Things I found while tidying the garden:

Amongst the expected pile of broken glass, beer cans and sweet wrappers I found:
Three different bits of a lock mechanism.
A large colony of woodlice.
A single, solitary bed spring.
Two pence.
Some very pretty bits of china.
A knife and fork (not a matched pair).

I feel like it's an archaeological dig, not a gardening project!

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A Short Restart, with Art

I set up this blog over a year ago, as an addition to my more ranty and emotional livejournal, with all good intentions of updating it regularly with cheery things... as you can tell, that hasn't quite gone to plan!

So here I go again... I will bravely endeavour to post more often, I promise!

I was pondering today that one of the things that I am passionate about is actually something I rarely blog about: Art.

I love art. I love that something that human hands have created for the sake of creating it can move me so much that will cry, or exclaim, or laugh, or, most often,just want to stop, and look and look and look.

Sometimes I forget this. this weekend I have been reminded of it by a tv programme: I spent saturday afternoon catching up with BBCFour's 'Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture'.
Sculpture is possibly my favourite form of art: certainly, if I had to pick a favourite artist, it'd be Henry Moore. There is something about it that stops me in my tracks more than a painting usually can.
What I hadn't realised until very recently was how wide my love of sculpture is. I recently visited the Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology, and I was absolutely awed by it. Watching this show reinforced this: so many styles, so many differences in scale, in levels of realism, and I loved so much of it.

My favourite, though, remains Henry Moore's Recumbent Figure (1938)

I got Halloween Goodies!

I took part in a ravelry swap...

Right, this is a test post...

Every time so far that I've used this app, my blog gets locked and I get an email saying the spambots think I'm not a real person. This is no fun!
I am real, I used my real money to pay for a lovely real bag in a real shop yesterday, and now I have my real knitting in it, look!



You can even see my real finger and real leg with it's real foot on the end!

Clearly, with that bag and the pink cat shoes and button hairclips, todays outfit theme is inadvertent kitsch. Oh well!

Science and knitting and cakes... Oh my!

Since I'm planning a lovely day out today of knitting group and Makerfaire at Newcastle Sciencefest, and it's a glorious bright spring day, I've decided to blog the day in photos.
So, here's the start of my day out... Busstop shadows




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New Quilt in Progress

This has been an amazingly quick quilt top to put together. I started cutting a couple of weekends ago, but didn't start with the piecing till this weekend. With a couple of hours on Friday night and about another hour today I have finished the main part of the top. I'm very pleased with it: it has a fresh, bright modern look to it, but with the oranges and ochres still has a warmth to the colourscheme. The Japanese style prints are bold without being loud, and I love the haphazard layout, the white squares and extra pieced squres in some blocks; elements which were actually borne of necessity, not design.

Now it needs borders.

Well, its been a while since my last update. the Book Illustration class was changed to an earlier time, so I've had to drop out, which is a shame, but I've had some inspiration, and collaboration, on an idea, so I'm going to work towards that.

After having nowhere near enough willpower to teach myself for almost a year, i have signed up for a class in Children's Book Illustration. It starts tomorrow, and I am quite childishly excited over it! I have packed a bag with paper and paints and pencils, and also have a dip pen and a bottle of ink, with filled me with glee, because it is a new thing.
So obviously, i am now trawling the Internet looking at inspiring things.
So far I have discovered the lovely Picture Book Illustration, and How To Be A Children's Book Illustrator, both of which look pretty and inspirational. picture-book.com is also full of images to inspire, and this looks interesting in terms of history, but right now I'm just itching to get started and wondering what our projects are going to be.

Well, I've decided to have a shiny new blog.
Here, i shall witter, and waffle, and generally talk nonsense about life, art, craft, words, and anything else that flutters across my brain.

Now, just to test the photo function, here is one of my favourite photos from 2009:

Side of Altar, Brinkburn Priory, Spring 2009