You know how sometimes you’re all full of good ideas, and one fantastically creative moment after another happens in an uninterrupted stream of productive fabulousness? Nah. Me neither. I’m really struggling with managing to be creative at the moment. All I seem to do is lurch out of bed, knackered and confused, get through the daily tasks necessary to decent (or indecent) living, and pile back into bed, marginally more knackered and confused. Don’t get me wrong: the tiny daughter continues to delight, fascinate and amaze me. Quercus continues to entertain, converse with and divert me. The cats, well, the cats are the cats. But I know myself well enough to know that, while I am very glad that in the last week I have shampooed the downstairs carpets, removed five (FIVE) dead mice from underneath the sofa, and generally pulled the house into a better semblance of order than has been managed for, oh, two years or more, I need something MORE. Largely, what helps me to stay sane, to feel genuinely happy, is to create things. It doesn’t really matter if it’s something baked, some writing on the wall (literally: our house currently sports a quote from John Masefield’s The Box of Delights above the dining room door, and there is an entire verse of a Mervyn Peake poem in our bedroom, put there as a surprise for Quercus’s birthday the year before last), or a knitted creation – I just feel better somehow if I am managing to make, do, or otherwise produce. I have a list of things that I’d like to do at the moment. Here it is:

- Make some more beeswax balm (my fingers have been unaccountably buggered since we moved to this house; kinda like bad eczema but apparently it’s not that, and it refuses to respond to, well, anything, really; I’m trying the balm I made originally for the tiny daughter’s nappy rash, but I want to add some things specifically designed for buggered skin of my particular variety);

- Find a simple pattern for a toddler cardigan to knit for the tiny daughter;

- Turn the old wool jumper I’ve felted into a pixie bonnet and a felted heart monster (don’t ask) for that same tiny daughter;

- Use some of the machine dyes I bought earlier in the year to dye our sad-looking towels, in part to check if they come out half as gorgeous as the colour of the red wall (I have it in mind to dye a pink rag rug to match the wall, but I don’t want to fuck up the colour as the pink is too nice to just throw away on a dodgy dye but at the same time has no obvious long-term home in our house as it’s the wrong colour, if that makes sense).

You’d think that all or any of these things would be simple, and fun, and promisingly tempting. And they are. Yet somehow I’m not doing any of them, and all I seem to manage in the evenings is to clear up after dinner, put the house to bed, and SIT. I’m doing a lot of that, somehow, when what I want to be doing is making things, and gloating as I see a tiny daughter in something I have made her – I have hats that I’ve made for her, and it still cheers me up no end when I see her little personage toddling about in the blue bonnet I improvised earlier in the summer, when there was some actual sun around the place. I keep reading lovely lovely blogs where lovely lovely mamas share lovely lovely patterns/recipes/suggestions for creative things that just make me want to go out and fall down a pothole. I’m not normally susceptible to crafty jealousy, but at the moment, the fabulous goods that the universe keeps showing me seem only to remind me that I’m not managing anything but the bare essentials of living at the moment. How to break the cycle? Suggestions, please, lovely internet.