Hello my dear friends. I have been neglecting you, for which I am so sorry. I’d like to tell again, if you want daily updates, please go follow me on Instagram (@mebearc). I’m working on something new to either replace this blog or incorporate it. But definitely to more active on a platform that I can call my own.


Since I’ve tapered down my anti depressants after a good 22 years and then completely stopped taking them (all in consulatation with my doctor of course), I’ve had a bit of a rough time. I’m still off of the anti depressants, but since a couple of weeks I’m on anti psychotiscs. Only temporary. But they’re making me very slow. I mean, it’s like those dreams where you try to run, but everything goes in slow motion. My thinking is slow and my acting is slow and therefore I get hardly anything done.


Enough with the explanation. I don’t want to complain. I’m glad I’m finally off those meds and although my body and mind are having a difficult time adapting, I can already feel I will never go back on those nasty pills. If you need them then do take them. In my case, I never should have gotten them in the first place. My depressions aren’t biological. What I need is trauma therapy and that’s what I get now.


Teddy likes to wish you a merry (belated) Christmas. Well, officially not belated according to my country. We have 2 days of Christmas.




And when it’s Christmas in The Netherlands, it’s the start of the annual Top 2000. From Christmas till the New Year, 2000 of the best songs ever made. Or at least, the songs that got the most votes. I remember listening to the Top 2000 as a teenager in my small bedroom, while making art. How amazing that these days Marit hosts the Top 2000 Blog Party, where we make art inspired by the songs in the Top 2000. You can find all the details here and please join if you are inspired. There’s still enough time.


This is my entry for day 1, which was yesterday:

And today’s entry:





I’ll try to do another blog post tomorrow. If not, there’ll definitely be a new photo on my Instagram.

Last Christmas

No, I’m not going to talk about Wham’s song. I just borrowed the title, because this will be my last blogpost about Christmas. It’s taken me some time to go through the many photos I’ve made during the Holiday season, but now I’m done and I’m a happy chappy. The photos are ready to get printed, so I can finally make my December Memories album. Knowing myself, that won’t be ready before next Christmas, so when it’s finished, I’ll be right in time for the new Holiday season and you’ll be happy to see my post (assuming you are all quite done with anything Christmas by now).

So, I have been quite busy trying to feel Christmassy. The fun thing about Christmas there are so many crafts and things that are Christmas only. This year I joined an online photo workshop that was a Pay It Forward kind of thing. You could join the workshop for free and get a new prompt every day until Christmas. The only thing asked from you, was to do something nice for someone else. It was up to you how far you wanted to go. Everything was shared in a private Facebook Group, so we could celebrate the joy of giving together. It was so much fun to do! And of course we shared the photos we made for the workshop. Very inspiring to work on the same project with other people and share results. So much to learn.

This is a photo collage which is the result of one of the prompts we got. Looks fun, right? Can you see what it is? I’ll tell you. It’s a Christmas tree. When I took the photo, I moved my camera. The coloured lights make cool patterns. It’s really fun. You should give it a try. Make sure your camera’s shutter is set to about 2 seconds. There are apps for your phone too, if you don’t have a fancy camera. Making photos in the dark of some lights with you phone, will be the easiest, as your phone camera will automatically take more time for a photo. That’s why it’s so hard to take sharp pictures in the dark without a strobe. Play with it and think creative. We live in a digital world, so wasted photos won’t cost you a thing!

As mentioned, we were asked to do something nice for someone else too. There were great projects and of course we all donated a little to several charities. If you all give a little, together you can still give a lot. There was also a spontanious crowd funding action that just happened, because some people offered to share things they didn’t use anymore. Someone in the group made friends with a young refugee from Iran, who was a photographer in his own country before he had to escape. He had to leave all his equipment behind. So somebody offered to donate her old camera, which she didn’t use anymore. Somebody else had a matching lens. Then people were asking if they could just donate a small amount of money. On Christmas Day, the young refugee got a box with all kinds of photo gear, which made him intensely happy and eternally thankful. Making another person happy feels so good. We all should do that more often. Just a kind smile and a hello to a stranger goes a long way.

One of the things I’ve done, became a nice creative project on it’s own. I made 30 sets of clay ornaments, which I put in little gift bags. To make it look even more festive, I added a homemade tag to each bag. Every day I went outside, I took a couple of bags with me and left them in public spaces for someone to find. It was so much fun, trying to hide a present in a crowded area, without being noticed. I have no idea who the people were that found one of the gifts, but I hope it made them happy.

It’s only Christmas once a year and this year there were so many things I wanted to do, see or make. Like baking gingerbread man cookies. It’s not traditional here in the Netherlands, so I never tasted one before, but I have seen pictures of beautifully decorated gingerbread men for so many years, I really wanted to try making some. Getting the grocaries was a project itself. I needed all kinds of ingredients I’ve never even heard of before. So thanks to the internet, I was able to determine if and where I could get all these things. It took me a couple of days to get everything I needed, but at least I was able to get all of it eventually. Making the dough wasn’t too difficult, but I had no reference, so I had no idea if what I had, looked right. And I was in doubt a little here, as it was so extremely sticky. That’s no surprise of course, considering the large amount of molasses and brown sugar. I made two discs of dough, carefully wrapped them in cling film and put them in the fridge for 24 hours.

Sticky, but it should be okay, right?

Next day, baking the cookies. It was harder than I thought it would be. The dough was so sticky, it was impossible to cut the dough with the cookie cutter. So, I added some additional flour. Tried again. Better, but still a lot of trouble. By the time I did my last batch of cookies, I finally discovered what worked for me.

Uh-oh…one man down

Since I only have a small oven, I was limited to baking no more than six cookies at a time. I thought I was clever to buy a second cookie tray, but it was too big to fit imy oven. So I had to transfer every sheet of baken cookies to a cooling rack (not an official one, I had to improvised a little) and then transfer a new sheet of cut out dough onto the hot (!!!) cookie tray and put that back into the oven. Of course no baking without getting burned. It seems this is a thing that I can’t avoid. The burns weren’t very serious though and I took good care of myself.

Meanwhile Teddy really wanted to know what was going on in the kitchen. It smelled so delicious. He knew for sure there was something edible and it was gonna taste so good! Sorry, mister. This is no kitty food.

Third day, decorating the cookies. This part was the most fun. I never ever done anything like this before, but being a creative person, I quickly picked up on how to do this.I don’t have any fancy tools and the tip of the bottle I used for the Royal Icing was a bit too wide for my liking, so I had to keep things a bit more simple than I had desired, but in the end I thought they looked very cute.

They even have rosy cheeks. And I have to admit something I have been afraid of for years. I want to do this more often and try to perfect my skills. Ever since cupcake decorating became a serious thing, I said I never wanted to try, because what would I do if I liked it? And that’s exactly what happened. Cookie decorating is super duper fun!

Don’t they look adorable? It’s like the cookie jar was made for them. This was about half the crowd of gingerbread men. There were so many!

Packed in a treat bag, embellished with cute washi tape and a simple handmade tag, they were the perfect Christmas present for my caregivers.

I’ll definitely make more gingerbread men next Christmas. And I’ll probably do some more cookie decorating as well. So on this subject I will say: “to be continued…” (don’t you hate it when that line pops up at the end of an exciting episode of your favourite show?)

You, of course, don’t have to wait untill next Christmas for me to come back to you with a new blogpost. I have a lot of projects in the pipeline and some photography to share too. Hope to see you back soon!

An After Christmas Party

Ho Ho Ho!!! I know, most of you are happy the holidays are over and life has gone back to normal, but if I promise this post is loaded with cuteness, will that be enough to keep you here and have a look at the photos I took? I can tell you, it took a lot of effort, because Teddy isn’t the most cooperative cat model. I actually had to bribe him with treats to keep him remotely interested. He’ll do anything for food.

Nontheless this photoshoot was a lot of fun! And I was able to make it fun for Teddy as well. At least, I think so.

And finally he got curious about all the decorations I spread on the bed. This was what I was hoping for.

But, still not being an adult cat –he’s a junior now- his focus is gone within a second. I had to try and do find everything possible to even keep him on the bed. It’s like he knows when I want him to stay at a specific spot. He’ll only do this when he picks his own, different spot. He likes to tease me by not staying where I want him to, until he sees the camera.

After all this curiosity and being naughty and having his belly full of all the extra treats (he doesn’t realise it’s just his regular food and I give him a little less his next meal, the joke’s on him), he started grooming himself, which resulted in this yoga pose. I thought it was quite funny. Like he was saying: “you can kiss my ass!”

In my preperation of this photoshoot I looked for ideas on Pinterest and found so many cute photos of cats wearing Christmas hats, so I just had to try, although I assumed he wouldn’t allow me. I was right about that. He didn’t even let me put the thing on his little head, let alone take a shot of him with the hat on. I started playing with the cotton ball at the end, to keep his curiosity and hopefully he would let me put the hat on afterwards. No chance of course, but I ended with this shot of him looking very naughty. Priceless memory.

I had a little playtime with that last shot and Rhonna Farrer’s photo editing apps on my iPhone and turned the shot above into a digital Christmas Card, which I shared on social media.

I went quite overboard with buying Christmas props, so on Christmas Day I tried to have Teddy pose with my antlers headband. It had been on a shelf in my art room for several weeks and he already showed a lot of interest in it, trying to climb on the shelves to get that funny thing with jingly bells. So when I took it off the shelf and let him examine it (lots of sniffing), he was very curious. I didn’t have a lot of time as I had a Christmas date with my bestie, so I didn’t take my DSLR to shoot the photos, but just used my iPhone camera, which, under the right conditions, can make good photos too. Also, in this case, the iPhone was easier to handle, as I had to hold the antlers too, while shooting.

After sniffing, came tasting. Hmmm…nice texture.

The antlers were way to big to even try and put on his head, which he wouldn’t have let me anyway, so this shot is as close as I came to having a photo of Teddy with antlers.

Of course I took some crazy selfies of myself and the antlers too (even with a glowing nose), but they’re too embarrassing to show here. If you are really interested in seeing some of my crazy selfies (I have several), you can visit my Facebook account. It’s an open account, so you don’t need to friend me to see me and my silly selfies. For me Facebook started as more of a personal social media account, where I knew everyone I was friends with and I used to write about funny, but embarrassing stories and complain about everything that bothered me enough to share. My account has changed since then and I’m now also friends with people I don’t know in real life, but share a passion with (like arts and crafts) and I try not to complain (that much) anymore. Still it’s the only platform where I share some stuff about my personal life. On Instagram I keep to only sharing my homemade art and photography and every once in a while I post a cute photo or video of Teddy. If you want to keep track of the things I create, this blog is the best place to visit as I will always go into more details about projects here (like the steps it took me to get to the final result, or more than just one photo of a shoot).

I have plans to overhaul the blog a bit. Some parts are outdated and there are some dead links in the bar on the right I need to remove. Also, I’m trying to learn how to get my blog back to something people like to visit and interact through comments. It seems social media has taken over a great deal of blogging and although I like social media a lot, I’ve always loved to write my blogposts and connect with other bloggers. So, if any of you bloggers out there have any advice for me or just want to connect, I’d be thrilled! Leave your comment in the comment section below, or send me an email (address top right).

Happy everything and hope to see you back soon!!!