Monthly Archives: May 2014

It’s Raining…It’s Pouring!

After a mostly bright and sunny three days for the first weekend of Open Studios, today we have a deluge!  The water butts are overflowing…

Raining

… the back yard is flooded…

flooded yard

…and the few steps from the back door to the studio are enough to get soaked through.

srudio

I tried to work out there but the rain on the roof is deafening so I’ve decamped to the dining table with the laptop where I am typing with one hand because I have a very worried little dog trembling in my other arm. Higgins hates the rain, hates the wet, the noise and the possibility of thunder too, one supposes.  Anyway he’s stuck to me like a limpet all morning and just wants to sit on my lap ’till it’s all over.mini dachshundAs you can imagine, the last week or so has been really busy, first getting prepared for Open Studios, and then opening the doors and welcoming people in.  So I haven’t managed to personally thank everyone who left such lovely comments on my last post, but I do thank everyone for such supportive messages.

The studio is now a display area and you can imagine just how much stuff I’ve got squirrelled away all over the house to make enough space!  As usual Kit is sharing the space with her beautiful prints…

Kit Calladine Prints…and we have lots of other things to look at and hopefully to inspire people…

Planet Penny Studio

…with of course our little Meeter and Greeter at the ready!

Planet Penny StudioHiggins is quite convinced that Open Studios is actually the annual convening of the Higgins the Miniature Dachshund Appreciation Society.  He greets every visitor with complete rapture, and by the end of the first day was utterly exhausted…

Miniature Dachshund asleepWe now have a few days to catch up before it all happens again next weekend.  If you are local, it would be lovely to see you. There’s a lot else to see on the Two Rivers Trail, (you can find out more on the website) Printmaking, textiles, painting, woodcarving, feltmaking, spinning, beautiful alpacas…

Alpaca in his wedding hat - Burnt Fen Alpacas…and of course, Higgins…

miniature dachshundSee you soon…!

 

From the Heart

Crochet Hearts made with Planet Penny Cotton in Rainbow colours - pattern & yarn on Etsy

Here I am, at last.  This is the longest gap in posting for years, and it’s been playing on my mind.

When I started writing this blog it was just for me, and I had no real expectations that anyone else would even notice I was I was here, let alone actually read it.  And then come back and read some more.

What writing regularly did for me was to make me do stuff, and this fed my creativity and became a creative spiral.  The fact that you out there dropped in to encourage me was a lovely bonus, thank you!

But it’s all so much easier when you can trundle along in blissful ignorance just doing your thing. The rot set in when I started thinking there’s more to all this world wide web stuff than I first realise, maybe I’d better find out about it.  And then I started a business and suddenly there was all this big stuff which people were telling me I have to use, like SEO,…keywords …categories… And the little thing which was fun and interesting and created interaction with nice people suddenly became fraught with rules and regulations.

I worry about getting things right.  And so rather than get things wrong I’ve ended up sacrificing the spontaneity with which I first started the blog, feeling overwhelmed by what I should be doing, rather than what I want to do.  And I’m guilty of letting that happen in life at the moment too.

This is a busy time of year, next weekend Open Studios starts and there’s lots to do.  It would be so easy to put off writing until it’s all over.  But it’s like when you owe a letter to a friend, and for various reasons you don’t get round to replying and then time goes on and it gets harder and harder to justify why you’re such a bad friend that you can’t even put pen to paper to say hi.  And you end up sending Christmas cards every year saying, ‘Will be in touch in the New Year’.  And you don’t.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will know I am a great believer in serendipity, the happy accident.  It’s stood me in good stead over the years.  By happy accident this morning I came across an amazing post this morning which really made me think about what I am doing. This is a quote …

10350535_10152148071065745_5232667406941192688_n…but if you want to be inspired as I was, click on the quote and read the whole post.  It really makes you think.

So let spontaneity rule all round!  I might just arrive here with a photo, or a short post, or I might write lots and fling in a tutorial, who knows!  But I won’t let WordPress or All in One SEO bully me by pointing out I’ve only written 250 words and the recommended length is at least 400 words or whatever.  It’s my blog and I’m not writing a dissertation!

This isn’t my usual kind of post, so thanks for bearing with me and I hope you’ll stick around, I wouldn’t be here without you …x

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