Garden shenanigans

Well, the garden has been providing us with much joy and entertainment

The young jackdaws make free with available water sources, in their very best grumpy jackdaw style

while the young fox stalks through as though this were her place, bold as you like

we had the joy of a green woodpecker, who furkled about in the border's edge, looking for tasty morsels, the green of his back was wonderful. We hear him regularly, but he's quite a rare visitor

as he was minding his own business, and not two seconds after I took the picture above, there was a black furry streak, and indignant squawk, and a confused looking cat wondering where on earth that exciting bouncing thing went.

The dudgeon was high!

our fish

have had little fish - I have counted seven at one go

badger has been badgering

and the squirrel, taking much delight in the rip in the fabric of the ancient chair cushion, found a fluffy paradise

he tugged and struggled, and pulled and hauled, 

and leapt onto the chair to tidy up the bundle; this repeated multiple times, until the bundle was just right.

The back streak, pre squirrel attentions, puddled into a black slump

and the dahlias are a delight

A tribute to Howard

I have been in correspondence for some time now with an Irish writer called Rosemary Raughter. She has been researching my great grandfather Howard's sister, Louie Coade, as she has an interest in women's history and the Irish suffrage movement in which Louie was involved. As her research has progressed she has also found out more about Howard, and has produced a delightful brief account of his life here. My mother and grandmother would have been so pleased to know that he was still thought of and written about. I recall visiting Wexford and Wicklow with Mum in around 1990. We went to the Wexford graveyard to see if we could find Howard's grave but as the light began to fade I felt sure that we would not find him; there seemed to be no order to the graves that I could discern in my hurried survey. As I was walking back to where Mum was waiting, it was as though someone tapped my shoulder, and there, just to my left was his gravestone, one amongst many, indistinguishable from the rest. I collected Mum and brought her to his resting place. I will never forget the way her face crumpled and tears came as she said "oh I so wish I had known my grandfather". A recent entry from her diary talks of having a bureau, which Howard had made when his three girls were young, moved into her bedroom so she could sit at it and write. She talks about

"the picture of my Grandpa which I framed and which stands on top of the bureau. It is an extraordinary thing, but this room had a different atmosphere from any part of the rest of the house and I feel in some silly way that if that picture were taken away it would lose that restful feeling which is just the right atmosphere for writing a journal in. That photo has a feeling about it which is impossible to explain, but somehow it makes me feel there is another presence in the room. I always see it first thing on entering the room, and yet it is well above my eye level and rather hidden in a way on top of the bureau"

This is the image which she had carefully framed and placed in her room as a sort of guardian spirit of her youthful writings.

 

transparents again

I am thinking around ideas of Mesopotamia, layers of time and habitation. 

These pieces of sheer, blogged about here might just begin to express this by using both layers of colour on the voile - here quite light in tone, and also layering the fabrics one over the other. 

So, having applied one layer of colour to the sheer poly voile, walnut ink and Quink on one, acrylic ink on the other, they have now been weighed down in trays with rusty bits

and wetted with either white vinegar and a splash of acrylic ink on the hummocks

Or walknut ink and tea, with trickles of Quink.

The same colorants as the first layer, with added rust textures hopefully, where the random bits of iron will oxidise with the tea/vinegar. 

I wonder what will happen. They are "cooking" overnight under a sheet of damp newsprint.

keeping them off- sort of

Yesterday's post nicely highlighted the lack of weeding through the spot I focused on, so I thought I'd give a morning to doing just that. One of the dangers of weeding, of course, is that one then has to defend one's freshly turned soil from opportunists

the chaps, who think this is just a matter of a little local housekeeping by the mistress to ensure their latrine needs are attended to!

and our visitors, who are quite sure that any freshly dug soil must contain more in the way of worms, slugs and grubs than anywhere else in the garden (except the lawn of course)

So, when all has been loosened up, and surface and deep rooting weeds have been eradicated, and a lovely blanket of soil improver and mulch has been laid over the top to keep moisture in, some protection is needed.

Whether those canes have a hope against a ravaging badger is yet to be discovered!

it looks a small space to have tilled, but that is about my limit in a couple of hours, the rest will be finished when I have recovered my strength!

At least now you can see there really are hellebores and a fern here. The gloom is down to some gathering clouds which have arrived for the afternoon, promising a goodly amount of rain to sink down through the loose texture, rather than simply running off the packed earth. How lovely.

Garden nooks and crannies

Come with me for a little perambulation. I have been doing a bit of tidying and realigning of a little portion of the garden that lives just outside the door beside which I sit. It is a little path that was all but invisible when we moved in, and along it you can enjoy the tripod with a lamp which my son in law made for me, the trickling of the pond as you pass the bird tree with all its dangling treats, the maple which Mum gave me years and years ago which found its true roots in this garden, and a little Japanese lantern which has had several spots in the garden, it may have found its happy place here. 

It all looks very dry and a bit weed spotted, but in spring there are hellebores and pulmonaria, then later geranium. I must think about planting for this time of the year

The lantern sits just behind the all important cricket listening chair

Shady seating by the lavender 

Where you can look back to the pond

Where the maple glows in the morning sun

Transparents

We have been working with Christine on the next online Studio 11 workshop, this time looking at transparent fabrics and how to get colour onto them. Christine has uploaded several tutorials and we all meet via Zoom once a week for updates and discussions. In the absence of a real one, I am improvising a "design wall" by pinning bits together and suspending them from a picture in the sitting room, hence the ghostly radiator! Tis way I can get some idea of how the colours are, or are not visible from a distance.

The first section here are all coloured using transfer inks, which have a gloopy consistency. Once painted onto a paper support of some sort they can then be ironed onto synthetic fibres, here sheer polyester voile. These were my first attempts, just playing with the colours to see how they came out. Some of them will get another layer, investigating how the colours mix when layered onto the fabric. Some of the patterns were painted directly onto the paper, some are monoprints. I have painted a few more papers since, which are awaiting my next slow ironing session. You do have to move the hot iron very very veery slowly. Appropriate music helps -  ranging from Faure's Requiem to Leonard Cohen. I have eclectic tastes

Then I played with walnut ink and Quink, and acrylic inks, scrumpling the fabric into a plastic pot of appropriate size and allowing the thing to "mulch" for a bit before taking it out and allowing to dry. The textures are really interesting, even more so when the fabric is layered over itself. At the bottom I have layered a piece from each technique, hence the colour ghosting behind the dark fabric. The acrylic ink gives a slight stiffness to the voile, but that might be because I've not washed the fabric yet - a vigorous rinse in cold water to get the excess pigment out. I have given it a hot press to set/cure the inks. 

More walnut ink experiments, this time smoothed over a piece of plastic wetted with ink. The fabric was then pushed about so it bubbled up in places, the colour pools around the ripples in the fabric. I really like this, but it is very subtle, I need to experiment more.

And the same technique with acrylic inks, which cure and will stay on the fabric, unlike the walnut ink which is likely to wash out. They looked incredibly vibrant when still wet and on the plastic, more subdued once dry but I think I like that better

The more neutral colours have potential for my Mesopotamia theme and I have been working towards appropriate textures in my experiments. They might provide an interesting base for some paper lamination, which is the next technique to work with. 

I have such admiration for Christine for keeping Studio 11 going despite the difficulties of the past year, not just Covid, but her loss of her previous Studio and consequent stress and upheval. Our little creative community is still thriving under her generous tutelage, and lockdown has become the catalyst for her developing a series of online courses which can now be found on her website. 

We are very lucky.

Mum's Diaries

Working with Mum's diaries (I have just begun 1944) is like having a time slip conversation with a very old friend. The person who is talking in these pages is the person I remember her to be; at times caustic and critical of others, at times (and much more often) a woman who cared and felt deeply and did all she could to make other's lives better. She is a mixture of naïve and mature, reflective and dismissive, longing for friends and company, as all only children are, but requiring too much from folk. Mum tended to be an all or nothing person, and that intensity shows in her writings. When she talks of "Mummy" in my minds eye sits my Ganna, who wrote novels and was my rescuer and second mother when we came here "after Daddy died". The diaries are full of family names and stories with which I am deeply familiar.. At times there are quirky little sketches inserted, like this, of her new coat or quick drawings of their new kitten George.

But mostly she records her thoughts about life, and events and happenings and family interactions. I wrote earlier of Nirvana, the holiday cottage which belonged to her Aunts, Connie and Harry. These folk are so familiar to me, I met them as a tiny child, we lived in their house (without them - we inherited it) when we moved to Hastings after my Dad died, they are part of the folklore of my childhood, and at times took on an almost incantatory presence for me, I could feel my molecules mingling with theirs. Numerous of those little incidents are recorded here, and were part of my childhood's pattern. I find myself at times almost alive in these recountings of hers, because they were the foundation of our life together