Japan's beauty

It has been a while since I wrote. In the between time I have been away on a great adventure, long awaited and much anticipated: two weeks on a textile tour of Japan. I must confess to some trepidation beforehand; a long flight, potential for being fed "squiggly things" (I am a food coward), potential for offending the Japanese folk through misunderstanding. All nonsense of course, the trip was just marvelous, and included a large and inspiring amount of textile related visits and workshops. It also included two breathtaking gardens; one at the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi, and the second, the Korakuen Gardens in Okayama.

The first are advertised as a "living Japanese painting" and indeed they were. They are viewing gardens, rather than ones to stroll through. One walked through the museum of art finding numerous points in the journey to stop and take in the perfection and pristine presentation of these wonderful arrangements of trees, moss, water and gravel, finely crafted gateways and borrowed landscapes. I confess to enjoying the gardens a great deal more than the art on the walls!

The following day we visited Okayama Castle. 

Before climbing the hill to the castle itself, we spent far too short a time in the beautiful Korakuen Gardens just below, where we were allowed to stroll, stop and wonder. After an initial query about the lack of green, we were told that the golden brown of the grass was quite normal in early spring, and not the result of a dry winter, simply the way Japanese grass grows. Again, there was such harmony in the arrangement of carefully manicured trees, bridges, lanterns and water. The reflections doubled the pleasure of the view and of course, there were the flickering bodies of gold and silver koi moving beneath the ripples, one rather gorgeous terrapin and the stately, swaying trunks of bamboo. 

All too soon we were called away to visit the castle. A few members stayed in the gardens and I was almost sorry I hadn't done the same. While a marvelous trip, there were too few moments to just stand and reflect, so I am perhaps getting more pleasure from revisiting in my photographs than I did while I was there. I hope you enjoy then too.

spring begins

In amongst the leaves of last year, and the rather soggy soil from recent regular rains, there are signs of pleasure to come in the garden.

I am always surprised and delighted by these little cyclamen, which seem to realise they should stay small beneath one of my slow trees. 

These snowdrops are in quite deep shade, but still are beginning to show their delicate white petals.

while these, nearby but getting more light, have gradually developed into a lovely clump over the past ten years; slow and steady

I love the soft furry leaves and clear colours of pulmonaria, which come in so many shades of blue and pink

Hellebores take time to clump up, but I have high hopes for these in the coming years, especially if they also set seed and bring us more variations on the hellebore theme

The greater periwinkle is only a recent addition, but the flowers are so long lasting and the variegated leaves bring a bit of brightness beneath a camellia

a shy crocus beside some steps

and in the front garden the bright eyes of winter jasmine

the first primroses netting the sunlight

and another clump of snowdrops by the weeping birch, which came from Cecil's garden, so always remind me of her

How is your garden growing?

New Year freshness

I'm not much of one for New Year's resolutions, they always seem to come with intimations of failure in their wake. However, I do try to keep up my resolve during the year to do things. One of those is to walk by the seaside reasonably regularly, for the good of my health and for the good of my inner self. Today our sea was really rather excitable, with the wind whistling so hard across the water that the sturdy railings were buzzing and vibrating in their housings. Great rafts of sea foam were collected, trembling and undulating on the shoreline or blowing across the promenade. 

Definitely no boats, or folk, on the water today

Dogs with their trusty walkers were at serious risk of losing their ears and the sunshine was sparkling in and out of the racing dark clouds.

The seagulls really seemed to be playing joyfully in the buffeting air

Walking in an easterly direction was aided by the following wind, but walking back to the car was very invigorating indeed. I arrived home windswept and freshened and wandered into the sitting room just in time to catch this spot of calmness as our resident woodpecker helped himself to a little lunch.

I expect he has tucked himself away somewhere safe now as the forecast rain is beginning to lash against the windowpanes.

Winter visitors

 As said before, it has been chilly in the south recently

With the bird bath often frozen, local birds have been making use of the rill, waterfall, cascade, whatever we call the mechanism for delivering moving water into the pond below. I was amusing myself by watching one of the very fat wood pigeons trying to give himself a bath with not enough depth to do so. He flew off and I was just about to carry on with morning tasks when at least three of these little delights arrived.

I wouldn't have recognised them but for a recent message from my good friend Steph who also had some in her garden. They are redwings, a thrush relative who visits the UK over winter. I was delighted to see their pleasure in finding some running water to drink, and obviously at least one of them is stil begging for food from mum, so must be from this year's brood. 

We have plenty of holly and yew berries for them to feed on in the garden, so hopefully I will be seeing them again.

Aren't they a delight?

winter arrived

After weeks and weeks of weather so mild that nature was beginning to think spring was imminent  

the temperature plummeted. Recent mornings have been scattered with frost, illuminated by blue skies or draped in mist. We have had to prise ice from the bird bath and refill with wet water, much to the delight of the starling squadrons. 

Leaves and late flowers have looked magical, though the outside tap has turned into an unregulated fountain in need of repair. 

My seafront walk yesterday evening suggested that weather was on its way,

 but very slowly, the air was so still

This morning there were still billowing clouds hovering over the sea

but the day was quiet and rather soggy. Then temperatures began to drop again, and snow arrived with some enthusiasm.

I wonder if your world is white as well?

Colour titrations

When my gal was at college doing chemistry, one of the bits of lab work she really enjoyed was titrations "the process of determining the quantity of a substance A by adding measured increments of substance B". It appealed to her sense of order and her enjoyment of methodical process, a thing she has inherited from me (though you might not think so looking at our housekeeping skills!!)

I have been doing a year's course with Christine in Studio 11 looking at colour: how colours react with each other; how to mix colours; tone, shade, saturation (intensity); all of those things that help one understand why colours do or don't work together and what their impact is on each other. It has been a very rewarding year. Our most recent exercise was looking at how mixing complimentary colours affects the saturation of the starting colour, using pre mixed liquid dye paints. I began with a vibrant green and used scarlet in various quantities to modify. It was intentionally rather unscientific, simply starting with a pure colour and mixing in small amounts of the complimentary to see where it went. We tried to keep all the mixes very close in tone, so the square looked homogenous, not entirely successful in my case as some are too dark. We created three 4x4 grids with our colour mixes, using the same pattern on each grid and leaving one square uncoloured. In this we painted a fully saturated, full strength patch of our starting colour, a much paler version of this and a full strength patch of the contrast colour. This gave us an idea of how the pure colours contrasted with those we had mixed; whether that contrast was harmonious, quiet or dynamic. 

A cool green modified with warm scarlet

Since then, I have been doing more experiments with this idea; creating greens with the warm and cool blues and yellows (royal blue/golden yellow and turquoise/acid yellow), then modifying these with warm (scarlet) and cool (magenta) reds. The warmer blue and yellow make a pretty muddy looking green, almost brown before one even starts, so there is much more brown in the top two sets, mixed with scarlet (warmest) and magenta. The cool blue and cool red sends the blends a little bit more towards grey (third mix down), a devilishly elusive colour to find. Every painted square taught me a little bit more.

Then I got into "titrating" experimentation mode. I have a wonderful little set of measuring spoons, which give me a dash, a pinch and a smidgen; respectively 1/8, 1/16 and 1/32 of a teaspoon each: brilliant for measuring out small portions of dye powder when mixing up dyes. I used the smidgen and spooned out tiny quantities of liquid dye into a mixing pot, so I knew what proportions of primaries I was mixing to get the tertiary colours

First the greens, using turquoise, royal, acid and golden. You can see the proportions carefully recorded so I know what I did in future.

Then purples

and finally the oranges

So I now have a wonderful rainbow of colours to give me at least some idea how those dyes will mix with each other. The process is, of course, dependent on my always mixing up the pure dyes with the same proportion of dye powder to liquid, but this is a pretty good guide to how they all work together, and gives me huge pleasure too. I shall take it along to my next Studio 11 class to get Christine's comments about the primary colours and what proportion of dye to liquid she uses for each. Different colours tend to be more or less dominant, so one has to adjust one's teaspoons (or smidgens) to suit.

All this mixing was, of course, much helped by music, in this case several playlists of early music and folk, set to shuffle on the iPad, singing out through my Bluetooth speaker, so I could listen for as long as the process took.

Having my converted garage space for these experiments is an enormous boon and one I am endlessly grateful for.

Autumn delights

I'm not normally a fan of red and yellow together, but these glorious dahlias and the vivid yellows and greens of the ginko behind them are giving us great pleasure at the moment

Today darling daughter and I are off to Knit and Stitch at Ally Pally, traveling up from the south coast to stay overnight so we are fresh for the fray tomorrow. We will be taking a class in something called "broomstick crochet" which I have been vaguely aware of in the past, though having no notion what it entails. 

We'll try not to spend too much ....