A new year - a new plan!

2013 started really well with a fantastic holiday in Morocco then coming back to good things in general and the news that 2 of Elisabet's photographs had been selected by Glasgow Print Studio to travel with them to the London Art Fair - and we intend to go on along the same, positive lines throughout the year.

To begin - our good friend Ulrika, who now lives in the north of Sweden, has agreed to write a short piece each month for publication on this blog. We are keen on promoting creativity in all formats, and are delighted to encourage where we can - we, and Ulrika, would love to hear what you think, so please do contact us via email or through facebook.

From Sweden - number 1

I don't own a bag of buttons.

They made bowls of buttons. "Bring your own buttons", she said. I don't own any spare buttons, I thought. Why don't I? My mother had a large bag of buttons, all sizes, shapes and colours. She always had that bag and I guess it still is somewhere. I remember the excitement of bringing it out and looking through it, digging deep into it with small hands. I think, at my age, it would be expected to have a bag of buttons. But I don't. I don't even know where I put the extra buttons that come with every new pair of clothing. I have probably thrown them away. All though I can not recall ever doing that.

They made bowls of buttons out of their spare ones. The colours spread over the table, the shapes carefully chosen. A bowl of buttons for buttons? I don't know.

The ones that didn't bring, or maybe like me didn't have, any spare buttons, continued with their crocheting, small squares, small perfect squares on top of each other on the table like a multicoloured pile of pancakes. I don't know how to crochet and if I did I probably forgot it twenty years ago. I don't own a needle. My mother had several at my age. Where I come from, the expectancy of owning a crocheting needle at my age is less than a bag of spare buttons.

Some neither made anything with buttons nor a pile out of squares, they sat and worked on their poems. Their short, small and intricate sentences opened up a whole new world as they read them out aloud to us. There were the wish to eat two bags of buns and feel good about it and the lines about the woman holding an old persons hand before she had to leave for something else or even sentences that all ended with "..., like water".

The words flowed out of pens onto paper, like water.

I listened and at the same time someone put a candle in one of the bowls made out of buttons and the light prisms played as the words flew by the square pancake tower.