Dreaming Spirals

The boys went back to school today and I’ve finally got back into my studio to continue with my reeds series.  The next one is hopefully going to have a grey background and golden reed stems but it depends if the experimental piece works out.    Meanwhile, I’ll tie off the summer blog posts with a few photos.  The above is the scarf I crocheted at Urchfont in July (how long ago that seems now!).  I used gorgeously soft cashmere/silk yarn from Makalu Yarns.  It drapes beautifully.  Hopefully one day I’ll finish it:(

We didn’t go anywhere exciting this year as a family, but I had a few day trips.  Here is Salisbury – DS1 was going to help at a kids’ camp there and as he had not long passed his driving test, I went with him to make sure he took enough breaks on the way.  That was a good enough excuse for an outing!

I loved the colours and shapes of these houses in the market square:

Then on Monday we went to Oxford for the day.  Two of the family teenagers took rather a lot of getting out of bed and the trip was rather fraught (like a fight between them while we were stuck in a traffic jam…) but it was worth it, just about! 

We went round a few colleges and I took this photo from the garden of one of them.  The round building on the left is the Radcliffe Camera.  Apparently to be a member of the Dangerous Sports Society of the university, you have to climb up the outside of it…  DS2 was looking very thoughtful when DH told us this… calculating just how he would go about this task…

This is part of the Bodleian Library taken from the quad.  I love the grid effect created by the different parallel lines.

In the afternoon we went punting on the River Cherwell.   Love the reflections..

Isn’t this rusted Green Man amazing? 

We did dyeing with Helen and I obviously have a green theme going on looking at this piece of Evolon – I used the transfer painted papers that I decorated several months ago….

And of course I did some mark making doodles with the parallel pens:

While we were there, there was another workshop where they were making chairs – honestly! A whole dining chair in a week!  Steaming the wood to make it curved and everything …  One of the ladies on the course brought us this gorgeous strip of planed wood at the end of the week – isn’t it gorgeous? 

My main achievement during the week, however, is a blue crocheted scarf and I can’t believe I haven’t actually taken a photo of it yet so it’ll have to wait for the next post…  I hadn’t crocheted since I was a teenager so I was glad to see the skill hadn’t left me. I used a silk/cashmere yarn for it and it feels yummy!  Since getting back, I haven’t even touched it and I only need to do about another 12 inches so I must pick it up again…

I meant to blog about the week I had at Urchfont ages ago but the summer is slipping away and I don’t know where it’s gone!    I went with a group of textiley internet pals.

Urchfont is a manor house in Wiltshire owned by Wiltshire County Council and is very grand:

While I was there, Sara taught me to spin:

Here she is teaching Gill:

I’ve had my drop spindle for a few years now, so I was glad to use it at last! 

I also had a go on the embellisher.  I decided it wasn’t for me, but I was glad to have a play.  This was the first thing I made.  It is roughly the size of an ACEO.

And the next:

Paulene also brought her pasta maker so that we could have a go at printing with it.  I printed a leaf – you roll printing ink on to an acrylic sheet, lay the leaf on to it with some paper on top, and run the whole thing through the machine.  So you get three prints – the first is the one on the right.  The next time you run it through, you take the leaf off and print the impression left by the leaf – that is the middle one.  Then you put the original leaf ink side up on to the acrylic sheet, put another sheet of paper on top and print that and the ink transferred on to the leaf from the first print then transfers on to the paper.  I hope I’ve remembered it correctly!  Now I want to get a pasta maker to try it again!

This is the second attempt using a ginkgo leaf that I found in the gardens.  I think I used too much ink but I like the abstract result!

More pics to come!

I got out my Print Gocco machine for the first time in ages and did some printing. 

I took this photo of the steam train on the Ffestiniog railway during our holiday to Porthmadog in North Wales last summer.

I can’t remember which station it was, but I was up on the footbridge at the time.  We broke our journey between Porthmadog and Blaenau Ffestiniog and had a short walk through the woods, catching the next train back. 

I printed another one on a Moleskine cahier and this time put some bronze embossing power along the railway lines, and heated it with my heat gun.

I also did a load more birdie prints, this time in browns and golds:

This one is printed on khadi paper.

And another one with embossing powder on a Moleskine journal:

Of course, I couldn’t stop there and there are piles more cards! Including these little birdie heads:

While we were away at Easter, I saw lots of crows and seagulls.  I think they were attracted by all the food scraps around, but I took the opportunity to get a bit closer than usual.  Crows, especially, seem to be particularly suspicious and will fly away as soon as you get close enough to take a picture with more than a black dot in it! 

This crow’s profile looks quite scary

But from a distance it’s not so bad…

This seagull looks quite at home in an urban environment…

And I quite like the effect of this one.  It would be better with a total background of blue sky though. 

And I include this because I like the effect of footprints in the sand:

Golly, where does the time go?  I can’t believe it’s 2 weeks since my visit to the West Midlands, where the Black Country Museum is based.    It’s called the Black Country in that area because of all the mines and industry which abounded in the 19th century. 

This is the house which my great great great grandparents, Benjamin and Elizabeth Meredith, lived in in the latter half of the 1800s.  It is called the Tilted Cottage because of the effects of the subsidence caused by mining in the area!   Apparently the Museum took great care to rebuild it that way when they moved it brick by brick to its new home.

Benjamin was a bricklayer but I don’t know if he built this house.  Most of my other ancestors were coal miners, potters and farmers, though the butt filers listed on several of the census returns amused the kids!  Typical male teenage humour…

The main part of the museum consisted of a reconstructed village – here are the ‘back to back’ terraced houses typical of a lot of Victorian workers’ buildings.    They are two houses put together only one room wide.  I used to live in a terraced house till I was 11 and it felt strangely familiar, although it wasn’t a ‘back to back’ type.  Click on the link if you are unclear what I mean – I was a bit vague about it and looked it up on Wikipedia!

I liked it because you could wander around all the back gardens and yards and see exactly what was there, the washrooms and coal houses and chicken coops…

The museum also links up with the canal system and going down there I saw these geese with their goslings:

It reminded me of the train journey up there, where the train driver stopped for some geese and their young family who were crossing the railway track!

This was the view from my cafe table when I was eating my lunch:

You could also go down a mine but I passed on that as I’ve been down several already and preferred to stay in the warm sunny outdoors!