudder, shudder, and that's meat.

From the Garden

Hubby came in with these two bowls from his garden today. Arugula and pink chard. You can't get them fresher or more organic, I guess. I would prefer those greens over flowers anytime. Some of them went into my jogger's juice and most of it into the Big Dinner Salad. Even Clara devoured it and she usually doesn't even look at the salad. Feels so good!

Garden Man

Hubby has just said: "I am going in the garden and make some place for the new plants." That fits today's blog topic perfectly.

Hubby's vegetable garden - his new pride and joy. 

This year Hubby started out on his gardening adventure, he dug up patches (and removed the remains of my last year's attempt at gardening), put bricks around them and bought seeds and plants for potatoes, chard, zucchini, lettuce, kohlrabi and arugula. And his garden is doing fine. More often than not I hear him disappearing at night to "water his garden" or talking about how the potatoes are doing.

Word has spread about his garden, I guess. So at our birthday party we were gifted with those:

Flowers, lavender, hokkaido and zucchini plants, a pear tree and a blackcurrant bush. They really need some garden space of their own. Personally, I am still waiting for my thumb to turn green, but I suspect that I am more of an organic vegetable lover/cook/eater. But, you know, in a marriage there must be balance, one in the garden, one in the kitchen.

So I am very proud of my garden man who also deserves a break now and then (under the roses that he cut back so well).

Pink Moment of the Week

... at the Flea Market on Saturday. Great sunshine weather, great location at the Oldenburg Castle, nice people and a great opportunity to let go of old stuff (the money made is a nice by-product of the process).
Extra info: this was actually only the second flea market of my life.
What sold best: my CD collection and books.

In the Raw

May has seen me dabbling my culinary hands in the fresh waters of raw cuisine. So most of my creative energy went into learning the art of un-cooking - cutting and spiralizing vegetables, soaking nuts, blending smoothies and pestos. The results were diverse, from plain and filling to downright scrumptious (oh, the desserts!). But what I can say because I feel it: it gives you such a beautiful energy.

Read Knit Blog

This was a book given to me to read from a yoga student of mine. I had heard about the book (I have seen the German edition  lying around in the birthing home - of all places!-where I teach prenatal yoga classes) and had come across the regrets online. Australian songwriter and now-new mother Bronnie Ware interweaves the "regret chapters" with her personal story of breaking free. Reading the book I found it very positive and life-affirming and I think that the author's personal meditation and yoga background shines through in a lot of passages. And did I say that I love books written by vegans?

She doesn't knit or crochet in the book, but is already in the second sentence of the book "having a yarn" with a friend. And this is not the last aussie slang time in the book where she talks to a friend in this fiber-related way.

But I found one knitting grannie in the book, also right in the beginning. The first client in the book, an elderly English lady, would love her weekly routine where one appointment per day (doctor's, bingo, grocery shopping) would be enough "or it would ruin afternoon routine of rest and knitting".

I would love that afternoon routine... and sometimes manage a couple of minutes of it. So hopefully, those pink socks will come to their natural knitting end soon. No regrets. Just toes left.

Christmas Shopping

... following my Christmas motto this year.

This Christmas

... as found on facebook (here).

317

... was the number of times I counted hearing the word "Mama" this Sunday at home. 255 times uttered by Carolina and 62 times from Clara's voice. This only slightly exceeded by estimated my 247 guesses when I started this little Sunday game of mine.

Clara was really curious why I was jotting down those funny lines all day long and I promised to tell her at the end of the day - which only resulted in a lot of intentional "mamas" at the dinner table (not counted), of course.

Today I am happy to just hear "my name" again - and react to it.

Pink Moment of the Week

... again mixed with purple: new pretty cloth diapers, to bring elimination communication over the wintertime... with fun.