She diagnosed the eczema as eczema and the rash as “atopic dermatitis” and gave me a topical antibiotic cream to put on it (not the eyelid, I was advised to only moisturize that, since you don’t want to put anything harsh near the eye). I normally stay away from medications as much as possible, but I was frankly getting very tired of the rash – it made me very self concious and to me, looked gross. So I decided to give the antibiotics a go, at least they were only topical, right?

After the first application, my stomach got a little funny, nothing crazy, but definitely not normal. After the second application, I started feeling really nauseous, extremely tired, and all foggy, like my brain had decided to take a day-long nap. At that point, I realized it was probably the antibiotic cream, so I stopped using it, and voila! Within 24 hours, I was back to normal. Still with a rash, but feeling fine. I was actually a bit shocked at the intensity of the symptoms from just two tiny applications to my skin. A very valuable reminder to always read every single ingredient in anything you apply to your body and, if you are so inclined, muscle test yourself to make sure that whatever it is is beneficial to you.

That rash? Well, I started experimenting with making my own clay masks for it, which is something I hadn’t tried before, but will for sure do again. Luckily, because I am studying Applied Zoopharmacognosy for animals and aromatherapy for humans, I have a lot of “this kind of stuff” on hand, so I made a quick mask of clay and a few other ingredients, put it on, laid down for 20 minutes and did Reiki on myself while it was working, and rinsed off. I thought it looked a bit better afterwards, but wasn’t sure. The next morning, I made the same mask, this time put it all over my face before I got in the shower, and left it on until I was done showering. When I washed it off this time, I noticed my skin was softer, tighter and more even in color. The rash looked better, AND I think I may have inadvertently invented a pimple cure too – a pimple that had started growing (and felt like it could have become really bad, sorry for the gross details here) had gone down considerably!

I have now been using this mask for three days, twice a day, and that pimple is completely gone. The rash seems to have caught a second wind unfortunately, so I will have to keep experimenting with the ingredients for that (stay tuned!). In the meantime, here is the recipe for my homemade pimple treatment:

Pimple-Fighting Clay Mask

1 tbsp clay (I used high-quality green clay)
1 tsp raw honey, gently warmed until it is liquid
1 tsp Roman Chamomile hydrosol
1 drop of aromatherapy-grade Tea Tree essential oil

Mix all ingredients together in a glass or porcelain bowl, using a plastic, wood or porcelain spoon (avoid using metal when working with clay). Spread evenly over affected area (or entire face if you want). Leave on for about 20 minutes and rinse off with warm water. Use twice/day until pimple is gone.

It’s a great book – if you’re a cat owner and want to learn a new way to help your cats stay healthy, or help them heal, I highly recommend it.

Aside from it being a fantastic book, another reason I was super excited to receive this is that those photos of the cute cat on the cover and back? I took them! It’s always a thrill to see your work in print, but this one is extra special to me, because I truly admire Amy and Nancy and their work, and since natural animal health is something I am very passionate about, it’s a perfect match.

I wrote a longer review of Acu-Cat on my animal health blog, so if you want to know more, check it out.

If you have followed this blog for a while, you will no doubt recognize most of the ingredients, and I have written more in depth about the various nutritional benefits of them in previous posts, so I’m just keeping it short here.

Ingredients (for 2 hungry adults)
4 tortillas (we use the sprouted Ezekiel 4:9 by Food for Life – they are delicious and an amazing source of vegan protein)
2 cans black beans, rinsed (we use Eden Organics because of their BPA free cans)
2 tbsp Frontera taco sauce, the Chipotle Garlic kind
Cholula hot sauce (or your favorite kind)
Homemade cole slaw

For the coleslaw:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice
3 cups of shredded cabbage (I like to use a mix of red and white)
1 1/2 cup shredded carrots
2 scallions, finely sliced
2 tbsp dried cilantro (you can use fresh if you want – I prefer the dried)
salt and pepper to taste

Start with the coleslaw:
1. Shred the cabbage and carrots and put in a bowl. Add all the other ingredients and stir thoroughly (I usually put a lid on the bowl and shake it until everything is mixed). Let rest on the counter while you prepare the other ingredients.

Note about the coleslaw: You can of course buy already made coleslaw mix and save time on not shredding it yourself, but if you have the time, I highly recommend doing it yourself. It tastes so much better, and you’re in control of how things are washed and handled…

2. Rinse the beans and put them in a saucepan. Add the taco sauce, stir, and heat on a low setting. You want them to slowly warm through, not boil (that turns them too mushy for my taste).

3. Once the beans are warm, heat up a cast iron pan until it’s really hot and put in the first tortilla. Warm on both sides until it starts to stiffen up a bit (but not so much that it breaks when you try to roll it).

4. Put the tortilla on a plate (I usually put a piece of foil underneath so I can roll it up in the foil, it gets very messy otherwise). Add as much of the beans and coleslaw as you want, and a few splashes of cholula. Roll up and enjoy!

After going back and forth for months, weighing the pros and cons, and stopping in at the Apple store to ask about everything, I finally settled on a MacBook Pro 15” with retina display. It wasn’t cheap, but it is amazing. I just got it last week and finally had time to play with it when we got a snow day from work. It is sleek, gorgeous, and everything is lightning fast – it started in seconds, installed Lightroom in less than a minute, and Adobe CS6 took less than 10 minutes. And the clarity and crispness of the screen is just stunning.

I was thrilled… until I hooked one of my external hard drives up to work on some photos. Nothing would copy over, it said I had read only rights. I spent the rest of the afternoon searching the internet looking for answers and finally discovered that they are all in a format called NTFS which is not compatible with Macs. Great. Here I had asked again and again, are there any compatibility issues I should be aware of, will I be able to just plug and play everything – everyone said no issues, you’ll be fine. Turns out that’s not the case. What you need apparently, to be able to use your drives on both PCs and Macs, is a format called FAT32. It sounded in the forums I were on like it would be possible to reformat the drives from NTFS to FAT32,but that would of course wipe out anything that is on it. And that format has its limitations too. And since every drive and every computer I have is full, I have nowhere to put my files while I reformat. So I thought, next week, I’ll be external hard drive shopping…

Then I found Tuxera (thanks to a Mac forum), a company that apparently focuses on file system interoperability (that’s what their website says, I read the About page, but the technical stuff is a bit over my head!). They have this awesome product called Tuxera NTFS for Mac, and you can download and try it for free for 15 days. So I did and it works perfectly! Thank you, thank you, thank you Tuxera!!

Note: I am not an affiliate of Tuxera; I have nothing (financially) to gain by promoting them, but when I searched the internet, it sounded like many had come across the same issue, so I thought perhaps this could help someone else who encounter the same problem.

I took a whole bunch of pictures around the house (because “they” suggest you should include photos of your studio and how you work, images that tell the viewer who you are) and in the process saw that there is a definite style here. I love that sparse, white Scandinavian aesthetic but our apartment is anything but! We don’t’ have a single white wall in the house, and there are books, cds, art, magazines, stacks of “papers to be read”, cameras, and little trinkets and mementos all over the place (all meaningful and things we love), and frankly, it comes across as a bit of a mess.

This is partly because we have completely outgrown our apartment at this point, and partly because I sometimes just put something somewhere on top of something else “for now” and later it turns out it was the perfect space for it, so it stays (I just wish I had room for all the great stuff that is sitting in the basement too).

I have long said that for me, photography is therapy, it always makes me feel better and happier no matter what’s going on, but it turns out it’s also a way to discover yourself. I know a lot more about myself now than I did a week ago, and it was a great reminder of how much I have to be thankful for.

Give it a try yourself: take 5 photos around your home that tells the world who you are – I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Curious about who I am? Check out my About page.

I took out some rose petals and a few other plants that I collected while walking Sadie years ago (I loved how she took her time to really sniff and investigate everything – it made me stop and enjoy the nature around us too, instead of just rushing by). They had been drying in folded archival papers in between the pages of a B&H catalog and I didn’t know how they had held up, but I was in for a nice surprise. They were beautiful – some are so delicate that you can almost see through them, and with others, the already deep colors had intensified.

I arranged and rearranged for a while until I felt I had gotten something I could work with. After playing with the layouts and wording a bit, I selected the 4 below as my top picks. It is a little bit of a departure from my usual style, but I have to say I’m happy with the result. And after seeing the final products, I realize that they do represent me and who I am, which is something I usually shy away from in my art. I guess I’m just not comfortable with sharing too much of myself with others.

Anyway, here it is – The Valentine’s Day greeting card collection 2013:

available from my Etsy store (both as customizable cards and wall art).

Have a good weekend everyone!

All images © Cattie Coyle

Well, it turns out I was making vanilla extract! It has now been sitting for around 7 months, and it has taken on a pretty amber color and smells just like vanilla extract. So that’s all it takes for homemade vanilla extract – vodka, vanilla bean, and a little bit of patience to let the flavor develop. Who knew it was that easy?!

I used Frontier organic vanilla beans, Grey Goose vodka and a glass bottle I already had (I have a weakness for glass bottles and can’t bear to throw the ones I like in the recycling once they’re empty, and consequently have an absurd number of glass bottles around!), but I’m sure any brand vanilla bean and vodka works fine.

I can’t wait to use it in ice cream this summer. I think it could also make a cute, inexpensive hostess gift – I’d put some in a small, pretty bottle and tie a ribbon around it.

It was all thanks to SWEA, a worldwide support and friendship network for Swedish women living abroad. Their latest magazine featured interviews with several Swedish women who are successful entrepreneurs in their new countries, and they talked about how they got started, what inspired them, and what advice they would give to others. It was all very inspiring, and one thing that really stuck with me was the advice from a wonderful and very successful textile artist in Connecticut who said:

“Always do the fun things first”

It really made me stop and think. I always do the boring stuff first, promising myself I can do the fun things when I’m done with the other stuff. Well, the other stuff seem to consistently take up more and more time, and I end up never doing the fun things. Which is bad for everything from your creativity to your physical health. So I decided that this year, I will make this slightly altered (otherwise I’d never get any housework done) version of her advice my New Years resolution:

Always do one fun thing first

I actually cheated and started my resolution a few days early. This past Sunday, we woke up to a winter wonderland, with sparkling sunshine and snow-covered everything. Instead of doing something boring, like I normally do while drinking my morning coffee (load the dishwasher, prep tax documents, sort laundry), I grabbed the camera and went outside. Everything was beautiful, the air was brisk and refreshing, and I kept shooting until the battery died (it doesn’t like cold weather). Back inside, I resisted the urge to do something “useful” and sat down at the computer to play with the photos instead.

I had so much fun, learned some new Lightroom and Photoshop tricks while I was at it, and was quite pleased with the final result:

My husband liked it so much he passed it around at our New Years eve party (which I’m fairly certain he would not have done with my spreadsheet of deductible expenses for 2012). I can already see that this approach to life is a good idea. It feels right, I think it will make me a happier and more content person, and maybe even help me work towards my long-term goals in a more focused way. Now the challenge is to stick with it and not get consumed by the “must dos” again (while still paying the mortgage on time).

How about you? Did you make any resolutions? How do you stick to them?

I also woke up to another fun surprise: a message in my inbox letting me know one of my kitty greeting cards had been featured in a treasury – nice!

I hope you all have a God Jul today, and a Merry Christmas tomorrow!