So today is the 21st March – the equinox – the mid-way point between the shortest day in December and the longest day in June. On this day we get more or less equal doses of night and day. I do love it when the nights are getting longer and I wake up and it’s light. hurrah! Every year it kind of takes me by surprise.
And then several things happen: I feel the need to clear away all the fire stuff and open the windows to let Spring in; I look at our garden and think loftily about all the lovely seeds we could plant (and then make a cuppa and don’t plant anything); I look at the clutter in our house and mutter about tidying it up. And I start looking for some of my more springlike clothes. But then I remember that although we get more daylight each day, it’s not necessarily warmer. In fact, when the wind is blowing, I think it often feels colder than November – usually because of poor clothing choices by me. So I still have my woolly tights and boots on, but I’m thinking about shedding the winter coat, and pulling out something more fitting for the season. I did this last year and then it snowed in Donegal when we went for a couple of days for a break, and I FROZE! So caution is definitely required, I’m not planning on ditching the tights until at least the end of April!
Oh and that’s a fairly random picture of my stripey clock which hangs in my sciorta room, which appears to have stopped at 9.45. I probably took the batteries out because I have a weird thing about ticking clocks and can hear them a mile off…..
SO. I have been away. And while I was away – this little fella appeared.
This, my sciorta friends, is the very cuddly Aithin Luke, and he was 6 weeks this week. Before he arrived I made a small entirely negotiable and get-outtable-of deal with myself that I would write something, even if it was just a few words by the time we got to 6 weeks. AND so here we are. And it’s almost 7 weeks. : )
There has, I can safely say, been absolutely no skirt making or designing in the last 6 weeks. There has been lots of Christmas, snow, sledging (but not by me), c-sections and sore bellies, a turkey or two, but absolutely nothing to do with a-line skirts. (well ok a few middle of the night feed-inspired drowsy designs flirting around my head : ) )
So, to celebrate the arrival of Aithin Luke, (and the fact that I managed to write something before the 6th week deadline was up) we are having a sciorta sale! All our winter skirts are reduced from £89 to £59.
Go – check them out!
‘hygge’ (pronounced hougge – think the ‘oo’ in zoo) is a Danish word meaning cosy or something like cosy - cosy is as close a translation as we can get in English – but it’s oh so much more than a word – think concept, think candles, fire, warmth, delicious wine, hot chocolate, friends. The best description I’ve read of it is this: ‘a state of comfort, peace and warmth while in the company of loved ones’ from a blog called speakdanish.dk blog . ‘Hygge’ was a word I first learnt when I was working in Armenia. It was 1995, and often we only had electricity for a few hours each day, mostly at 3am – yeah – useful. In the summer months this wasn’t so bad, there was light, it was warm. In the winter however with temperatures dipping as low as -20C, it took some getting used to.
As I worked for a Danish organisation at the time, there was a tonne of chatter about how to make things ‘hygge’ – the former Soviet Union was not known for its cosy, warm atmosphere so we had to create it. Candles, lighting fires and drinking some precious hot chocolate helped.
Over these winter months when the light is so dim here, I light candles every day. Starting out at breakfast time, it just somehow gently eases us in to the dark mornings. We also light a fire most evenings, and read ALOT of stories. We try and make our home a ‘hygge’ place. What else could I do to make life a bit more ‘hygge’ these wintery days?
Photo: Alesa Dam
I worked with a very brilliant guy when I lived in Armenia a while back (I was an Aid Worker in a previous life) and he used to talk about spinning plates with regard to managing projects. I loved the analogy of the plates spinning round and how every now and then at the right moment you need to give each plate a small push, a tweak as it were, in order to keep it spinning. Otherwise one by one, each plate would fall down. Messy.
My life feels a bit like the spinning plates right now. Again and again the interesting question of can we have it all comes up with many women I meet – all of whom are mid 30’s, have risen in their careers or have started doing their own thing, some have children and some don’t. The question is can you keep all the plates of your life going? Career, children, business, balanced home life – and all that that entails? Honestly? I don’t know that we can. And I wonder sometimes if I feel we’ve been sold a bogey in making us believe that we could have it all. (whatever that actually means). Which therefore can lead to tremendous disappointment in some aspect of our lives where we fall short of our own expectations.
Whether you feel like you’ve been a rubbish parent today, or this week, or you just haven’t managed to move something on as much as you feel you should have. Whether you feel your house looks like a tip, or your children are behaving horrendously in public; whether you haven’t had enough sleep, or whether you just feel plain overwhelmed by the whole adventure of life; I wanted to encourage all of us (me included) to step back for a moment and cherish the good things we have in our lives. Whether that be your health or the peace of sitting in stillness for five minutes with a cuppa. Lighting a candle and watching the shadows bounce off the wall. Or just going outside your home for five minutes in the dark to look at the sky.
It’s half term week here so the children are off school and my work is piling up merrily. I have a to do list the length of Ireland. And none of it is getting done. But I’m also pregnant and for the first time ever have got to 30 weeks without drama involving long hospital stays or the delivery of a very preterm babe. For that, today, I am so very thankful. Next week, I will start spinning plates again.
(And yes, I do find it quite funny that the main plate spinner in the picture is a bloke – helped along by his glamorous assistant – it was the 1950s…….)
Photo: tpaddock
So. Just in case you were off doing something else last Saturday morning…….here’s the audio link to me chatting all about sciorta to Alyson and Jenny from The Saturday Morning Show on Feile FM.
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Alyson runs The Belfast Fashion Souk which is on every second Sunday afternoon in the Ulster Hall. Excellent vintage clothing, quirky jewellery, hand knits, and some of the most amazing shoes I’ve seen in a while. It’s quite a find. If you are in Belfast, go see!
We had a great chat about the where the idea for sciorta came from, all about how they are made (and why we do short runs) and the opportunities and challenges of having a family and running a business. I totally loved doing it (even if I find it weird to listen to myself) - hope you enjoy it too.
sciorta – what? sorry? sciorta? yes siree, that, would be the Irish word for skirt. And a fine word it is too. Some of you have been asking how you say it. Not that I have ANY qualification for this whatsoever as I am a non-Irish speaker. (it’s all French and a smattering of Russian in this house – I will not mention my dire attempts at German : )
However. There is a very handy website here where you can listen to a lovely lady say ’sciorta’ over and over again until you get the pronunciation just right. It turns out that it sounds almost exactly like it looks – bonus! Don’t you just love that with a language?
Oh and there’s another person that may be able to help you with your basic Irish education. My lovely friend Rene, designs beautiful Irish things for your home including lots of things with Irish words on them. In her own words, ‘we make and sell things that are mostly little, mostly beautiful and definitely Irish’. Check out her shop ‘placed’ here