Medievalitis has struck again!

......and so has the laptop gremlin!
I am having problems getting some of my photos onto my blog. The procedure has changed and now I am told the webpage has expired so you will have to make do with just three for now. These tiles were on display in the museum in Glastonbury Abbey and I have so many more lovely pictures, it's hard to choose which ones to post.

The one above is rather unusual for being circular - so many of them are square.

They were in glass cases and it was almost impossible not to get some reflection. I have come across this design in many different books and other places. I can't take the credit for these pics as my daughter took them. I had left my camera at the flat on this occasion so she kindly used hers to take these shots for me.

Perhaps it is a good thing I can't get access to any more photographs - I could very easily bore you rigid with them and do appreciate that not everyone shares my fascination in Abbey ruins, old bits of tile and ancient church vestments in a state of disrepair!

If things carry on as they are, I have enough photos to last me a month of posts. Goodness knows when you will get to see the new pond - it is partially filled with water so that we have been able to put the frogs and newts back. I didn't like to keep them in the small tank any longer. It was too hot today to do any work out there, but I did manage to tidy up a little and the pump and filter should be fitted and working by Sunday. We will then have to lay the stone slabs all around the edge and then I can get down to putting in the plants. I'm really looking forward to that. I am hosting our group meeting in August so have until then to restore order to the garden - by then everything should have settled in nicely.

At this time of year I usually indulge myself in buying more plants, but have been very restrained this year realising that the space for them has been reduced. However, judging by the number of weeds I have lifted in the last two days from around the garden, there maybe enough gaps to be filled and a home will be found for everything.

Busy, busy.

Just words today as I haven't had time to sort out my photos yet. There are some from nearly two weeks ago when we went to Symonds Yat overlooking the River Wye as well as those from my little holiday.
I had a lovely week in Glastonbury with our youngest daughter last week. The weather was amazing and actually too warm for comfort a couple of days, but we managed to find shade in several interesting shops! and postponed our trek up the Tor until the end of the week when it was cooler. There is the most wonderful view from the top - a full 360degrees and you can see for miles. I didn't know that there is a small wildlife area within the Abbey grounds which has a badger sett, and the duck pond is full of huge carp whose scales look golden when they swim through a patch of sunlight.
The first morning we were there, I woke up at about 6 o'clock and heard a cuckoo calling. It must be over 30 years since I heard one.
I'll do a proper Glastonbury post later in the week when daughter and I can get together as she has some of my photos on her camera, due to the fact that I had left mine behind in the flat the day we went into the Abbey museum and I saw the wonderful cope and medieval tiles.
It's been all go since we got home. The garden had become a jungle-cum-wilderness and the liner for the new pond had been delivered so I have spent the past two days weeding and digging up plants to be saved and potted in order to make space, as the new pond is larger than our current one. Our son came this afternoon to empty the old pond and rehouse the frogs and newts temporarily in a tank. I had no idea we had so many - there must be well over a dozen frogs and over twenty newts.
At the moment it all looks dreadful - a bare uneven area of soil with a big hole in it and mud all over the patio slabs. It can only get better! When it's all put back together and replanted I'll take a photo and show you. Whatever we did to the garden last autumn seems to have paid off - it's all looking very lush and healthy. I'm sure plenty of other gardens are the same and maybe we needed that 'proper' cold winter weather so that the seasons knew where they were and what they were supposed to be doing.
I took some homework on holiday to do in the evenings and made little canvaswork slips to add to my allotment piece. I will have to wait till the weekend before I can do any more to it as this week is booked up. When I have something worth showing you I'll post a photo of it.

A belated birthday present.

It's arrived at last after quite a lengthy publishing delay, but is well worth the wait. I've been an admirer of Jan Messent's work since I discovered it nearly 30years ago. This book is a mine of information about these early times and it is obvious that Jan has done an enormous amount of research.

She has used her fabric, mixed-media and altered books to record many experiments and findings, but there is a great deal more to this publication than making books. It's full of other delights as well though I feel inspired to make another book myself.

I should of course be doing more on my allotment piece, but work has slowed right down as I seem to have fallen prey to raging hayfever. I wondered why my cold symptoms kept coming back! I have never suffered from hayfever though have been aware of being a bit 'sniffy' now and then during the summer. This has taken all my energy and I have lost my voice! It's very peaceful in our house!! I have a stuffy head, watering eyes, sore nose and a hacking cough and as long as I don't do anything I feel OK . At present I could maybe sing baritone or counter tenor all in one line of music!!

I am having a week off next week and am going to Glastonbury with our youngest daughter, so must be fit by then. We are planning to walk up the Tor and I don't want her to have to carry me! I have masses of gardening jobs to do as well, as we are having the pond enlarged and many plants will have to be moved. Oh well! I'll do what I can and the rest will have to wait.

No pictures but a new and user friendly laptop!

This is my first solo run on my new laptop, bought this morning and set up this afternoon by my very helpful daughter. I didn't know I was going to buy one - just went to see what was available - but this one seemed like the answer to all my prayers. Don't ask me anything about it! It's a Dell, it's lovely, it's blue and it works!!

Daughter and son-in-law wore me out going around our out-of-town retail park and then the shopping mall, but it was so worthwhile having someone with me who knows what they are looking at and talking about, and I'm delighted with my new toy. My daughter will be happy as they bought a new washing machine - theirs died yesterday after making a dreadful noise and filling the house with the smell of burning rubber. The replacement will be delivered tomorrow.

I'm just about to find out if my paragraph spacing works on this one, or if I will have to go on putting in full stops to leave a blank line.

Just off to do a quick - yes QUICK!! - flick through other people's blogs before I get supper. Yippee!!

I've been shirking - but I have been poorly.

This is a new visitor to the back garden - he pops in most mornings for breakfast and dips crusts of bread into the lawn birdbath to soften them before tucking in. After eating several pieces he often flies off with another piece in his beak. We had a greater spotted woodpecker on the peanuts in the front garden this afternoon but before I could get to the camera it had flown off.

This is another frequent visitor, and very cheeky with it. I opened the front door to see it sitting on a low branch of the wisteria just above the porch. Of course I startled it and it disappeared but when I stepped outside with the camera I found it sitting on the tiles just above the guttering over the porch. Look at those lovely fat wisteria buds - it's going to look wonderful later this month.

I can't believe the amount of growth in the garden over the past few weeks. There is hardly any soil to be seen - everything has taken off and the stone birdbath has almost disappeared among all the foliage.

I love bluebells but they are a mistake in a small garden and will insist on marching onto the rockery and pushing up in the middle of other plants. I am always having to dig them up but their number never seems to diminish. The forget-me-nots are so well named and a lovely reminder of a dear neighbour who moved to New Zealand with her family some years ago, but not before she had given me just one little plant from her garden. They have happily spread throughout mine and if they turn up where they are not wanted I just pull them up, otherwise they have freedom to flower where they please.

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I have been rather lazy this week owing to a heavy head cold which has drained all my energy. For two days I was so busy blowing my nose there was no time to do anything else! The 'allotment' piece is crying out for more work and I'll try to do more on it tomorrow. It's our next group meeting on Tuesday and I shall need something to take for our Show and Tell session.
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I was hoping to do this post two days ago but problems with this contrary contraption prevented me from doing so. After driving me to distraction then, it is now behaving beautifully and butter wouldn't melt in it's mouth. Aaarrrrggghhh!!

You'll need to use your imagination!

The air has been blue while I've tried to write this post. It has taken so long to do anything on my laptop today that I nearly gave up, then having carefully organised the loading of my pics in the right order, a little box flashed up on the screen telling me that there was a download failure for the pic above and couldn't get it on to my blog. However, I tried again when I'd finished the post and here it is - in the wrong place of course. It shows a section of three of my strips which will eventually be joined together somehow (!) to make up a fairly large panel which will hopefully look a bit like a series of allotments. My inspiration came from seeing our local town allotments on Google Earth.

I started by tearing long thin strips of green fabric about 3-4cms wide then prepared a selection of other strips to be cut into short lengths and applied to them. I made these other strips by machine couching ribbon with automatic stitches, fabric paper, heavy yarn and anything else I could think of, in close rows on another green fabric. When all the stitching was done I cut the strips apart, ready to be reassembled on the main pieces. I was looking for variations in colour and texture.

I also made tiny pieces of knitting, some of which I embellished to felt and then worked from the back to push the felt fibres through to the front in places. These will be added here and there to provide variation in the textures of the piece and more stitching will be needed to unify all the little bits and bring everything together.

I discovered some failures in a bag and embellished those too - they might be cut into small pieces and applied to the green fabric. I may machine stitch on them first or when they are applied - I am having to make decisions as I go along. I prefer to know from the start what I am going to do but time was running out on me so I began work without being able to see the finished piece in my mind.

These paper beads are just the right colours. I could add one or two here and there if they look right. I have no idea how to finish this piece or whether it will be framed or be a wall hanging.

This has been recycled from another piece of work altogether and used to be a study in tree bark! I have unpicked quite a lot of heavy top stitching and may take off even more. It was also manipulated to suggest the undulations and fissures in a very craggy bark and I've had such a job to flatten it. In reality it is not as pink and blue as it appears here, but much more green and bronzey and quite a bit darker. I am hoping to turn it into another Google piece - possibly 'Moorland'. If I get stuck on either of these I can always start on Google Quarry and totally stress myself!

What is it?

This indoor plant flowered for me a few days ago. It has strap like leaves and the flower lasts for only one day. As it has only three petals I wonder if it is a member of the trillium family. I also wonder if I can keep it alive for a whole year and hopefully have more flowers next year.

I thought you might like to see a photo of my strawberry patch!! There is another pot with three more plants in it so we should have two helpings. Those strange furry things are pussy willow catkins - they are all over our garden and rain down on us from the tree just the other side of our wall. In places they look like a new kind of garden mulch.

This is the veg patch, though it will get larger when the dwarf french beans and runner beans are ready to plant out. I have to be careful to leave enough space on the patio to sit and enjoy the sun.

About a year ago this was a dark and dismal little area where nothing much would grow on account of our neighbours very high conifer hedge. The hedge height was drastically reduced, new fencing was put in place, I added more plants and already it is all paying off. Sunlight actually hits the ground here now and everything is growing nicely and beginning to fill out.

It's hard to imagine that only 6 or 7 weeks ago there was bare soil everywhere - if not snow! There has been such a surge of growth in the last two or three weeks and please note that I actually have one - albeit rather scrawny - black tulip this year. I had given up on them as they kept turning out a nasty faded mauve. You can almost see the plants growing and in the greenhouse all the seeds, apart from the sweet peppers, have germinated. All I have to do now is protect them from slugs and snails.
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I haven't done much work on my textile projects and will have to pull my socks up. I have torn several strips of green cotton fabric ready to be pleated, appliqued, stitched and textured in as many different ways as I can think of. If I can make it work, they will be joined together somehow to become my interpretation of allotments as seen on Google Earth. I need one finished piece ready to be photographed by the second week in May so will have to get down to work.