When It Rains It Pours

The front garden is being transformed from a gravel and grass space into a brick-paved area with pots. The digging machine is sleeping here while the work progresses. A gradual accumulation of soil and stuff over the years had brought the level up too high in the small enclosed space, and vast quantities are being removed. The two manhole covers were found about six inches down and a trench will be dug to one of them for the pipes for the new toilet and bathroom. It was easy to get the digger in and the stuff out once the brick wall at the end had been knocked down. The guys closed the space for the night, with the skip (nearly full to the brim so that the neighbours can't share too much unwanted stuff with us).

Then just after they went home, it rained. It is still raining. It will probably rain all night. The cat has been out for a swim and brought lots of mud back in through the catflap, over the back of the sofa, across the carpet and up onto the table to explore a new cardboard box for size.

It fitted. I had just brought it home from Sainsbury's to pack an ebay item in. I'm still selling things. Lace bobbins will go on for a week or two more at least. This phone came from an auction lot and so did the Davidson glass spill jar which will now wing its way to a new home in Oz. The brass unicorn came from the rubbish skips in Daventry where D's neighbour works. He polished it up and it is now off to Biggleswade.

I have been a bit busy lately and have realised that I can only handle one blog at the moment so RedUmbrella is on hold. It was the last art lesson of the course today but I shall sign up again for next year. I enjoy it so much. This was one of my efforts at painting snow...or not painting it.

Cheers Gillian

The Things You Like Keep Happening

There are still quite a few lace bobbins to sell on ebay. The whole thing has gone well from auction-purchase to ebay-sales. People who collect lace bobbins are kind, polite, honest and appreciative and I have had sales to Sweden, Denmark, Massuchusetts, Tokyo and all over England. The whole thing has been a pleasure. The remains are shown below and will be on line before christmas. It encouraged me to sell some left over stuff from the garden and that has gone well too. A woman just came and paid £5.70 for a small garden ornament that I was going to take down to the tip. The other thing occupying my leisure is my art classes. Paul Dillon at the Darlo Arts Centre does watercolour classes and I have done a couple of courses with him but this year he was offering a more-mixed media course using resist to portray things like shine, frost etc.
Resist is applied before you paint. You can use special rubber pens or oil-crayons. This pic shows the original photo we used as a guide. On the left is my interpretation on smooth paper and on the right is the same approach, colours, resists etc but used on rough but regularly textured paper.Paul had used rough paper and was demonstrating the effect shown in the top-right-hand quarter of this pic. I was so dismayed. I had set up my lesson on SMOOTH paper. I rushed back to my area and peeled a sheet of very textured paper off and carried on with two sheets at once.
This is the application of the same resists, paints and effort for each image. The first pic below is done on the rough textured paper and follows what was done in the class. There were fifteen of us and none of them were the same. The next pic is the "mistake one" done on the smooth paper. It was admired all round, and even by Paul. It does have a more dramatic look, and as many people commented a bit like batik. That was probably because I over-applied the resist but who cares. It was admired, even by the teacher!!!

On my way to art class I popped in to Watsons to put a bid on "Fridtjof of Nansen" (yes it was two volumes 1st, and folded maps were intact) which they had listed at £20-£40 est. Well I examined them and they were really good and generally in good nick. So I left a bid of £75, making the mistake that others often do, that no-one else would know what they were really worth. They sold for £80 to the other person who knew.

I'm still a bit sore about my own parsimonious approach. I must be willing to make 20% profit. I am still hooked on doubling my money.

In the meantime I'm knitting scarves and shawls from the Tunisian wool and mixing it with other stuff and I'm getting my craft space sorted.

Cheers Gillian

Gosh Still More News...and I Nearly Forgot

After visiting Durham (a couple of weeks ago!) we went on to Beamish Museum, a few miles to the north but still in County Durham http://www.beamish.org.uk/ and had a great day. It is an enormous open air museum with a farm, colliery, High Street with shops and trams, buses and trains. In fact it is difficult to describe how good it is and these photos only show a glimpse. We were there for hours and haven't finished seeing it at all. The little dogs got carried when we approached buildings and managed to get away with peeping into the indoor exhibits although normally dogs must stay outside. It was not crowded....the north-east of England is not crowded. Beamish is not cheap but is it worth every penny. Go early, stay late, take a picnic.

Mick took this pic of us celebrating a ride on a steam train. One of the earliest with no roof or seats. It was towed by a replica of "The Rocket" and coal was the fuel that got us up to 15 miles an hour. We went forward for a quarter of a mile and then came home backwards. Not sure whether the driver/engineer came to work in these really sooty clothes every day or whether he actually got that dirty in the first half hour. There are lots of people dressed-up and wandering around in costumes. In the buildings there are schoolmasters, postmistresses, farmer's wives, grocers, dentists and music teachers and outside there are farmers, labourers, wood workers/charcoal makers and transport controllers. All of them are full of information about their role and their general history. They bake bread in the coal ovens in the cottages and make clippy rugs. One of the tram conductors told some young teenagers to go and line up properly...and they did!

Yes, Di was lurking in the bottom right-hand corner of the last shot. The blokes were in the "garage" drooling over the old cars etc and we had been into the sweet shop and bought some fabulous fudge. The dear dogs had spent the day trudging along coal-dust pathways and were black up to their skirt edges, and quite weary. In fact we all were and headed off on one of the last trams to the car park.
We had a lovely picnic at lunchtime on the tables at the farm with the geese cackling loudly nearby waiting for our cast offs, and I tried to load those pics as well but the system went into meltdown
Cheers Gillian

Rain Frogs and Toads!

In this picture I hold a toad between my thumb and forefinger to show you how small a toad can be.In the north of England we have always called such small amphibia "rain frogs or rain toads" because they hatch very quickly after a bit of wet weather and seem to have come down with the rain. They don't last long.

Here he is again trying to get away. I believe they have them in Scotland too. I have even come across them in Australia.

This little one is only an inch long. Cute and harmless when small as this.
Cheers Gillian

DURHAM

Bill Bryson exhorted everybody to visit Durham in his "Notes from a Small Island". He is now Chancellor of the University and I don't think my blog post will usurp him but it is a beautiful city and well worth a visit even if you have to go out of your way.

We went, on the way to Beamish, with our visitors and didn't have enough time there but here are some views to show you what it looks like on an ordinary day. This first view is from Milburngate Bridge looking over the Wear river towards Prebends Bridge.

It was not very early in the morning but the day was calm and a mist still lingered over the river. The next view is looking through Elvet Bridge from the bank where the rowing boats are lined up for hire.

We climbed up to the Palace Green to admire the Cathedral, the Castle and the grand selection of buildings; all using the same stone and demonstrating a full range of architectural styles through the ages.

More can be seen at http://www.visitcountydurham.com/.

Cheers Gillian

WALKING ALONG HADRIAN'S WALL

We journeyed north through Corbridge and Hexham to The Wall.

The grandeur of Hadrian's Wall persists in all weathers. The general haziness seems to be part of the "mists of time". Our guests were thrilled to be there and experience "the wall" even if it wasn't as enormous as they had expected from their childhood memories of pictures in school textbooks. This impressive stretch is at Cawfields a few miles north of Haltwhistle. This is about halfway along its route from Newcastle to Carlisle.

CLARISSA CHICKEN

We were expecting guests so I ordered a large chicken from the local farm shop. We have always bought wonderful meat from there and were looking forward to a roast-dinner-feast. Clarissa weighed in at 3.3 kilos.Whether she was a retired athlete or whether my inexperience in cooking such large birds was at fault, I don't know but after the reasonably tender and very tasty breast meat was devoured, the rest of the meat refused to leave the carcass and fought valiantly against the attack of a very sharp knife.

The yorkshires were assisted with an extra spell in a very hot oven and ended up too black. The sprouts were overdone because they had to wait for the yorkshires. The parsnips could sole shoes because they had been in too long and the cauliflower cheese sauce had congealed because I had made it the day before to save time and used cheeses sauce granules. And we cannot for the life of us explain the green colour of the inner meat of the chicken. No!!! it wasn't grotty, it was a pretty pistacchio green confined to two small muscle areas. We didn't even give that to the cat.