Current Obsession – Deborah Makarios

June 24, 2021June 24, 2021

Adventures with Avians

There are dinosaurs in our back yard. For a given value of dinosaur. “Feathered theropod dinosaurs” is what Wikipedia calls them (not to be confused with the celebrated therocephalian therapsid Purlovia Maxima). One is Troodon and one is Kryptops, and both are hens. Well, technically, only Kryptops is a hen. Troodon (pronounced Troo-don, not Tro-o-don like the original dinosaur) is a pullet.

And therein lies the problem. A pullet is a teenage hen, more or less, and Troodon turns out to be one of those rebellious teenagers who’s never seen a boundary she didn’t want to cross.

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January 15, 2021January 15, 2021

Of Hamsters, Lavender, and Immigration

I freely confess that I had not realized how much the general “What Even Is This” of the last year had affected me until I came to start actually writing this new novel. It turns out that I now have the attention span of a hamster who has slurped down three large mochaccinos. A rather stressed and easily overheated hamster, moreover, with a long to do list.

However.

I have been trying to get into the garden lately as a way of reducing stress, and it has been teaching me some lessons. (#1: There are Always More Weeds.)

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November 25, 2020November 25, 2020

Colouring In with a Hook

Colouring books for grownups have become a real hit in the last five or six years. You can’t hardly visit a bookstore, stationery shop, or anywhere else involving paper-based products being retailed to the public at large, without happening across a selection. Usually, if the retailer is clever, with coloured pencils stationed close at hand, because who has yet recovered from the childhood passion for a fine array of coloured sticks?

I have yet to fall to the temptation of the adult colouring book (though I’ve coloured in a Book Depository bookmark or two in my time). Yet a new passion for colouring in has seized me, not involving pencil or crayon, but hook.

Some of you may recall that I developed an obsession a couple of years ago (how time flies!) with the form of embroidery known as tambour. The obsession went on the back-burner with the book idea that it came with, but it’s been simmering away, and recently, as the book idea moved to the front burner, so did the obsession.

Here’s what my first efforts on ‘real’ fabric – as opposed to netting – produced. (Those of you with fine artistic sensibilities may wish to avert your eyes.)

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