Family Time

Saturday saw the first family get together using the new party pit, as it was the last day we would all be together for  another year  (youngest daughter is going back to Shanghai in a couple of days) I thought it would be nice to record our day by drawing around our hands, which also kept the grandsons amused. This is a piece in progress which I will keep working into until it pleases me.

The pit worked well and the oven made pizzas a pleasure to make and eat. This is a fore - shortened view we think we can manage thirty people quite comfortably which we will confirm when eldest son has his 40th birthday party in a couple of weeks. Next year we will build a permanent awning over one end but in the meantime the tarpaulin is keeping the sun/rain from being a problem.

 I've given up on trying to do any serious stitching and declared August a holiday.

Sampling

Busy sampling methods for laying down the herb shapes onto the background, very easy with a pen and paper, very time consuming with fabric and stitch. here I have used  free motion stitching, applique and embellished some chiffon over the shepherds purse. This would be perfect for poppies as the chiffon leaves a hairy edge mimicking the poppy stems exactly. Talking of poppies.........

My mini wild flower meadow is looking stunning at the moment, it's amazing how the torrential showers are really battering the poppies but within a couple of hours they are all looking quite perky again.

Another storm heading our way.

Such a dramatic mix of weather, the sun was pouring into my sewing room window making beautiful shadows which I considered drawing and stitching over this piece, if only I had more time. 

Evening Light

After a hectic day, a stroll around the estate is a great way to relax. The light is disappearing fast but the colours are so intense, the blues and yellows look ethereal in the evening gloom. After the continual rain of today it's hard to believe tomorrow is going to be warm and dry, it had better be. I have a lot of people coming to lunch to greet the home-comers.

Lots of cooking today but I still managed a couple of hours on the embellisher attempting a piece of work that will mark the end of Dionne's workshop. Very complex piece of work which I will post if I can pull it off, if not it will be a sample or I'll cut it up ( those famous words).

I'm trying to find some time to work on this drawing inspired by the shepherds purse and poppies that I have been weeding from the garden. The drawing will have to wait - family time is precious.

The Garden At Number Six

I have been back for a couple of days now, most of which has been spent catching up with the garden. The builder in the bottom right pic is my husband, who over the course of this winter has dug out by hand 30 cubic yards soil to build me a sunken entertaining area, what a man! The frame for the steps has gone in today, the bark for the floor ordered and just 30' of trellis to make for the fence that will surround it. The fun will then start, we are attempting to build a pizza/ bread oven to fit into the grand plan, ready for Summer parties to begin.

I have also found time to rework several areas of this piece. It's not hard to see where the inspiration has come from, it's called 'The Garden at Number Six'. This is leading me towards the next phase of work. I know I shall be using a monochromatic palette over the next few weeks but I'm really taken with drawing and painting into my work at the moment, and Dionne Swift's course which I start on the 17th (Drawing for Textiles) will feed into my current ideas.

I have been making and repainting trellis for the garden over the last few weeks and my beads remind me of the little insect cocoons that I've found on the old fencing, so there it is, what I thought was a fairly abstract piece of work has it roots well and truly based in reality. 

Darling Buds of May

By the time I got home from this afternoons Guild meeting the sun had finally broken through the grey clouds. So armed with my trusty white board and camera, a little stroll round the estate was called for. The late spring plants are all at the point of bud burst and are being held at this stage by the cool temperatures. One warm day and everything will open together. 

Last year I spent several days weeding alliums out of the main borders I was sure I got everyone of them,

apparently not! There are hundreds of them. I know they are lovely but they like our soil so much that they are choking lots of little treasures out of existence. Short of sterilising the soil  I think I will have to learn to live with them. 

Garden Focus

I often wander around the garden at this time of year with a piece of white board in my hands, it can be so hard to capture the beauty of a single bloom when everything in the borders is so rampant. It's quite a feat to hold the board in one hand and the camera in the other but it makes for a pleasing shot to focus on one thing at a time.

The woodland border is at it's best over the next month, the Solomons Seal is almost ready to unfurl as are the North American  gems I have planted over the years. The delicate looking leaves in the bottom right corner belong to my quince tree, it has the most softest, downiest blush pink blooms which are about to burst into flower.......and then the frost will get them and I will be quince-less for yet another year. However this could be the year of the quince and that is what gardening is all about - hope over common sense (I live in a frost trap). 

I'm having a low key bank holiday weekend, husband and self full of cold and sneezes but we are enjoying pottering about in the sunshine and each others company.

Not Just Stitching

It must seem as though I do nothing but stitch and I must admit the last few weeks have felt like that. I'm so glad the sun called me into the garden today for a couple of hours of weeding. I would have missed the sweet perfume of the Daphne, the emerging cyclamen, the first Anemone blanda, the Hellebores, the berries on the Gladwyn Iris, the last of the aconites and the marbled Arum leaves that are just at their best. It wasn't exactly warm but the sun on my face was just what I needed.

I may not have been stitching but lot's of crafting has been worked at over the past week or so.

After the inspirational talk by Linda Monk at the Guild last Saturday my friend Paula and I got together on Monday for a play day. 

We were overwhelmed with all the products at our disposal and agreed next time we would limit ourselves to a much smaller selection of stuff to play with. Children and too many toys come to mind. However one or two lovely pieces happened and will bear further experimentation.

On the same day I started a week long on-line course with Dionne Swift info@dionneswift.co.uk I could fill a book with all the reasons why I think this is the future of teaching for the more experienced student. I have always thought that I would miss the 'classroom' atmosphere and lack of peer inspiration but I have found that I have been able to work and think at a much greater depth than I can in a usual one or two day course. I have been crafting for a long time and I'm familiar with most media, I just need silence to concentrate ( I admit that could be age related) and lot's of thinking time, classes have started to stress me with their speed and too much content. The fact that this course is one of the most professional that I have seen also helps. I think she has brought some interesting work out of me. Thoroughly recommended!  

The first sweet peas

Look at the elegant curves, the folds, the in-between colours, the almost silk like appearance of these first sweet peas, they are like precious babies at this time of the year. They will soon turn into riotous toddlers demanding of attention ( all that tying in) and covered in pollen beetle but for now the sheer sensuous beauty of  the first blooms has captured my heart. This is the stage where I should announce my intention to draw and paint them, the idea is in my head but I fear motivation is on the back boiler at the moment. All I can focus on is collecting and seeing my son from Heathrow (for the first time in a year) on Sunday.

In the meantime I seem to be putting a lot of work into this 'time-piece'. I'm using freezer paper to make stencils to place the letters but there is still an awful lot of tiny stitching to do. I need to push on with it before I start getting bored with it. 

  

A Cold Day In Fens

The wind is whipping across my garden all the way from the arctic, sudden squalls of rain and hail are interspersed with intense glimpses of the sun. The light keeps changing by the second making it feel like I'm in Ullapool in the Highlands rather than a sleepy village in the Fens of England.

Not an ideal day for garden photography but spring is rushing by me and must be recorded.

Our record rainfall of the past month or so has given an intensity to the leaf canopy that is exceptional so I have made a collage of just some of the plants in my garden today.

Always a heart stopping moment for me is the sight of the first Lily of the Valley. It takes me back to being seventeen again and working as a florist (in the sixties) and the anticipation of opening the first box of the season of these heralds of spring. They would be sent up by rail from Covent Garden.Tucked in with them would be damp little posies of fragrant violets. So precious, they would bring a tear to the eye of the shop owner who would gruffly pretend to have something in his eye.

The woodland border is just about at it's best - the plant on the far right is a Uvularia that I grew from seed, not a fast grower it has taken years to reach this size. I'm honoured by it's presence it's a very fussy plant but obviously like it's present home. The fading Hellebores, the Brunnera and the Solomon's Seal are such an archetype of spring that they are almost a cliche but they please me intensely.

Uproar in the Garden

What a pity that I had to take this shot through the sitting room window, it is a good shot but could have been a great one with a little more clarity (and cleaner windows).

I was still in bed when John got up to make us an early morning coffee and called me to the window. I was still a bit sleep fuddled and originally thought it was a huge thrush but as my eyes focused I could see it was a hawk of some sort. I ran down stairs, grabbed the camera and literally crept on all fours to the sitting room window the sparrowhawk was about four feet away. The collared dove was plucked and eaten in about ten minutes. Cruel, but fascinating to watch so closely. We have Red Kites flying around on a daily basis but I have never seen a Sparrowhawk up so close and personal before.

Puting the garden to bed.

Many, many years ago when I first left school and couldn't decide what I wanted to do in life I trained as a florist. I have never regretted this choice as it taught me so much about so many things. The first lesson was about hard work  - not the  the lady like profession you would think it would be  but very cold, long hours on your feet, very early starts, deadlines and disasters with such an ephemeral product. The thing I value the most from those days  is that it taught me composition. The repetition of using such a variety of shapes and colours to form a pleasing arrangement is something that I rarely have to think about, thanks to that early practise. 

 I was stuck into clearing the overgrown veg plot and borders today when I just had to make a table top autumn arrangement before the frosts kill the tender plants in the borders. I know the wind will blow it away but thanks to the wonders of digital photography a moment captured in time.

Ornamental cucumbers in the afternoon sunshine. Very pleasing textures but not edible.

A Christmas bauble worked whilst visiting our children and grandchildren yesterday. Green and red but the camera is reading it as orange and turquoise or is it my eyes?

Sweet Peas and Xmas Decs.

I have never ever picked sweet peas in September, not in decades of gardening. I went out early this morning determined to consign them to the compost heap. I 'm having an early clean up this year so that when I come back from Scotland the garden doesn't look like a dead jungle. As I reached up to drag the first plants away from the trellis the perfume just hit me and for a moment it felt like an early summer's day. Sweet peas are usually over and done with by late July in my windy garden, they've earned a reprieve.

The bizarreness  of sitting in a garden that looks more like high summer rather than autumn was brought home to me as later I sat making Xmas baubles ( thank you Christine for your five minute tutorial).

It's lovely to be sewing something decorative and pretty after the more challenging stuff of the last few weeks.

I also managed to have an hour mindlessly finishing off a sketch from my last Ullapool visit. I remember the day I did it so well. I had been looking across the loch at a line of woodland, the water was inky blue and reflected the image like a mirror. The sky and the mountains merged into one and my doodle / sketch technique came up with this stylized  sketch just waiting to translate into stitch.

Playing Truant

Should be finishing all the backs of my work for Ullapool today, should be making sure all the annotation is ready, should be stretching some final pieces and making sure everything has a means of hanging.

Did anyone else see Carol Klien in the Millenium Garden at Pensthorpe on Gardeners World last night. Couldn't help myself just had to go and see it today.

Pensthorpe is the place that Springwatch used to be broadcast from. Acres of waterland set in conservation farmland in Norfolk. It also contains this wonderful piece of prarie style planting from the master designer Pie Oudolf. What a perfect day to see it - the autumn tints were just starting and the wind was blowing enough to make the grasses and tall plants undulate like huge waves.

I love this style of planting it makes you feel part of the garden instead of just an onlooker.  It's possible to totally immerse yourself in the plants,a wonderful and uplifting experience.

The bonus was the amazing diversity of birdlife in this place. After a good walk and lunch in a lovely restaurant on the site John and I decided to splurge on a guided tour. The guide was fantastic,so interesting and knowledgeable, pointing out many things we would have missed.   The highlight was watching a Marsh Harrier creating havoc in the skies above a forested area and a little Hobby whizzing past us ( a bird we'd never seen before).

The best value and most enjoyable day out for a long time.

I want to dig the garden up now and create a prarie. I want! I want!

Never mind  -  it will pass.



My Husband ; the artist.

He: - What shall we do with these old slates?

Me: - (slightly preoccupied) Oh I don't know  - Do Something creative 

He: - I don't do creative.

Me: - Well...... build a helix in that space in the bottom border.

Two days later

It looks like a very expensive piece of garden sculpture set on a stone plinth and I have a double helix that looks wonderful.

Clever man - good mathematical mind!

It's all about colour combinations in the garden at the moment. I call these my mucky poppies. I have been culling any reds out of the borders for the past eight years and still the odd one crops up, I love their tissue paper appearence especially when the sun shines through them - they are my first sight in the morning when I walk out of my workroom.

Orange, blue and dark, dark red I repeat this combo.all the time

I like to consider paint colour to show off my plants.

Everything is responding to the rain - that wonderful mass planting effect that I like is starting late this year because of the drought, but if this weather keeps up everything should knit together in a fortnight (just in time for my party).

 

sketching for stitch

Charcoal, pastels and graphite - this may lead to an art quilt.