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This time it is needle felting and fabric and ribbons on styropor. The pink butterfly is about 3" long while the rest are about 5". As for the eggs the smaller are 3" and the larger are 6".

This black leather bracelet is my first macrame project.

This is my first clay project a raku mask

As some of you reading this might know I am on unemployment pay. The law in Denmark is so that if you are on public unemployment pay you have to be what they call 'activated' at least 5 months of a year. It can be either in a job (if you can find one) or in an activation project. I am in one of the latter kind now. It is aimed at people with psychological problems, people with crisis and their lives or people who in other ways are vulnerable. Two things are required to be in that project. You must not be addicted to alcohol or drugs, and you must be interested in working with yourself from an artistic/creative point of view. So what I am spending my time at now is painting, working with clay,glass and probably felting, and if I can come up with other ideas I can work with those as well. As a start I am going there 3 hours a day 4 days a week, and if I can manage I can go up to 6 hours a day, still 4 day a week, Mondays and weekends the place is closed. I have been making a couple of clay masks, the first came into the oven today and it will come in again Friday. Friday it will be raku.
Yesterday I was preparing the largest canvas I have ever had the chance to work on. It is 80cmx120cm (that is 32"x48")
I'll be back again, but I can't say when.

After my time as drafted I had various jobs over the next 20 years or so, all jobs that required no special qualifications, and I was in and out of the unemployment system, but in 1995 I was told that I had to either start with education or I would have to work with garden service for retired or disabled people. Now I have never really been interested in garden or yard work, and I could have up to 2 years of payed leave for education, and that meant that I could take high school for grown ups, so I entered the educational system again and passed with high marks. The system has changed within the last 10 years, but back then marks were 00, 03, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13 and you needed an average for all subjects at 6 or more to pass, and my average was 10.1 and no marks below 8. My highest mark was in history with 13, and to get that in any subject it was required that your knowledge was beyond pensum, and to give some idea as to how difficult it was to score 11 then I can tell you that in grade school we had a writing test where a teacher was reading a text out loud with most of the punctuation, but you had to place the commas and of course spell all the words correct. To get 11 you were allowed 1 yes ONE misplaced or omitted comma and no spelling errors.
After I had finished high school I could not return to the unemployment system, but we are lucky here. We can get payed to study at the universities or colleges, and that is possible for one year longer than what is normal for the subject you choose, and that became deciding for my future.

I started in school in 1958 and left again in 1968 not to return to the educational system until 1995, but I'll return to that later. The first 10 years in school I was not a top student, but probably a little above average. I was kind of lazy and much of a day dreamer. The only subjects that could really catch my interest were English, science and in the later years history due to the history teacher I had those years. In general we had good teachers, so I managed to learn quite a bit, and had I not been such a day dreamer I might have finished school better and maybe even continued in high school, but instead I had various jobs until I was drafted to serve my country in the summer of 1973. I served with the civil defence for 16 months, the last 8 months as a sergeant.
More about me later.

This might end up being a long story, but I have been encouraged to tell something about who I am and my background, so here goes.
I was born in a suburb to Aalborg in 1951 and lived there until 1956. The neighbour across the street had horses, not something you see in Danish suburbs any more, but of course, there were not so many cars then. When we moved it was because my parents had got a bigger apartment in a house belonging to my grandfather (still smaller than the apartment I have now, and it is small to modern standards). As something new compared to where we lived first there was a garden where we kids could play. My parents got 2 more kids in 1952 and in 1953. I don't remember any other kids from the first place I lived, but in our new neighboruhood there were plenty. If I include 2 houses north and 2 houses south of where I lived we were a total of 13 kids, and across the street were a couple of teenage girls, so it was something completely new. My grandfather who was a widover lived in the apartment below the one we had, and his tv was the first I ever saw. Now that is not very strange because tv was still very new in Denmark. As a matter of fact regular transmissions started the year I was born.
If you follow this blog you'll learn more later.

For some reason I thought I had settings for anybody to comment, but it was not so. I have changed that so if you would like to comment any entries feel free to do so.

I had until recently no intention of blogging, but when I recently talked to Mary aka Badger she convinced me that it was a good idea, as it could among other things help me get things that troubles me off my mind. In our talk I happened to mention a short story that I had written. Though it is fiction it is based on a single fact mentioned towards the end of the story that will fill the rest of this entry. So here it is for anybody interested to read.

My little Story

Humans are strange. You tell them something and you expect that they have grasped it, but look if anything happens, oh no, not right away, but let me begin at the beginning even though it was a long time ago.

We were a whole bunch drifting along slowly. Not very organized, but we stuck together more or less. Of course sometimes somebody left the bunch and others joined. In the end I think there were more joining than leaving. Some left and came back, but it was hard to tell which was which, because mainly we all looked alike. Well, as I said we drifted slowly along in a manner of speaking as the wind blew.

At some time we had come far north and it started getting cold. More groups joined and we started sticking closer together, but it wasn’t really enough, so we started dressing for winter. It didn’t change a lot in the groups, we all still looked very much alike, but it gave some insulation.
A day with a bad depression some of us tore loose and danced in the wind. More and more joined and the dance went faster and faster. We rushed now to this side now to that, up and down it went in a furious dance. Finally we became tired and we laid down. We were lying very close, and if you saw us from high above, you could believe we were a blanket covering the ground. As time went more joined, and we were always close, so we ended spending winter where we had settled.

When spring came, a little brook came to life, and I decided to follow it. I had no idea as to where it would take me, but I didn’t care anyway. The brook was running in a fast pace and I followed it across stick and stone. I discovered that several that I had spent the winter with were both ahead of me and behind me. As we got along more and more brooks joined and made up a rather wide violent stream. I was filled with a desire for adventure and was torn along. The stream became eventually a river, and one day I reached a huge lake that I could not just get past, so I decided to have a home there, at least for a while.

It turned so out that I had my home at the lake for several years with cold hard winters and warm light summers. The trees were growing close around and gave shelter for the wind as long as you didn’t go to close to the middle of the lake. In light summer nights you could have the luck to see animals come down to the lake to drink, but there came also humans hunting, which I didn’t like very much, even though they left me in peace. When the winter storms were roaring most furious I could get caught by a weird urge to travel, but it ended up being a day in late summer that I finally left and bid farewell to the lake.

At the opposite end of the lake compared to where I had come to it, was a slow river which I decided to follow where ever it might take me, and after some days I came to a new lake that I passed in some weeks until I left it behind me to follow a new river. It was not many days before I came to a new lake, where I settled for a couple of years, but eventually all the humans day in and day out at the shores of the lake became too much for me, so I decided to find a new river that could take me away from the lake.

I did find the river, and it lead me north again floating in a fairly fast pace at some places, though there were also quite idyllic places where I almost could settle with the water though only for a brief moment. Again I had to go. The river was floating with a breathtaking pace and I was with it. Sometimes there were rocks that you just had to get around. Faster and faster it went until I together with the river went past the waterfall humans call Niagara. Wahoo for a fall and a splash, but gee what a rebound I got. Upwards through the noise I went seeing everything as through a mist, and just as I was up highest and started falling down again, I hit a human an enormous man, right in the middle of his forehead, but he just smiled, so I decided to stay and tell him my story.

It took a while before he realized that I wanted him to write it down, you see, I have never really been able to write. Every time I have been in touch with paper it has become useless, but it isn’t really that strange. After all I am just a drop of water that got the chance to tell my story.