Mosaic made!

Mr Robot gave me a mosaic kit for Christmas and this weekend I finished it!

I'm currently back on my beta-blockers, which I take when I'm stressed. Not sure what's knocked me off-balance but it's pretty bad. I've spent the weekend doing gentle things. Making the mosaic was part of that. Just me, my kit, and CDs of 1960s dramatisations of Sexton Blake*. When I'm stressed I find doing stuff with my hands, things that I have to focus on (so things like sewing, not knitting which I can do in front of the telly) is ideal. I'm so busy concentrating on whatever it is that I'm making that I can't think about other things.

The outline of the seahorse was drawn onto the backing, and the kit came with a colour picture of what I needed to do, but it was ultimately up to me how I filled it in – I didn't have to copy the exact tile shapes and layout. Cutting up those tiles and gluing the little squares in place is quite an absorbing, thoughtful activity, though the pincers are jolly tough on the hands. People who make a lot of mosaics must have stronger palms than me; if I hadn't finished yesterday I definitely wouldn't be cutting more tesserae today. It also took longer than I'd expected it to. When I first unwrapped the kit I assumed it would take a couple of hours at most, but it took many more.

The finished mosaic is going to go in the bathroom as the earthy colours of the seahorse design will look brilliant against the terracotta colour of the walls. I've managed to glue three tiles on upside-down (oops) so if you look closely you can see they've got matte, ridged surfaces, but I'm really pleased with it nonetheless.

I've done other fun things over the weekend too. Yesterday was The Vintage Bazaar in Devizes, which I'd been looking forward to. We went round, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind to enjoy it – the crowds got to me a bit, and I was worried that Mr Robot wasn't enjoying it, and all the vintage clothes on sale just reminded me I'm too fat to fit into the vintage I own... it all got a bit angsty. So I rushed round and found nothing.

However, we did also poke round the charity shops in search of fabric and other treasures and I found a brilliant boys' science fiction novel from 1953, Danger in Deep Space. I'd never heard of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, but it appears to have been a big thing in the United States in the first half of the 1950s, with books, comics and a TV show. The book certainly has splendid endpapers and illustrations.

I've also been watching some old episodes of Poirot and have been admiring the wardrobe of Miss Lemon all over again. Aaaah isn't it a great programme? Sinking back into it has been wonderful. I'm going to be minimising my social media use (blogging is fine, Instagram's not too problematic, Twitter and Discord are out as both are a big sea of other people's stresses) and relaxing with a bit of vintage crime for the next few weeks, I think.

What's your recommendation for low-stress activity?


*And Mr Robot, to supply cups of tea, and the catses, to supply trouble. They do love to sit on rectangular things...