Category Archives: New Studio

A Pinboard for a New Term…

I don’t think it matters how long ago it is since you left school, the approach of September always feels much more like the beginning of a new year than the actual one in dreary old January! And it’s so much more full of hope and possibility, we could have an ‘Indian Summer’ to make up for the lack of a British one, the evenings are still light, and it just feels like an optimistic new start. So this has been a good time to get my little office up and running efficiently with pinboards, graphs and flow charts (pause to snort with derisive laughter!) and slowly, slowly get on top of the teetering piles of paperwork. It also means I can reclaim the studio space from being a dumping ground/spare room (thank goodness it was only Tim and I trying to shoehorn ourselves into the sofa bed!) It now looks too tidy to use, even Higgins is surprised…

…and here it is, I had to record it because it won’t last!

and in this one you can see the office at the end, it’s not ready for close inspection yet!

You might have noticed the old pinboard in the first photo, so full of stuff which had been there forever.

Very uninspiring, and in need of a makeover to celebrate the new look. It was even more uninspiring once I’d taken off all the tatty bits and pieces…

You can see just how long some things had languished there by the interesting shadow effects!

So this is how the transformation took place, a quick and easy project as it only took a couple of hours. All it took was some grey emulsion paint, I used a sample pot, and some white, I had plenty around as we’d been painting the studio. Fabric and Bondaweb the size of the board, ribbon and glue and a few buttons.

After giving the board a wipe I painted the frame with the grey emulsion…

Once it dried I gave it a coat of white. It doesn’t have to cover completely, just make sure that the brush strokes follow the shape of the frame. Once it was dry I sanded it lightly to reveal some of the grey undercoat and polished it with beeswax.

I then cut a piece of Bondaweb to the size of the cork area of the pinboard and ironed to the back of my chosen fabric, in this case some jolly red and pink spotty Ikea fabric, peeled off the back of the Bondaweb and ironed the fabric directly on to the cork area…

To cover the raw edges I used a woven ribbon…

..and found just the right buttons to trim the corners.

Did you notice the Dove Christmas decoration on the old pinboard? That got a new lease of life…

…and the pinboard was ready to use…

Trouble is, it’s far too pretty to fill with Post-It notes, receipts and appointments, isn’t it? So for now it looks like this…

…and I’ll probably have to buy another pinboard to use in the office! Ho hum…

Out of the Blue

Today I find myself popping out to the garden to gaze up into the perfect, blemish free, china blue of the sky in amazement. Only last week when Higgins and I were out on a walk I had remarked on the fact that over our rural part of Norfolk there must have been 30 to 40 vapour trails in various stages of decay. The Icelandic volcano is causing all sorts of havoc to so many people, so it’s good to record a positive aspect.

The vegetable garden is still a battle ground, and I am losing. I have a sneaky black and tan garden pest, and a second sowing of salad greens with no labels and scraped up rows. I really thought the polytunnel would be a deterent but for a small animal of the low slung persuasion it seems not…

I ‘ve managed to protect the peas and beans with a cobbled together barrier of chicken wire and bamboo which has worked so far so we’ll see…

Things are growing fast. I photographed the rhubarb and the lovage a week apart…

The lovage is at it’s best when young and tender, by the time it reaches its full height of over 6 feet high the leaves are a little tough. I can’t wait for the rhubarb, I love rhubarb and orange crumble…

I’m plodding on in the studio. I have shelves waiting for Tim’s return next week and that will make a huge difference as I can then shift so much bulk. I’m slowly sorting, sorting…so much has got SO muddled, but it’s nice finding old friends and things I had forgotten about.

I’m still finding time to be a bit creative, bearing in mind the ‘Twenty Minuter’ message. I’ve needle-felted a couple more little birds…

…but when I tried to make a pale pink one it stubbornly insisted on being a pig…

My Tabby Cat and Goldfish now have a shelf to sit on…

Henry and friends donated the whiskers, otherwise he’s solid Merino wool…as is the Blue-haired Lady.

Just as well I’ve recorded the positive side of grounding all aircraft, Tim’s trip back from the ‘office’ next week involves a helicopter so who knows when he’ll get back…

…and BREATHE…

I feel as if I’ve been holding my breath for months, waiting for this moment. Waiting to open the doors and windows, to let in the sun and fresh air, to wander in and out without a coat…and here we are at last. I don’t want a ‘barbecue summer’, well, not one that will barbecue me, but pleasant warmth, sunshine and light, and just enough rain for the garden (only falling at night please, if we’re having a fantasy lets get it right).

I’m scuttling about a bit at the moment. A little bit of gardening, a little bit of sorting fabrics and yarns, some sewing, some knitting, symptoms of a butterfly brain. So excuse me if this post is a bit like that, I’ll settle down soon.

Firstly, the garden. You’ll excuse me if I don’t take you round the vegetable patch just yet. It needs a little more attention before I show it to visitors. Too many old bean canes and dead flowerpots. I do have lovely raised beds which I talked about in this post, and I have extravagantly enlisted the help of a gardening guru to make it look good enough for a photo shoot.

The wild plum is just bursting into bloom and I love the ‘spottiness’ of the buds just before they open. We started on the last of the wild plum jam on Sunday on warm scones.

In a couple of days it will just be a froth of blossom.

The forsythia is doing it’s thing, quite a bit later this year. Every summer I look at this unprepossessing nondescript shrub filling up the border and nearly give it it’s marching orders, and every spring I forgive it.

There are assorted daffodils…

…and other, less assertive, little lovelies hiding their light under the bushes…

Meanwhile, back in the studio, there is a very different tree…

The little red bird is feeling a trifle lonely now that his pink friend has flown off to live with Elizabeth, I must get felting again.

…and then there is the knitting…

Quite big knitting as Higgins will demonstrate…

The ball has a history – which I’ll tell you about another time – but it’s just had a colour revamp before going off to our local Farmers Market tomorrow where the Knit and Stitch group are hoping to spread the knitting bug, (whilst spoiling ourselves with coffee and and the delicious, and very naughty, bacon rolls.

So, before that happens I must don my wellies and gardening gloves and head back out to the vegetable garden and absorb a little sunshine…

Higgins and the Robot

Ha! Now that’s got you wondering hasn’t it, and I’m not going to tell you about it till the end!

I’ve got quite a backlog of photos in the camera because all this tinkering with the blog and the studio has meant I’m really behind on posts. I was also full of good intentions to make pretty Easter things (I have to confess to 5 blown egg shells which didn’t get painted LAST Easter -I’ve forgotten the excuse I had then) . It’s been pretty inpossible to find any of my equipment however, seeing as it’s all packed in boxes in the spare room, and I’m trying to bring it all out slowly so I can sort it to avoid the minestrone type mixture of stuff I usually end up with when I’m working.

I did have wool and needles to hand though so I’ve been able to do a little knitting project AND write a knitting pattern so I have been putting in more than my twenty minutes of creativity a day.

Firstly, I managed to get a picture of the Twisted Hazel which I gave my Mother for Mother’s Day several years ago. It’s qite slow growing, and that first year had just the one catkin so it’s doing pretty well now.

The little daffodils sheltering underneath look so pretty. The miniature ones do so much better in this windy spot because they don’t get flattened as easily. It was even warm enough for not just one, but two ladybirds. I’ve only just spotted the second one.

With a birthday in the family this weekend and a celebratory lunch I’ve got the Easter Tree up and ready. This is where the painted eggs are supposed to hanging… Anyway, the little decorations look pretty, and the pink primroses set it off nicely.

Then there were the egg cosies, knitted in my favourite wool. (Hasn’t it gone a long way since I did all that dyeing last year? Time for a fresh batch with new colours very soon)

I’ve put the pattern in the tutorial section which you’ll find at the top under the banner.
And now for that robot… Several years ago a very clever person, someone who got their priorities in life just right, invented a robot vacuum cleaner. It was HUGELY expensive and I said at the time, if I ever win the lottery I’m having one of those. Well time went by …and I still haven’t won the lottery… but the price of the vacuum cleaner went down to a nearly sensible price, and Lakeland featured them in their catalogue and I thought ‘Why not?’ So Kryton came to live with us. He sits under the work top in the utility room until he’s needed, charges out with a triumphant little fanfare when he is switched on, trundles round the room humming and sucking away and spins frantically round on the spot with a blue light flashing when he finds a particularly filthy bit . Once he’s finished he wheels himself back to the docking station and parks himself with another fanfare before going back on charge, the light on top pulsing red like a heart beat. Occasionally we might have a little problem and Kryton stops, gives a mournful little toot and says, in a strongly American accented female voice, ‘Please clean Roomba’s brushes’ . I can’t tell you how disconcerting that was the first time that happened. Anyway, it’s great to be able to drink coffee and watch the vacuum doing its stuff without me and if that makes me sound totally lazy, well…

We also had an amusing moment when Higgins, as a very small puppy, went behind Kryton’s curtain and climbed on top, stood on the go button and rode out on top looking very surprised! Not a lot fazes Higgins, but you can imagine he’s not Kryton’s number one fan, especially when it chases him round the room with the filth detector light flashing. When I got to the end of the studio painting I took the vacuum out to clean the floor prior to painting it and, as Higgins does like to be in on everything, he joined in.

Sometime I must tell you about the day he met a seal…

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.