Category Archives: Gardens

When not in textile mode my other passion is gardening and my garden

The White Cube

The studio is finished and is scarily, eerily, white…. I feel I must exhibit something in there, this white cube. Actually Higgins has already done that for me. When Kit popped round to admire it and I proudly flung the door open there, in the middle of the room, was an artfully placed pile of poo…oh dear… a budding yBa?

It’s amazing what this whiteness does for a space. It means that whatever is placed in there suddenly asumes a huge importance. Even a pencil on a table, a coffee cup, a dirty sock becomes a statement. I’ve got to get in there with my stuff PDQ before the mystique scares me half to death.

The challenge is to fill it with colour and to stamp my personality on it and to get CREATIVE. I’ve been talking about it long enough. I’ve actually popped over to see Marmalade Rose and asked to join the Twenty Minute Challenge to instil a little discipline into the proceedings otherwise I could spend far too much time arranging things artistically on shelves…

In the meantime I’m going to add a little more colour to the blog. I’ve been popping out in the garden on and off wielding the camera and recording the fleeting moments of spring flowers in bloom. It’s a grey day today and the crocuses are over, but we can still enjoy them, and a little sunshine.

Underneath the weeping willow and the bottom of the garden, not fairies, but Iris reticulata…

…miniature cyclamen..

… the last of the snowdrops…

…and primroses.

That’s better. I’m now buoyed up to go and shift piles of books and start filling shelves…

p.s. If you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to put your name in the hat for the ‘Little Bird’ draw!

Getting Plastered

I hope that I’m coming to the end of posts with pictures of building works, it may be informative but they are hardly the most colourful things to decorate my blog. I’ve been debating whether to put the latest ones on first and get them out of the way, or whether to save them till the end and start with prettiness. I’m really failing on the creativity front at the moment, with all my stuff in boxes, so I’ve been making the most of the colour in the garden and elsewhere.

Tim is away at work again so I am back on dog walking duty, and with the bright sunshine it’s been good to take the camera along. Bright sunshine, but still an iciness in the breeze so the walking has been brisk and photo opportunities taken speedily. I’ve just discovered that I have managed to delete the photos of Higgins on today’s walk so if anyone is waiting for an aaah moment, sorry but no doubt another one will come along tomorrow. He seems to have got the cute thing down to a fine art.

So, let’s get the exciting pictures of drying plaster out of the way. Actually that sounds as if I’m not excited, and I am. With any luck the studio will be all but finished by next weekend. I had been hoping to be painting this weekend, but the weather hasn’t been helpful with drying out.

and, complete with builder…

..and, you can see my stable door!

Meanwhile, out in the garden…

..actually Higgins has managed to get in on the act…

..I found the first primrose…

…tiny cyclamen under the weeping willow tree…

Delicate blue crocuses …

Bold and brash, purple and gold…

…and blue and yellow.

Meanwhile, back indoors, the tulips are going all unneccessary. Why do they do that?

..and down the lane there is lichen…

and moss and ferns…

Spring is definitely springing…

Here comes the sun…

…for at least two days according to the forecast (and then the snow’s back…)so I had a wizz round the garden with the camera. You’ll be glad to know my camera issues have been resolved so the moaning will stop!. With the help of Ebay I now have THREE cameras! When I went back to the nice and long suffering man at the London Camera Exchange with the new Olympus camera that I couldn’t get on with, I took along the ‘steam’ camera that Tim had bought on Ebay, a Fuji Finepix 6800Zoom which had seemed so ‘state of the art’ when I had one nearly a decade ago. I showed it to the nice man and said, ‘I just want a camera that takes pictures like this’. And he couldn’t sell me one. He said he had had the same camera for about four years, it has a fantastic lens, Tim had got an incredible bargain from Ebay and he gave me a full refund on the one I had had since November! What amazing service. He suggests I go back later in the year when the next generation of cameras comes in to see what would suit me. Meanwhile Tim went back on to Ebay to get a memory card for it and bought a second camera for the same price as a memory card, and finally found an F650 (again at a bargain price) which was the model that I wore out last year. So I have no excuse now for not filling my blog with lots of pictures – in focus!

As it’s St David’s Day and my daughter was born in Wales I have to include daffodils…

..but a little trip round the garden found things popping out in the sunshine.

It was interesting to see things from the perspective of someone very short…

Slightly out of focus, but Higgins hasn’t had a lot of photography practise so far…

Just to be completely greedy, I had a pink tulip moment when I went shopping this afternoon,

…and then in the ‘slightly sad and lonely’ bucket, I found these, which just begged to come home with me to be appreciated…

…and I had some help arranging them…

It’s amazing what you can train a dachshund to do…

Growth Spurt

Over the last few days I’ve been watching a hyacinth growing…you can almost see it with the naked eye, but I recorded it more simply with daily photos…

It’s not the most floriferous hyacinth, nor the most colourful, but it’s scent is just as amazing as any of it’s more spectacular cousins and it’s filling the ground floor of the house with the smell of Spring.

Meanwhile, in the garden…

The crocuses seem to have pushed up over night. Hold on a minute though, what’s that brown shape in the top left hand corner…?

Just checking, are they edible?

From a dachshund point of view, the answer is probably yes…Oh dear…

Higgins has also had a growth spurt, the little black coat he wears for his walks has become like a sausage skin, so we decided to buy another one from Equafleece, this time in a more stylish colour. His immediate reaction when we tried it on him was “Oh, NO! A walk!” cue a mad dash to hide in his bed…

He’s just a little ‘weeny’, in every sense of the word!

It’s been raining…

…quite a bit. This time last year I would have been happy to turn my back on the weather and find things to distract me indoors, but that was before I was a dog owner. So while I was happy to park myself on the sofa with a DVD (‘Batman Begins’ – I’ve never seen it – very good) and my latest woolly project (cue tantalizing glimpse…can you tell what it is yet?)…

…I was very aware that I had a small energetic bundle of fun to tire out before bedtime. In the middle of the afternoon the room was filled with that lovely golden light that comes when half the sky is a clear washed blue and the other half is inky with passing rain..

…so it was time to press the pause button and put on the wellies. Poor Higgins, it’s bit rough only being three inches off the ground when the puddles are four inches deep! As it is the house training takes three steps forward and two back every rainy day. I wonder if you can get umbrellas for dachshunds?

We compromised by splashing down the road and walking back through the grass at the edge of the field to wash the mud off Higgins’ tum.

Although it didn’t go entirely to plan…

Once we got home all that was required was a warm dry towel…

…and a nice cup of liquorice tea…

A Colour Infusion

I try so hard this time of the year to convince myself I like autumn. I look at all the beautiful photographs in Country Living of autumn leaves, and snuggly coats and interesting things to do with sweet chestnuts. I read articles about the joys of crisp mornings and hot chocolate by a roaring fire and, while I like all these things, nothing can make up for the shortening of the days, and the prospect of the colour gradually leeching out of the surroundings as winter approaches.

Today has been glorious and I took the camera out to capture the last few flashes of colour in the garden

So while it’s sunny outside I make the most of the colour left in the year, and when the weather turns, I, and my studio assistants, Henry…

…and Higgins…

…(Oh dear, you can’t get the staff!)… get stuck into the dye bath and making our own colourful landscape. Using the microwave has been a revelation as far as dyeing is concerned. I’ve never really used it it much in the kitchen apart from defrosting things, heating up my wheat bag and exploding custard (don’t ask).

dyes

Using the Easifix dyes I’ve been able to work out a foolproof method of mixing the dyes, getting reliable results and not ending up with multicoloured hands and splashes all over the walls. I had the most wonderful time experimenting with mixing the powders and the amounts and have been really excited by the variety of hues possible just using the four shades, Turquoise, Golden Yellow, Ultramarine and Magenta. I have been so organised! colour swatches