Dreaming Spirals

A couple of weeks ago I ordered some Misty Fuse from Joggles in the USA.  10 yards of it cost about $31 which is pretty good.  Except that today I got a letter from the Post Office saying that I owed them £11.45 for customs charges.

£11.45 for $31 dollars worth of stuff?  I thought there must be a mistake somewhere.  $31 is about £20.47 according to an online currency converter (and actually Joggles were running a promotion so I only paid about £20 including postage).   Here is how the charges panned out. £3.45 for VAT.  And £8 to the Post Office for the privilege of collecting it.  I think someone is being a bit nitpicky here.  Usually they don’t bother with goods under about £25 value.  Oh, and to add insult to injury, they stuck a nasty great sticker on the Tyvek envelope that Joggles had sent it in…

The irony is that it still worked out about the same price as buying Misty Fuse in the UK.  But I think I’ll get a whole bolt next time.  And a few extra Joggles goodies…

Spring is beginning to emerge here in Wales.

The supermarket online delivery  came this morning so the fruitbowl is looking well stocked, and in the fridge is enough food to warm the cockles of 3 teenage boys’ hearts.

And today is DS3’s birthday… when they start having birthdays I know spring is here.  All three of them were born this time of year.  His cake arrived too…

Outside is looking a bit dead still but today the sun is shining.

Yesterday I decided my clothes needed a new lease of life so I used some washing machine dye that I bought in the Woolies closing down sale – those trousers on the right used to be a yukky light sort of khaki colour – I like them much better in a terracotta brown.  And the teal jumper in the middle used to be quite a nice green  … till I forgot to wear an apron and it got various paint splashes on it!  And the other two jumpers are a lot nicer now too.  I shall look forward to wearing them.

Cobweb has decided it’s spring too and that it was warm enough in the sun to curl up in the garden.  Let’s see how long it lasts, eh?

In common with the rest of the UK, we had lots of snow last week and my 3 sons were off school – they are due to go back tomorrow and I think we are all ready for that to happen!    It snowed heavily last Tuesday night, and this was the scene on Wednesday morning.  I wouldn’t normally stand in the middle of that road to take a photo but as it is the top of a steep hill, only 4 wheel drive vehicles were attempting to get up it.  I love the quiet and the clean, crisp landscape.  

And the wintry trees covered with snow.

I fulfilled January’s reed photos that day too.  Here they are – very dry and dead looking.

Crisp, brown and papery….

On the way back I didn’t see many snowmen, but I did see this enormous snowball!  That is a rubbish bin at the side.

After several very cold, icy nights, the temperature has risen and the snow has got very soft and slushy again.   I don’t know how much longer it’ll last but it has been fun for a while.  Meanwhile, this afternoon I finally rinsed out some of the fabric I screenprinted and painted with natural dyes this time last year so hopefully in the next post there will actually be some textile content!

… to all my blog readers. 

I’m afraid I’ve been rather lacking in blog posts over the last couple of weeks, and any photos I took of the Christmas festivities are now sadly out of date.  Who wants to look at Christmas cakes and trifles when they are suffering from a surfeit of them?  Maybe I’ll save them till the middle of summer..

I have just acquired a new laptop and have been busy getting to grips with Windows 7 (which I’ve actually found pretty intuitive so far, once I turned off all the manufacturer’s annoying popup reminders and software and configured Thunderbird to act and feel as much like Outlook Express as possible. 

I haven’t quite organised my photos yet so here are a few reedy ones I took the last time I remembered my camera!  My new laptop has a nifty little card reader in the side but since my camera didn’t have any photos on it that wasn’t much help:(   

Look at the yellow leaves on these reeds … when I walked this way in November, they were all a brilliant yellow!   Sadly, I didn’t have my camera with me.  It’s amazing how different they look from one month to the next.  Once they were a deep green and the seedheads were a purply colour.  I have decided to try and retrace my steps WITH my camera at least once a month through this year.  Maybe I should look to see if this new laptop has a loud bleep to remind me of such things! 

So… two resolutions for the new year … Blog More and Monthly Reed Photos.  And I need to take an online course or two to get my creativity kickstarted again.   What about you?

On a rare dry day earlier this month I had a day out in Ludlow, a small market town in Shropshire.  I loved it – it was bigger than I had thought and had lots of lovely little locally owned shops instead of the proliferation of boring chain stores that you find in most British towns nowadays.

This is the hill up to the town from the railway station.  I love the profile of the church on the horizon – it looked as if the sun was shining right through from one side to the other (well, it probably was!).

Here’s the market square, where I bought a squirrel proof bird feeder.  Well, it would have been squirrel proof if I hadn’t hung it to the pear tree with fishing wire which the said squirrel then chewed through, bird feeder fell to the ground, knocking the seeds everywhere, which the squirrel then proceeded to dispose of!

There are some lovely half timbered houses there:

And a castle.  I circumnavigated it to go for a walk down to the river…

…. which was swollen with all the rain we’ve been having.   VERY swollen.

I love this old medieval bridge.

And these half timbered shops house a bakery with the most gorgeous florentines ever! 

Last week I decided to go for a walk: along the river to look at the reeds.  I always love walking along rivers.  I took my camera with me to record it.

Across one pedestrian footbridge…

Through the park… love this row of poplars….

And the rusty gate

But… I saw the looming grey clouds and had to hurry… but too late!  It started to pelt down with rain.  Luckily, Sainsburys is by the river too and it has nice sheltering overhangs on its roof…

I still found picturesque things to photograph while I was waiting….

The river looks very gloomy today…

Rain stopped… back over another footbridge it feels being in the tree canopies…

Plop through that puddle and hurry off home before the next deluge!