Sunday, October 21, 2007

Therapeutic Art

Emily and I spent yesterday afternoon doing lots of encaustic art, which was quite healing and therapeutic.







Yesterday we also made roman egg custard and practiced some oracle card reading skills. Made a change from the normal Saturday of me being stuck at the computer - for the moment I've recklessly decided that deadlines can go to hell as I need some positive time out with my family.

On Thursday afternoon, when Emily and Jon came back from tai chi, we also spent a few hours colouring some beautiful mandalas from this book - that was very healing too; we both want to do more of that kind of thing. We can put some beautiful music on and shut out the stress of the day, just sitting quietly together colouring and chatting.

Our friends came round all day on Friday; I did some work on children's rights with Emily, Mei Lin and Jasmine and in the afternoon I started teaching them the basics of Italian, which was fun. Much chatting and laughing was done both by the children and by me, Jon and Jackie, which again was healing.

It's just as well there are some positive things going on that I can cling to. I was greeted at 8 o clock this morning by my father in law demanding that I cut his toenails. Jon had already agreed to do this for him, but it wasn't done to his command yesterday, so he wanted to push the issue with me. I wasn't impressed. Jon did his father's toe nails before going out to karate with Emily this morning. I, however, spent most of yesterday evening and much of this morning so far in tears. The strain of the situation is beginning to show in arguments between Jon and I over what to do for the best. We are fortunately too strong together to allow my father in law's issues to undermine our marriage, but his nasty, vicious, spiteful attitude towards Jon and Jon's ever increasingly crumbling self-esteem and self confidence is breaking my heart.

5 comments:

Georgina said...

The pictures are great, hope you home situation improves soon, lifes tough sometimes!

Elaine, Ellies Treasures said...

The pictures are fabulous. Did you use a special kit for them? Elle

Nikki said...

Thank you George :-)

Hi Elle :-) We did have an encuaustic wax art "kit" but we've used most of it up now. The iron is nothing but an ordinary travel iron; the card is just high gloss black or white card. We have some of the waxes from the kit left, but you can also use ordinary wax crayons. We've recently treated ourselves to a hot stylus pen (basically just something that looks like a cross between a soldering iron and a quill pen) that you can dip into the wax to make details with (like the stars on the black/red castle picture) but we don't use it very much and were quite happy without it. It's sooooooo much fun!!

Elaine, Ellies Treasures said...

Thank Nikki. We had a dabble with wax not so long ago but didn't produce as beautiful results as you and Emily. We'll have another, more dedicated, go I think. Elle

Unknown said...

The artwork is fantastic! Hm, you've inspired me to head over to opitec to see if we can get a kit now...