A mantra about the I and Me

As a self employed woman I am as busy as any other professional career woman, and maybe even a bit more. Sometimes life gets consumed by the own biz 24/7 and I forget about me as a person in all my wholeness and complexity, think of myself as a shop owner and artisan first. I have been reflecting on this for a while and did a little internet research and stumbled upon several life coaching sites. I copied an affirmation, also called mantra, below and it ties nicely into the accompanying article How To Love Yourself in 17 Ways at Abundance Tapestry

Here is a good affirmation to read and reflect on…..

“I am Me. In all the world, there is no one else exactly like me. Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine, because I alone chose it — I own everything about me: my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions, whether they be to others or myself. I own my fantasies, my dreams, my hopes, my fears. I own my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes.

Because I own all of me, I can become intimately acquainted with me. By so doing, I can love me and be friendly with all my parts. I know there are aspects about myself that puzzle me, and other aspects that I do not know — but as long as I am friendly and loving to myself, I can courageously and hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles and ways to find out more about me.

However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me. If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought, and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that which I discarded. I can see, hear, feel, think, say, and do. I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be productive, and to make sense and order out of the world of people and things outside of me.

I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me. I am me, and I am Okay.” Denis2005 Virginia Satir quotes (American Psychologist and Educator, 1916-1988)

3 treasuries with my FTEC teamies

a hint of teal

collection in brown

color me softly on a summer's night

Lazy me felt like playing this morning, and believe it or not, these are my first treasuries ever, after being on Etsy over 2 years.

Enjoy the talent of my FTEC friends!

Free crochet pattern links...hippie tams, rasta hats, berets, kufis, slouchy beanies, skullcaps

Here is a message to all those readers who are searching for free hat crochet patterns.

I still get a lot of hits on my old free pattern and I'll be happy to answer all the questions, but often you guys don't leave me an email address.

Just got a message from Hannah who gave me her AIM contact, but I don't use AIM messenger.

So this message is for you, Hannah and all the other interested visitors of my blog.

A wealth of good patterns can be found here:

http://www.crochetpatterncentral.com/directory/hats.php

http://www.crochetpatterncentral.com/directory.php

Hope that helps, let me know how you like this suggestion. As an

organic crocheter I have a hard time writing crochet instructions

for others and I don't sell patterns for that reason, only finished

crochet items.

The starter garden and lessons we have learned

Lesson 1:

Never underestimate gourd vines. They are competing with our giant tomato plants for space, sun and water. Next year they may get their own little garden corner.

Lesson #2: Get to know your soil. There are some spots where nothing comes to life. Probably a rocky soil and dehydrated by the giant close-by tree.

And if you don't really love okra, don't plant them. I have been watching out forever to see okras

grow on these plants, and I don't even love okras that much.

If you have a pet, you may think about building a nicer fence or start your beds with raised wooden planting boxes while it's still cool, around March preferably. Our provisional fence that we raised at first may just stay there during the whole season and every time I look at it I go "how ugly", but in almost 100F weather, who's got the energy to carpenter?

Planting your first organic garden is fun, and you can't get enough seeds or pre-grown plants. As a novice you think that if at least one third of all your plants will survive and carry fruit, then you did exceptionally well.

Squash and cucumbers grow so much larger than I imagined in my beginner's dream, and half of the seeds would have been plenty. So it's either less plants or more space for the future, but yet again, while the sun is scorching Oklahoma, who will pick up the shovel and relocate all the mature plants? Not me:)

Natural garden sculpture: this giant stump used to be a really giant mulberry tree which endangered the safety of our house. We sadly had to have it cut. What a wonderful shadow it provided to cool the back patio.

The hibiscus tree in the middle was given to me on Mother's Day and it looks a bit wilted in the picture. Even though a tropical tree, I am not sure it will withstand the afternoon heat in the west. Yucca plants from New Mexico in the back. We assumed since they survived in the rough climate of the Oklahoma panhandle it would be a cinch for them to thrive in our yard. Seems like

they are suffering in our soil, what a beautiful garden centerpiece we had anticipated. We'll see if there will be any lesson to this experiment.

Summer Solstice -- The Elders Speak....some poems

(from weather & arts, the Elders speak)

The Summer Solstice: Summer has begun by the almanac, but the light is already leaning toward Fall.
Hal Borland

Summer's lease hath all to short a date.
William Shakespeare

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee -
Emily Dickinson

Summer means promises fulfilled, objectives gained, hopes realized. The surge of doing and achieving, of watching and enjoying is finally replaced by a sense of quiet and floating and a certain fullness and repletion, as though one cannot absorb any more.
Sigurd F. Olsen

Today the summer has come at my window with its signs and murmurs...Now it is time to sit quiet face to face with Thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.
Rabindranath Tagore

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
Wallace Stevens

Beanie Round 3 ... simple vs. kitschy...and this and that

This blogging/listing commitment has helped me to stay on track and invest that iota of more energy. Even though these 2 hats have not been listed for sale yet, I have accomplished my task 90% today.

Beanie 1: Simple, but with a sophisticated yarn, contains recycled water bottles. This is my personal style, especially with color mixing.

Beanie 2: I was not sure whether to add some adornment or not, the beanie seemed to "need something" to make it more special.

I am really not the kind of person who likes to add-on a lot of stuff. And I personally never reach for a brooch or sew flowers on my wardrobe, but, I have experienced that a lot of people really go for these kind of embellishments. At a craft show I sold more of those beanies with flowers than hippie tams. Kitschy may not be the right word, even though kitschy has a positive connotation in my book. I enjoyed rummaging through my trim and button bin and made this little flower/yoyo/button thingy after all. It's cute. I should embrace cute more often:)

Today I am tired, it was one of these days when chores didn't come to an end.

After a long day I just want to retreat to bed with a good book and a bowl of frozen yoghurt.

Oscar, our cattle dog, got stung by a bee or wasp today, and since he is allergic against insect stings we had to make an emergency run to the vet clinic. It's Saturday and we were so lucky that our vet happened to be mowing the lawn around his animal hospital when we pulled up. There had been nobody answering the ph at the vet's office and we just decided to drive there anyway.

He treated Oscar with Anti-histamin and a cortison shot right away before the poor dog could swell up too bad.

This ordeal happens almost every year at least once during the warm months. The first time it happened I didn't know that Oscar would develop such a severe reaction, his body and face looked "rippled" and was swelling, he hardly could breath and his whining sounded like crying .

He got bathed after we got home, and I sat with him in the shade and made him lay still for a few hours. While crocheting.

Then gardening, watering, preparing tuna salad with our own home grown garden fresh tomatoes. Cleaning the dog house, sweeping the porch.

Dinner, showering, shopping for dairy and fruit at Braum's and getting everything for tomorrow's "after sweat-lodge dinner".

You get the idea, and it's still around 90F while I am typing this late at night.

Happy weekend and happy Father's Day to all the Dads:)

Beanies Round 3 ... these are very ME

Tie-dye makes me happy, it's vibrance boosts energy and expresses a love of color ("What Not To Wear", I am so glad the show went into their summer break!)

I called the 2nd one "Purple Fae".

Purple combined with green is just who I am, Purple Sage, and I am intrigued by fairie myths and folklore.

(Beanies in my Etsy shop)

Don't want to call it Rollback time, but Customer Appreciation Days at Purple Sage Designz HQ

Only valid on my web site

Purple Sage Designz

Happy Shopping & Saving:)

At the mercy of a low internet connection

Yesterday the listing fell flat because at a certain point in the evening my pc refused to move, or what I suspect, our bandwidth was in the basement.

Alas, the beanie round #3 had to be postponed.

Today I am showing the rustic urban beanie and a relisted beanie in alpaca blend.

As you can tell, the colors have been toned down to almost monochromatic.

Colors are still going strong...Round 2 of beanies week

Hi there, we're going into round 2 and I still have a lot of fun with bright colors...check out the 80s vibes beanie.

The paprika hat seems so much more toned down next to it, but is a beautiful strong red, too.

Cheerio, gotta run:)

Summer Fun Skullcap Beanies Week...I challenge myself to list 2 every day during the whole week

I have had many unusual or even weird yarns in my stash, some bright, some fuzzy, some crazy and I wondered what was I thinking when I picked them up at the store.

So, for many months I kept looking at these yarns and tried to come up with a way to use them.

They didn't seem quite right for my tam sized beanies.

Until I played around with them and crocheted a smaller beanie. And voila, these novelty and insanely bright yarns came together for a funky young look beanie.

Remember: young at heart or young of years, there is NO difference, dare to be you:)

(available at Etsy)

Variety is the spice of life

Some projects will never compensate the time invested, but they are reason for new zest and picking one's mind.

This patchwork crochet purse has been my latest project outside of my hats mania (I make hats daily) and I couldn't wait to see how my ideas came to life, even though there will always be some improvisation because some construction ways won't work and my engineering mind has to become creative and find other solutions.

If you like it you can see more pictures and read the details here, and buy if you want it, too:)

Hippie Bag on Etsy

Happy weekend to all the kind people out there.

(As it is hooooot, life just moves in a slower pace and blog updates are more scarce:)

From Zen to Biz

Interrupting my trend of serenity and nature subjects by a shameless self-promotion post.

Finally, after mulling over a new custom design tam idea in my head for weeks, I actually set down and created 3 new "custom color tam" listings in different sizes on Purple Sage Designz.

(Above: the moderate size, small/medium)

The longer style.

The wide crown style

||