MY ANIMALS

I would like to introduce you to my family's animals, They have been a big part of my life for as far as I can remember. 

So first off we have Harley, a black and ginger tabby cat that is ALWAYS hungry for food. I believe that she is around 12-13 years old now and, when she was around one years old, she had four kittens - two fully black and two fully ginger. 
One of her favourite things to do is to hold a staring contest until the opponent gives her food.

Secondly we have Holly, a tortoiseshell who has a skin condition. She is a happy cat who could still pass off as a kitten with her bursts of playfulness. She is also around 12-13 years old.
One of her favourite things to do is to curl up on the seat that you want to sit in.

And lastly, but by no means least, we have Ali. Ali is a collie crossed with a breed we have been unable to distinguish! We got her when she was nine months old which was around 11 years ago now. Her back left leg was broken when she was a very young puppy and healed awkwardly so generally distributes her weight over the three fully-functioning legs. She is very easily excitable and an enormous fidget! 
One of her favourite things to do is to whine as loud as she can until she can get to the cat's food.

Natasha

HOW TO MAKE A CHRISTMAS TREE

Now I know it is still November, However I am very, very, VERY excited for the Christmas season! So I decided it was time to start decorating.

Here is how I turn magazines in to Christmas Trees:




First off I start with the front page of the magazine, I make a fold that allows the top edge to align with the glued edge.










I then make another fold in the same way, I align the previously folded edge with the glued edge.







Finally I fold the bottom corner up of the page.









I continue to do this until I have folded all of the pages in the magazine.




















I have found it best if you use two magazines for every tree, unless it will be on display in front of a wall. 

You could go a step further and spray paint them once they are finished however I choose to keep the magazines how they are as I feel it adds a bit more colour.

I hope you enjoyed this simple craft. What is your favorite Christmas decoration?

Natasha

THE PAST YEAR - A COLLABORATION PROJECT [PART 3]

The past year... Well, I guess I could say it's so so. 2014 has actually been very good to me, way better than 2012 and 2013. I guess you could say that "Every year gets better". I hope that's true.

My first year at college seems like a blur but I know great things happened. I found my now best friends while still keeping close to the old (although we drift apart, I will always love you all), became a part of a friendship group that could accept me for who I was. I tried my hardest to pass with decent grades (I take BTEC Extended Level 3 Art and Design Diploma & Media) and I averaged out with DDM (Distinction, distinction, merit AKA approx. A, A, B) in my Art course and an overall grade of a B in Media, however I managed to achieve the highest AS grade in my coursework across all Media AS students, getting an A* (98/100) which made me super happy. 

Summer came around and I saw an opportunity to read a lot of books and fall in love with TV shows. I moved out of my house in order for it to be renovated, and moved in with my lovely Aunt, which is where I am still (been here for 3 months ~ish~) I saw my friends, earned money, relaxed for the first time in ages. College came around again too fast, and put me down a lot. I couldn't settle back in and ended up not attending very often at all, my depression and anxiety took over. My attendance fell below 60% and now I'm under a form of "probation" if you like. I'm not pleased, but I didn't see any other option at the time, it was literally unbearable to deal with. (You can read about this more here.)

So talk after talk after lecture after talk, I've tried to pick myself up. I think about the positives in life like my amazing friends, and my lovely lovely boyfriend of whom I've loved and waited for, for a year  (I'm cheesy I'm sorry), and how help is always available for when things get tough. I turned 18 and spent it with my favourite people, made new friends, got closer to family, lost my phone (and a few other things). I've kicked old habits out the picture, like my self harm, but acquired  new ones, like smoking... Which again has disappointed a few people. But I can say I'm getting there, and I think that's a big step from where I was over 2 years ago... (link).

Here's to a not so bad 2014 and a hopefully better 2015... 

Catherine x

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THE PAST YEAR - A COLLABORATION PROJECT [PART 2]

This past year, has been a strange one. Some things happened just as I expected them too, but others took me by surprise. I was both excited and scared to leave secondary school and move on to college. I liked the idea of choosing a few subjects that I loved (Music, Drama, English Literature) rather than having to sit through lessons that I couldn’t care less about. For example, Maths and science; I hated those lessons because I had no idea what the heck was going on, and didn’t understand anything I was being ‘taught’. However, I was completely terrified of being stuck in new classes full of people that I didn’t know.
- I am a ridiculously shy person, full of anxiety (yay). So talking to new people is really difficult for me. People never really believe me because I’m a performer. I’ve been on stage, singing, dancing, and acting in front of reasonably large audiences; people don’t seem to understand that being a character with prewritten lines is totally different to being myself and having to find ways to hold a conversation. 

In secondary school, my friendship groups were a mess. I was friends with a large group of people for the most part of four years, and then realised that a lot of them were assholes and I didn’t want them for company. So then my friendship group changed and I had five best friends that I spoke to every single day. But going into college ruined all of that. We all chose very different subjects to study, meaning that we had very different timetables and met different people. At first we would try to meet up at lunch as often as possible, but that soon changed. As everyone made friends, they started hanging out with them instead, so as a result, I was left alone. For around a month, I spent my days silently sitting through lessons and awkwardly finding places to sit during lunch where I could be alone and not feel like I was getting judged (not freaking easy).  I was in a seriously bad place, and hated my life. Even worse, I hated myself.
  But then a miracle happened and two of the girls from my old friendship group (the one with the assholes) saw me sat alone and invited me to join them. And to this day they are some of my best friends again, and I don’t know where I would be without them.

I still hate college, and im pretty sure that im going to fail my exams (like seriously, I procrastinate so much. As im writing this, im supposed to be reading two novels and writing at least three essays, but this is more fun so….)

Another issue I had was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. This period of time is full of decisions that we are pressured into making, even though we have no idea what we want to do. I spent so many nights crying myself to sleep because I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. My mum had been making me look at university courses and dragging me to Open Days, and this whole process stressed me out and actually made me really sad. And very recently I realised that this was not okay. If it’s making me with sad and scared, then it’s not for me. I tried to think about what made me happy, rather than what my family wanted me to do, and what society expected of me. The things that I love are 1.) Books; I love reading, and I actually love to write as well. 2.) Music; music is seriously one of my favourite things ever, I don’t go a day without listening to something. And I love to create music, I play guitar, ukulele, piano, clarinet (oh so cool) and I sing, and I know that I want music in my future. And 3.) I love the internet; more specifically YouTube, I spend so much of my time there and am subscribed to around 200 channels, but I also love to make videos, and I really enjoy editing them. I know that I want each of these things in my future, but the difficult part, is telling my family. They are the type of people to completely shun the idea, and be totally unsupportive. But I know now that this is something that I want, so their opinions aren’t going to stop me.

This past year, has been a strange one. I lost friends, and spent a long time being confused and seriously unhappy. But I also rekindled friendships and found out who I want to be, so I guess it wasn’t too bad…

Stephanie x

THE PAST YEAR - A COLLABORATION PROJECT [PART 1]

The past year for me has been different to how I expected it to be.
I thought that I would currently be in my second year of college studying Health and Social care with hopes that I could eventually become a midwife. That was the plan anyway, but that's not how things played out for me. Instead I have a job, responsibilities and barely any fun.

Now I didn't do very well in school, I think I have said before that I barely passed five of my 13 GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams and I know that this happened because I put in little to no effort, at all. Looking back a little over a year later I can see how foolish that was of me.

Living in this world and finding your place in it is not an easy task, to know what you want to do and what you will enjoy for your entire working life is one of the most daunting tasks anyone will go through, EVER - even if you think you know what you want to do.  I thought that I knew what I wanted to do with my life - I thought that I wanted to deliver babies into the world or to aid the premature-born to survive and ideally that would have been perfect for me. 

I started at college (And educational facility for the two years between secondary school - 11 years old to 16 years old - and University - 18 years +) just like the rest of the people in my year at school did, with the intentions to like it, make new friends and learn things that I wanted to learn about (and not have to argue on a daily basis about why I am going to need Pythagoras theorem and poetic techniques to survive in life). I found that as much as college gives you more of a choice about what you can study, everything else about it reminded me of school. Every other person there was no different to the people I was in school with a few months before and I really couldn't get on with it. I started testing the boundaries, how far each teacher I had would let me push them and soon I stopped attending classes altogether. 

It took some time getting my mum to understand that I wasn't happy at college and that I wanted to drop out. I wasn't all too clear with myself let alone with her about why I wanted to drop out and that made it hard for her to see my point of view. Once I had realized and told her that it was because I didn't like my course and the people on it she came around to the idea that I wasn't in education anymore, she let me know what responsibilities I would then be taking on - I would have to start looking for a job and basically become an adult. 

After applying for a few apprenticeship posts and having two interviews with a few more set up I was offered a job in which I would get the opportunity to get a level 2 NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) in Business and Administration. A level 2 qualification is equivalent to a GCSE and being that I didn't have too many of those to brag about, I grabbed that opportunity with both hands and that was the best decision I have ever made!

Now the 'barely any fun' that I referenced at the beginning of this post is that I am in a professional environment for most of my day so I rarely get the chance to intermix with other people my age - this then means that I only have the friends that have stayed in touch with me from school who all have their own new friends, lots of course work and part time jobs to do, so seeing them happens less frequently than a full moon!

In spite of this I have really been able to see the amount that I have grown as a person, it's incredulous to me that I have been able to achieve even the smallest of things like pick up a phone to a strange purposefully and keep my shit together. Now, I feel that I am nowhere near where I want to be in life - partly because I don't quite know where that is yet however I now know some of the things that I want to be able to do and to try out with my career - now its just to figure out my next step.

Natasha