Time to explore

Chris is very good at finding places that I just adore. The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum is a collection of very old buildings that have been moved here from all over the country and preserved as a complete town. The scent of woodsmoke drifted over the village, and I sat in the winter sun and sketched until bits of me went numb. 

There were people here whose whole purpose was to wander round in costume and talk to visitors. I think this might be my dream job. And I just love those timber framed buildings and interesting brickwork.



My other current obsession is fungi (see previous posts) and I was pleased to add a couple of new ones to my collection, including these Jelly Ears.

There were some charming little scenes set up in the houses, and you could imagine that any moment the gardener was going to walk through the door. It appealed to my love of preserving garden produce - the strings of onions and garlic hanging up and the neatly stacked fruits are a bit of a dream of mine really. One day I would love to have a pantry where I can store dried vegetables and jars of home made jams.

I can't help comparing life then with our lives now: rushing from one thing to the next, sending emails and writing reports, so busy that we have to do our shopping online and get it delivered. Don't get me wrong, I love the life we live and I am very lucky in so many ways. And I wouldn't change our centrally-heated home with electricity and running water for any of these cottages, however charming they are. But I think there is a lot to be said for living in harmony with the world around us, following the pattern of the seasons and using our natural resources wisely. 

I thoroughly enjoyed our morning exploring here, and I'm glad that we get the time to do things like this. Maybe modern life isn't so bad after all.

Too far gone

I think not posting anything since July qualifies me as a terrible blogger. I could go back and re-cap everything since then, but really I think it's too far gone. So instead, I shall start again with the best of intentions and see how far I get this time.

It's been warm. Really warm. Like wearing t-shirts in October warm. Which is wonderful, if slightly confusing. We finally reached the end of bee-keeping season and the girls are settling down for the winter, which means we get weekends to go off and explore and DO STUFF. Mostly, this has been going for walks, seeing lots of amazing things, and generally having a wonderful time.

The honeybees are making the most of the long autumn and stocking up for winter.

Autumn is a great time to see wildlife, and the red squirrels here made my day. You'd think that living with small fluffy animals, I wouldn't want to see more of them. But I do, oh I do. I loved noticing the differences between the squirrels and our degus, even down to the fact that the squirrels will come right up to you for food and yet it took us MONTHS to get the degus to eat out of our hands.

I don't really think of myself as a bird-watcher. But as we go out and about, I find that I always want to know what things are. What's that bird? That tree? That plant? And the more I know, the more I want to know. Which might be why I've joined so many Isle of Wight nature groups on Facebook. I want to know ALL THE THINGS.

The last few weekends have been full of wonderful things. I'm quite emotional about it really - there's so much beauty around us and I love that we have the time to enjoy it together.

I love noticing all the little details, and feeling like we're making the most of every minute of this glorious autumn. These are good days, my friend.

Stretching our legs

It's been a while since we went on a proper walk, and we certainly hadn't planned to this afternoon. But the weather was nice and we didn't have our beekeeping gear...so why not? I met Chris after work and we took a picnic lunch up to Brading Down. Lots of planes, microlights and autogyros taking advantage of the still, calm weather.

To work off some of the excess lunch we decided to stroll down, across and back up. We've done this walk before and there are always good things to be found. I didn't have my proper camera with me today but I was very grateful for my phone:

I do love bees. If I'm honest, I might love bumblebees a little bit more than honeybees. I mean, look at them! They're so cute and almost cuddly. And their ridiculous bodies that look far too big to fly...how can you not love a bumblebee? We saw so many all the way round on our walk, lots of different varieties as well which is quite pleasing. Definitely a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

Wild roses were out in bloom, and we also saw our first blackthorn. Late spring/early summer can be a tough time for honeybees to find forage as we traditionally get a 'June gap' when the early flowers stop but before the next ones blossom. But with blackthorn out already, it looks like we won't have to worry about that this year.

Chris and I have very different styles as we walk. He is very much interested in the animals and wildlife that we find, can tell what sort of bird is which and is always the first to spot something interesting like a lizard sunning itself on a leaf (we found one of those today too). I love to see all these things, but I also really love all the different plants and flowers that we see. I really want to get better at knowing what things are, and I think my next purchase is definitely going to have to be some kind of field guide to wildflowers. In the meantime, I shall settle for taking photos and identifying plants once we get home. I'm pretty sure this is the Common Spotted Orchid, but I'm happy to be corrected if anyone knows better! Quite a thrill to find as I've never seen it before, despite the 'common' in its name.

Even though we were walking on bridleways and established paths, the vegetation was so lush and overgrown that it felt as though we were exploring unknown territory. I could have easily stopped here for a long time and looked out at that landscape. I am constantly amazed by how beautiful this island is. 

Our path took us past a small farm in the middle of the woods that had peacocks - really - wandering around. And as we walked past them we noticed a kerfuffle in one of the trees nearby. As we watched, two young jackdaws emerged from their nest in the tree and took their first flight. Slightly uncertain and distinctly wobbly, they were shaky to start with and one of them even crashed into the undergrowth nearby and then had a hard time trying to extricate himself from some stinging nettles. We could hear their parents calling from the branches above, and finally a third fledgling popped out from the nest and flew precariously to a nearby branch. I was quite concerned about them, but as we watched they all seemed to get the hang of their wings and flew away. A magic moment indeed.

There was plenty more magic on our climb back up the hill: a group of four or five wrens hiding near a nest in the woodland; a baby rabbit that watched us get closer and closer before scampering to safety in the warren; and some neatly nibbled nutshells that are the sign of a dormouse - something Chris would dearly love to see. It felt good to stretch our legs and get out from the routine of Saturday beekeeping, and our efforts were definitely rewarded today.

One of those weeks

It has been a busy week, which makes me even more grateful for moments of calm. And if they are accompanied by sunshine and blue skies, even better.

I have a whole stack of pictures that I want to turn into paintings, but I'm pretty sure that if I painted those trees at that angle you'd think I'd gone crazy, right?

And in the middle of a sea of mud, a whole bed of crocuses prove that spring is on its way. February was a tough month and I am ready to welcome March now.

Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside

Continuing on the seaside theme of my last page, here are some more low tide pictures. Except these are a special low tide, when the sea goes out far enough to let people walk out to the fort and back. I've seen photos and heard people talk about it, but I've never taken part. It was definitely wetter than I expected - the water came over my knees - but well worth it and totally exhilarating.

Still in the 'using up all my stash' mode - see that green sticker with a quote on it? I think that's been on my desk for about five years. Everything else is newer than that, in varying degrees. I guess sometimes it just takes time to be inspired.

Even on a beach page, I can't escape pink and green. And glitter, it seems.

Not quite as many embellishments as the previous page, but I am still using them up. I am really enjoying pushing myself to be creative, mixing products and colours while staying true to my own style. Thanks for stopping by!

Take a deep breath and carry on

Gran was the bravest person I knew. She never complained, never grumbled about life, never faltered in her determination to carry on. I am desperately trying to follow her example but I don't think I'm doing very well. There haven't been many new sketches in my journal lately so I thought I would catch up and share some I did earlier in the summer. Happier times.

You can see this sketch in larger format here. Flickr has increased their free photo storage allowance so I can upload there again.

Endless sunshine

The mornings are colder, the skies are greyer, and the endless sunshine of summer has come to an end. I've just had a couple of weeks off work and this morning definitely had that back-to-school feeling. The problem is, I just don't feel ready for it. Can we keep summer, please?

I'm still scrapbooking pages from early summer, so I can keep the sunshine feeling for a bit longer. These photos are from July, and I've just had 400-and-something prints of the rest of our summer adventures delivered  to keep me going. I am seriously considering a simpler style of album to get all these memories recorded, maybe with some fancier pages interwoven rather like my Christmas pages. 

Hope you have some happy sunshine-y memories to keep you going through autumn!

Opposite extreme

From the largest size photo to the smallest: a 4x4 print using one of my many photos from Instagram. There are various services out there that will print your Instagram pics, but I've found the best results when I upload them into Photobox on a standard size print and trim off the edges when they arrive. Simples.

Having a smaller photo leaves me more room for embellishment, and in this case also more room for the story of our second date. It's quite a long story, and involves me getting heatstroke and passing out in the middle of a field. Fortunately for me, it didn't put him off :)

I'm all out of enamel dots at the moment, so in a moment of inspiration decided to make my own using Liquid Pearls. This is the White Opal version, and I've discovered that if you put a good fat blob on the page and then flick the back of the paper really hard, the blob flattens out to become a lovely dimensional dot. Perfect for some subtle embellishment layers.

I haven't done so much scrapbooking lately as I've been busy filling my sketchbooks. Those photos aren't going to go anywhere, though!

Big photos

I like 6x4 photos. Or, 6x4.5 if I use the default proportion on a digital camera. One or two fit nicely on a page, leaving me plenty of room to write my story or add embellishment. Printing photos at a standard size means I can get them all done in one batch, without having to think about resizing or cropping or anything complicated. Easy. The vast majority of my scrapbook pages use standard prints.

Every once in a while I take a photo that I really like and kind of want to show it off. But I am decorating-challenged (two and a half years and the walls in this house are still bare) so I print big photos and stick them in a drawer and forget about them. I had this picture from one of our walks in the spring, and decided to make the most of it. It hardly needs a scrapbook page; it's all photo. 

Tranquility - an evening walk

I haven't done a walk post in a little while. We often go for a stroll, some longer than others, and I take loads of photos. Some of them make it into scrapbook pages, and I might post one or two on Instagram. I think it's nice, though, to have all the photos in one place so that when I look back I can remember where we went and what it was like. There is a scrapbooking podcast that I  listen to (Paperclipping Roundtable) and their most recent discussion is with a woman who suffered amnesia and lost eight years of memories. Wow. I can't imagine. Without even listening to it I have started reflecting on life and how I record it. I haven't kept a paper journal for a long time, but I am considering how I can make sure I am keeping my memories safe. The idea of being 'caught-up' with scrapbooking isn't something that appeals to me as I like to craft when the mood takes me. But what about those important stories that I just haven't got round to scrapbooking yet? I need to think about that. 

Yesterday evening, we picked up some chips and a pineapple fritter (to share, I couldn't possibly eat a whole one) and drove to Gurnard seafront. We sat in the car and ate our food...why do chips always taste better outside? Then we walked slowly along the front, past the kids bringing their boats in after sailing club. Just after the boathouse, there was a turning to go up the hill and into a small wood, and a most beautiful sunset behind us.

This is where the photos start to get a bit grainy, because I only had my phone and the light was fading. Even so...the path looked so inviting, rising through lush greenery with the last of the evening sun glinting through the trees. The wood was quite dense and silent, a proper hobbit-wood and we half expected to see Frodo and Pippin sheltering in one of the secluded corners. There was lots of evidence of animal activity, but they all kept out of our way as we walked through.

Apart from this little chap! As we came out of the wood and onto the road again, Chris suddenly stopped and pointed. Whenever he does this I know it means he's seen something, and if I want to see it too then I have to keep quiet, move slowly, and try and see along his line of sight. Just how he spotted this little guy in the hedge, I have no idea. We moved so, so slowly to try and get a better view, and I really didn't think that the mouse would stay there if I took my phone out to try and take a picture. But he did. We moved closer and closer, snapping a shot with every step in the hope that one of them would come out well enough to see. By the time I got close enough to take the shot above (and there's no zoom on that, it's as it comes from the camera), I was holding my breath to try not to disturb him. I had my arm out holding the phone, and my other hand trying to fend off the branches and random insects that were doing their best to put me off. Mr Mouse, though, wasn't in the least bit bothered. He waited until we were up close and looked right at us, before turning and making his way slowly back into the depths of the hedge. Magic.

That moment is going to be a hard one to beat. I am so glad that there is that photo there to remind me, and I am so glad I've written down just how magical it was. Walking back to the car we could smell a beautiful floral scent from one of the gardens nearby, and could see the mist rolling in from the West. Beautiful.

Moments in May

Enjoying: the sight of animals and their young.

Appreciating: every blossom and flower.

Savouring: the vivid blue sky and green spring grass.

Relishing: the challenge of our first long walk in the sunshine this year - and the ice cream at the end of it.

Learning: about honeybees and becoming enchanted by them. (This camellia is in the garden where we keep our hives...it was much too busy to be taking photos while we worked on them today. Don't worry, there will be bee-related posts later).

Feeling: the sand between my toes.

Looking: forward to many more moments like this.

Have a little faith

 It felt like Spring was never going to arrive. I should have had more faith, really.

Nature is doing its thing. Slowly, but it's coming.

 Every little flower, every little bird...it's all beautiful and makes me quite emotional, actually.

There is still lots of grey and brown. Lots of bare branches. But in between there are green leaves, tiny flowers, and splashes of colour.

 The wind brought with it some beautiful blue skies and clouds that left wispy, frothy trails.

I am SO going to sketch that shed. I took more than 90 photos on this walk and any one of them would make a lovely picture.

I'm thinking maybe a large-scale canvas/ I've been in this house for two years and there still isn't anything on the walls, so these photos might be the prompt I need to change that.

Don't get me wrong, it's still cold. There was a fresh, biting wind that made my eyes water and my nose run. I was very glad to get back into the warmth of the car and eat our picnic.

But Spring is a promise. A promise of sunny days and warmth that reaches your bones. A promise of new growth, renewal and opportunity. 

Life is good.