Scilly Time 2013

Last week we were in Scilly, our traditional family holiday. What constitutes a tradition? Well, we have been going to St Martin's for twenty years, so I think that does. The very first year we stayed in the Julian's cottages opposite the Post Office General Stores in Higher Town, then had a year break and since then have been most years for a fortnight to St Martin's Campsite in Middle Town. That first year E was in a back pack and wanting to get out and toddle whenever she could, and T was walking, but with a buggy close behind so that those short tired legs could get a break. How big the island seemed, exploring with those restrictions! I don't think we ever made it to either end, and the longest expedition was over to Great Bay on the north east side (about 500 m), somewhere we routinely go for a swim before breakfast now.

Who came this year? Sixteen of us, assorted cousins and friends, two of whom are the current residents of 2CC and two of whom were "Scilly Virgins" as someone dubbed them.

Here we all are on the beach last Wednesday evening:

We don't habitually eat in this formal way on the beach, but on this occasion Little B had organised a celebratory meal,we had brought glad-rags with us, and then scavenged very successfully about the island. The table had once been a barn door, (it still had seven keyholes in), Sam's black suit came from the charity shop, as did the crystal pudding bowls and two of the champagne glasses. Most of the crockery came from the Reading Room, courtesy of Rod the postman and the charming table decorations and statuesque flower arrangements were from the dunes.

So what else did we do? We read (The Chaos Walking series, one of the Hunger Games and Far from the Tree for me) played Ticket to Ride ( and started to get a bit more sophisticated in its strategy), swam, sailed, kayaked (both round the island and to the Eastern Isles and Tresco), swam lots and TALKED. 

Birds creating an early morning sculpture from an inadequately hidden loaf.

Sosmix, a 15 year old friend of Jamie's (or several generations down?)

A  kayak resting at Great Bay on its way round St Martins.

And this is the traditional parting ceremony: a St Martin's Wave?

We often say it is the best holiday place on earth, and this year it wasn't difficult to remember why we think so. Natural beauty, the sea, good food, wonderful company, shell collecting, physical activity of all sorts, and this year SUN, which does improve all the rest. May we return many times.

Home .....

And here they are at home! Two new little cats for Coombe cottages. The only unhappy party at the moment is Kirry who is very suspicious of the chirrup noises, pattering of feet and smell of foreigners emanating from the family room. She will come around I'm sure and we are swapping scent, and associating it with food but we will just have to wait although I know she will ultimately cope OK. After all they can't be as bad as a wild Bengal.

The kittens have experimental names at the moment but I'm waiting for the human family to gravitate homeward before making final decisions. They seem to have settled immediately - the dark tortieshell is a very positive about people already and sticks her tail up and rubs in greeting, the little ginger is less positive but is trying to groom me and loves play. I have time off work to get to know them and to help Kirry cope. :) 

Kittens to cats...

Ginny, the stray ginger mum, and her four kittens have been doing amazingly well in her foster home with A and C . They have decided to give Ginny a  long term home, which is wonderful, and all the kittens have been claimed by prospective owners! They have been such a joy to watch.  They are emerging from the doddery uncoordinated phase to pouncing and climbing, and are now greeting with tails up and today we heard the first chirrup of excitement. We are still set to welcome two into our home and  we have been busily trying to get Kirry, our existing cat ready for this. As cats communicate through scent we have been 'scent swapping'. Blankets and rugs of Kirry's have come back to the house having spent a few days in the kittens nest. Initially Kirry wouldn't go near these, even when in her favourite spot on the bottom of our bed, but now she is less worried and will eat from her food bowl even when on a kitten smelling blanket!

No real names as yet but C has been calling the little ginger male Rupert and the dark tortieshell female Rosie.

June birthdays

The year is running away from me and here we are at the longest day.. The garden is at its height of fecundity so when I do get home without more work to finish I try and tame the jungle outside. So, little time for crafting. But the wonderful June birthdays at least make me sit down for a little while to go through my drawer of papers and create cards!

The green one is a print I made many many years ago on a wet day on st martins with an artist called Mandy who created amazing paper sculptures with findings from the windswept beaches. I have always wanted to emulate her one winters beach walk and will do so one day. The card and gift  of a tiny green handmade notebook is for Richard who spends his life tending trees and plants. 

The pink card is from recycled bits - a moshulu bag and Emma Bridgewater catalogue-  for my dear friend Caroline also with a notebook. This one a bought find of beautiful birch trees and line drawings. It is a wonderful time of year to have a birthday and I wish them both well. 

Introduction to Zentangles

Hello everybody! I wonder if there are any readers to this blog? If there are, please leave a comment and say hi!

Now, I've discovered a new way to "waste time." (I'm sure the zentangle community would crucify me for saying "wasting time!") I started doing general doodling a while ago, as a way to keep my mind occupied and whilst searching for inspiration online, I came across zentangles.

Source: craftthatchery

So, what is a Zentangle, and how does it differ from "just" doodling?

According to my Zentangle book, a Zentangle "turns drawings into artistic dsegin while reducing stress and focus. This relaxing process can be done anywhere and no 'artistic' talent is needed." (Sounds good to me - I can't draw to save my life!)

"Traditional zentangles...

A very simple process is part of every traditional Zentangle. 1) Make a dot in each corner of a paper tile with a pencil. Connect dots to form a basic frame. 2) Daw guideline 'strings' with the pencil. The shape can be a zigzag, swirl, X, circle of just about anything that divides the area into sections. It represents the 'golden thread' that connects all patterns and events that run through life. The lines will not be erased but become part of the design. 3) Use a black pen to draw Tangle patterns into the sections formed by the 'string.' 4) Rotate the paper tile as you fill each section with a pattern."

So, there you have it! There are "Tangles" in the book I bought, and there's a huge wealth of them online as well. And there's so much you can do with a Zentangle. You can make it into shapes...

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And you can add colour...

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As well as Tangling on different spaces/different media...

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It's all pretty inspiring and exciting stuff! Needless to say, my own attempts are not anywhere near as good as any of the above. I will post some of mine, but I thought that in order to make this post at least somewhat pretty it was important to include some "proper" zentangles! My first attempt was this:

Not anywhere near as impressive as any of the others, but it was quite fun to do. At this point, I decided to buy myself some nice new black fine-line pens, and made some more attempts. Here are some of my later attempts:

Getting a little better, although I think the thing I really need to work on is shading... I'll leave you with one final Zentangle (I think it's technically "Zentangle Inspired Art" as it isn't a "tile") - this one is a card that I sent:

Hope anyone reading this has enjoyed the introduction the world of Zentangling! I may post some more in the future, so watch this space...

E

May-June Poetry Group

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I realise we haven't posted this month's poetry group offerings, so I thought I'd do so now. These were chosen by cousin M - thank you very much!

The first is 'The Horses' by Edwin Muir, a poem that I've read a lot before and really love. M has suggested that we only learn the second part, but here is the poem in full:


Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning. 

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The second poem isn't one that I was familiar with before, a Jamaican poet called Louis Simpson, who died last year.

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As birds are fitted to the boughs
That blossom on the tree
And whisper when the south wind blows—
So was my love to me.

And still she blossoms in my mind
And whispers softly, though
The clouds are fitted to the wind,
The wind is to the snow. 

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Goats?

With the prospect of a field to fill with animals next Spring E and I visited Buttercups Goat Sanctuary near Maidenhead today. It's a small charity which appears just to house and then re-home unwanted goats.

There were around 130 in a huge field all doing goaty things. As I spent my childhood with a big white goat called Ria I adored it and we had fun looking at all the other permutations of colour size and breed.

George and Heathcliff were our favourites...and the field was full of buttercups.

New kittens on the way...

Our very precious LC (short for 'little cat') died in January. She joined us as a tiny rejected Bengal kitten, one third of the size of her litter mates at 16 weeks of age and was thought to be unlikely to survive. Against the odds she gave us nearly nine noisy and sometimes stressful years before developing an untreatable cancer. She was a huge character - very affectionate, climbed the conservatory roof and sang, had battles with squirrels, dashed up and down the garden as if jet propelled, curled up under the duvet with me and tormented Kirry our sedate tortieshell cat in rather rough play. She always greeted me with such abandonment when i came home. She is irreplaceable.

However, the house is quiet and I feel the need for more cat company. There is nothing like cats to come home to... We think Kirry will cope best and feel less challenged by kittens, especially if there are two of them to entertain each other.

So we will be joined in a couple of months by these two little ones. Ginny, their mum, has been rescued by Sam at my work and is being fostered near us. Ginny is lovely - calm and very affectionate, and the four kittens are all growing well. Their eyes are almost completely open and they are starting to 'creep' at 13 days old. J and I have chosen the little ginger male and the female with the most mottled markings on her face. Little miracles in the making.

Miracles

It's funny how you can forget about things. This is a plant that has sat, looking just green and plain, in the conservatory all year - until now, when it shoots into life again! So many pot plants don't come up two years running, so this was a nice surprise.


And, an even better one. Do you remember what I said in this post that my peace lily had never flowered again? Well, look what has happened:

It all fits in with the card that A sent me last week.

Love to all E xx

Blue

The garden at Coombe Cottages is dominated by blue at the moment. Every autumn I carefully avoid digging up all the tiny forget me not seedlings that then survive the winter to give us the most amazing display of blueness in the spring. It makes it difficult to grow vegetables as there is no room for them until June as I cannot bear to dig the blue up! But somehow forget me nots do grasp a bit of sky at this amazing time of year...
And where E is has a wood with the same blueness but in the shape of bluebells - it's nice to think of us both being bathed in blue.

Emergency Revision Kit

T is doing some very important exams, and H has her last big essay before her masters thesis coming up, so we thought that some revision rations were in order! We know they have been skimping on nice tea and good chocolate, so we collected together the following things:

Sadly, the box is not home made, but we are going to take the next one apart so we can work out how it is constructed - it shouldn't be too hard.

Along with some other bits and bobs, we hope this revision parcel will make things a little more bearable! Happy revising! A and E xx

Lino cuts

E and I treated ourselves 2 weekends ago to a couple of hours Lino cutting tuition. We went armed with hugely ambitious idea and projects which couldn't come to fruition but did learn about the basic processes a bit more. We made a couple of images for J's birthday, so hence the delay in putting them up as we didn't want him to see them! We have plans for some tremendous cards in the future but will devote a whole weekend to it rather than 2 hours.

Hopping away...

The tadpoles are now froglets and have been basking on the rocks, sitting on the top of the weed and climbing up the side of the tank over the last week. So, sadly I have had to start releasing them... They have been wonderful to watch and dominated my family-room life over the last couple of months. So, there have been 4 'batches' of 8 or 9 already released transported in little Tupperware boxes early in the mornings this week. I've had to find ponds without newts in! We have a tiny pond but it contains a well established ferocious family of great crested newts. They eat everything, which is why we don't have frogs! So my precious froglets have so far gone to a pond I dug at my mums house about 6 years ago which has a beautiful sheen of green pond weed, and to a huge secluded pond (a lake really) which belongs to some frog loving neighbours.
So here are some on their way..

More Spring

So this last weekend when I went up the hill again, by a different route, I found a lovely recently hatched egg:


It was just on the edge of the heathy bit of the hill, and bigger than a blackbird egg (no scale included, sorry) perhaps 2cm long dimension? So, any guesses as to whose it was?

And the other big news of the weekend is that our joint bid with our neighbours for the field in front of the house has been accepted. Here are some views:

The top one is from the stile into the field from our garden, and the lower one is a google map.
At the moment there are calves in it, as there are most years from March to November. The picture of a calf in the header for this blog is one of them, so you can see they are Guernseys, and some of them are Guernsey cross beef of various sorts. They arrive in late winter or pre-spring looking forlorn and mucky, and by this stage the field has done them very well, they have filled out and taken possession of its 4.5 acres. There are 12 this year. The grass has a particular cycle to do with the seasons and the growing calves: at this time of the year when it is growing fast and they are quite small, it outgrows them, so that by the end of May they are often knee and sometimes shoulder-deep in it. Then as the summer wears on it gradually gets shorter: grass grows more slowly and calves get bigger and eat more, until by the time they leave in November, the field is down to a bumpy almost tennis court in length (never quite that short: it takes sheep or horses to really make a tennis court). This year, I suspect the grass won't get as far ahead of the calves in the next few weeks as it often does: long late winter and then dry means the grass isn't growing as fast as usual.

The first swallow of 2013!

Yesterday, the first day of May, I ran up the hill early, and just before getting to Hilltop Farm, there on the telephone wire, was my first swallow of this year! Last year's was on the 18th of April, and a similar date in 2011, so I suspect s/he and mates may have been around for a while and I haven't noticed. This is my mental pattern most springs with the first swallow though: I think I must just have been missing them, and then over the next few days notice increasing numbers, which suggests that that first one really was pretty early. I didn't get a picture, so  here's a link to one of Somerset's best birding photographers

swallow | Swallow - Hirundo rustica »

WildImaging

And when I got ten metres further, I met a couple of escaped lambs noisily roaming around outside the field where their mothers and the rest of the gang were. There were less than desperate to get back in, and rather than running away, came up and bashed my shins. Not bottle lambs though, as when I offered my fingers they didn't respond.

This is another cheat photo, being in fact one of Alison's lambs from three or four years ago, taken on a very misty morning with a very damp phone. Still it looks appealing, and they were!