ABOUT TIME! I know.

A new short shift for my TVR and a rare birthday in Oxford (not at RBG Kew)Hi everyone,I meant to post this ages ago!You know me...lol...life gets in the way.As a matter of fact, so did a certain orange maniac.Can you believe it? On the one day I go into London and visit Kew...the one day which has happened every year for the past 15 years, the orange one comes to town.Nevermind the though of tainting my special day, the traffic getting into and out of London was enough for me to back out of my tradition.So we went into Oxford instead.The first place we stopped in was my most favourite store Scriptum.Scriptum is so amazingly beautiful. It's like a little jewel box of papers, inks, pens, beautiful journals, vintage books and every other kind of old world library fancy your little heart desires.After having spent a very long time there, we headed off to lunch at our friend Will's restaurant The Vaults Garden Cafe . This is an amazing place in the old vaults under St Mary's church. Will makes the most delicious organic food.After lunch and a lovely chat with Will, we went to the science museum to see the ancientThen off to the Ashmolean Museum of art and archeology in a huge building with five floors to explore. You could easily spend days and days there and still not discover everything there is to see.Actually, the reason I wanted to come here today is because on the third floor the Ashmolean has special exhibits which they change every few months. Right now they have a large and beautiful exhibit called America's Cool Modernism, and it features early 20th-century modernists. There was a no photo policy :( but there is a small link here with a little video from the Ashmolean site.I couldn't help it. I bought the book with all the paintings on exhibit. It's just so inspirational.In other news, I'm back in my TVR.Man, I love this car!However, it does have its challenges.One was the old and clumsy shift which took all my strength to push it down and wrench it into reverse.So this spring I bought a bespoke short shift and Robert and I installed it.Out with the old!and in with the new.That's better. Now it feels like a racing car.I took it for a test drive and I love it to pieces. So much easier to shift.(I must admit to feeling a bit silly when I put it into first instead of third because of the very short distance between them and tried to drive off in a sexy yeah-I'm-all-that-in-my-hot-car sort of way in front of the local village gas station crew, and the car goes "splutter, clunk, clunk", you tend to find first gear really quickly after that! LOLAnd then Robbie did the sweetest thing.I took off the bespoke silver top of my gear shift because it had the previous owner's initials on it and was thinking of what I wanted to replace it with, when R made me a disk made from a real Williams Formula 1 car Inconel exhaust, which has actually been in an F1 race and that's why it changed to all those rainbow colours.Then he stamped out a beautiful scrolled V freehand with a pin punch.Lucky girl.That's me.

June catch-up, oh yeah, we have a dog!

This is Ruby the red bone coon hound.Our littles named her.She's not exactly my dog, or Chloe's or Kerstin's (whose inspiration is the reason for Ruby), she is a collective family dog.She's a puppy. A bit wild, a bit uncontrollable, a chaser, tree-er and a loud bayer, a swimmer, a destroyer of dog toys, a snaffler of cat food, a beggar, a digger, and a big snuggler, and, we love her to death. With solutions offered at www.ipetcompanion.net she will never be left at home alone.She wants to be in the middle of everything we do.Especially in the middle of beds.We now have a new tradition of mornings at the dog park where we've met a bunch of new, lovely people and their dogs.We are also really guilty of getting to know our new friends as, Bill, Veronica, "Shadow's owner", "Bella's owner" "Tamaku's owner...Now I'm not capable of committing to owning a dog because of my commitment to this lifestyle, but I'm happy to say that as a collective family dog, Ruby fits right in.Best of both worlds.

Hello from Sunday night...finally!

Hello everyone, I'm back in England.Which may seem like a strange thing, because if you read my posts, it looks like I never left!I did leave England for almost 2 months, but the day I left, my computer left me.That is to say that the hard drive on my pc packed it in.Just like that.The black screen of death.So the past two months have been a bit of a nightmare trying to recover data, trying to see if my old PC (still under warranty) is fixable or replaceable, and getting a new pc for the meantime as it became apparent that the company who made my old pc would take their time, (and need gentle encouragement in the form of an all-out rant on social media by my brilliant SIL), for me to get any recourse.In the meantime, I've been back to Vancouver, became a family dog owner, went to see our little ones in Kelowna...twice, had a garage sale, taught my last journal course before my summer break, collected millions of photos....and had no computer and no Photoshop to share.So, while this is where I am today, I do have a second pc that now has Photoshop, and I will share a sort of back and forth mix of posts, but for now, I'm back in Oxfordshire five fields away from my river.The earth is sun-scorched.I think I got here just in the nick of time to save parts of my garden.But the river is beautiful.I've been walking the jet lag off and my most favourite walk is the Thames right here.It's such a Wind in the Willows area.Any minute it feels like Mr Toad could come paddling by.As a matter of fact, each time I get close to the water, I frighten some creature which immediately splooshes in.In the fields here is a pill box from WWII, looking now more like a relic from some tiny castle rather than a strategic military bunker erected in uncertain times.On the river is a large flock of geese.These guys tend to fly over the cottage later on in the summer.The day is hot, but finally I come to my destination.Today I wanted to come sit under this foot bridge.Those cement footholds are perfect for sitting on and dangling your feet in the cool water.To my left is a metalic green-blue damselfly.He flutters around after some prey or to ward off other damselflies and returns to his perch again and again.On the right, the river bends some reeds which give the stillness a small bubbling sound.I stayed for a few minutes just taking it all in, and then turned back for home.By the time I walked down the field, the geese were fed up wih doging boats and waddled up on the shore.I don't blame them.Even though the river is quieter than normal, there still is a lot of activity.I realised that everyone just might be indoors watching the Fifa World Cup when I walked past this narrow boat and heard a "YESSS!" and a "WHAAAHOOO!", and glanced inside to see the brightly lit screen of the TV.LOL,Back down the river, back home to the cottage and about to send some more posts your way.

Bluebell heaven

You know, it's pretty rare for me to get here at the turning point of the seasons, but this year I managed just that.Four weeks ago, the trees were bare and the ground covered with frost, and today suddenly it's practically summer!One thing about a warm British spring are bluebell woods.Do you guys know about British bluebells?They're slightly more delicate than the typical Spanish garden variety and must be protected in the woods because the Spanish variety is invasive.Anyway, I asked Robert for a day out wherever there are bluebell woods and he took me to his childhood village Stoke Row.We set off in my TVR, I drove there and got to Stoke Row just in time for lunch.We found the Cherry Tree pub and parked up.Pretty car!Robert was really happy to be back in Stoke Row and I loved that he kept telling me stories of his childhood and of the people who lived there.After lunch, we parked up the TVR on the village green and got on our walking shoes.This is R's childhood home, The Oak. He stripped back the paint on the Tudor beams himself and that dark building beside The Oak was his father's surgery.So we walked past The Oak and into the beech woods.The beech woods are so amazing. It feels like Robin Hood and his band of merry men could come out from behind any tree.Or possibly fairies and goblins and elves could be living in any little nook.Soon we got to a greener part of the forest and I was starting to get more excited about bluebells.All around us bracken was just starting to unfurl.Bracken is so huge and so beautiful when fully grown.And then, we came upon the first little clump under a beech tree.And then a few more.And then great swathes of them!I've never seen anything like that!The whole forest floor covered in bluebells!I was in bluebell heaven.Too soon it was time to go.Actually, R did ask if he should leave me there and head off to our friend's alone...lol.Alright, alright, I'm coming.We jumped in my TVR and hooned out of Stoke Row, past the bluebell woods and off into the afternoon.

Adieu April showers, bring on the May flowers!

Hi everyone,This was going to be a hello from Sunday night post, but then I didn't think I had much to say (past the car boot sale on Sunday) and then I thought that maybe I wanted Monday to finish up some art to show you and that turned to Tuesday...and there you are!Typical me.Do you remember last post when I was at the Burford garden center?I fell in love with a few books, but they cost about $60 Canadian dollars each, so I looked for them on the UK Amazon where they were only about $15 each and I ordered two of them.They are the most gorgeous books. Complete house porn!I could live in each and every farmhouse in the Farmhouse book and not change a thing, (except for one which is decked out in purple and black Goth. The Goth would have to go,) and the second book has such stunning photography that each page is more gorgeous than the next.My sublimation printing is coming along really well and I'm getting the hang of the material.So far I've figured out that I love the blending of the dyes wet on wet in a semi-controlled manner, and I like a little sharper outline.I've also figured out that I love overlapping the prints for a deeper effect than I could ever get with paints.A few days ago I decided to deconstruct some flowers and try to print them back together.I got four flower petals printed and something else came up.But today I managed to finish this little piece of art.I painted more flower petals today and printed them on.It's always a bit deceptive to see the colours painted as opposed to how the colours turn out when sublimated, but I'm getting used to it.Here is my deconstructed flowers piece.I really like it.This is the first piece...after about seven...where I think I'm onto a style I like.In other art news, I ordered some oil based printing inks and I love, LOVE them to pieces.There may not be any going back to water-based inks for me!The downside is that the print takes a full three days for the ink to dry, so printing with oil-based inks will be a slow process.I also ordered three vintage piano rolls from player pianos and one of them I designated for practice.I carved this rather large moth from lino and printed it on the music rolls.There we are!I love it.When this idea comes together it will be a scroll depiction of the peppered moth turning from a white with black mottling moth to an almost black moth thru the pollution of the industrial revolution, back to a whiter moth post-revolution. Darwin's natural selection in art.I think I will incorporate some graphics and drawings on the scroll too.On Sunday I went to the first car boot sale of the season.I had so much fun running around the three rows. It was a small boot sale because it was just so darn cold and the wind chill made it even colder and the ever-present rain clouds kept threatening, but the reality was that an F1 race was on Sunday afternoon, and that just left 45 minutes for me to run around the boot sale if I wanted to get home in time for the start.And I sure did! It was one of the best races we've seen! Complete mayhem.Anyway, I did find some treasures and only spent about $11.First is this beautiful teapot.It's a vintage Aston Pottery teapot and I love to collect Aston pottery, (the bespoke potters in Aston village very close to us.) I have a whole bird series of teacups which will look lovely with this teapot. And, it has cowslips on it...which are growing all over the hedgerows and meadows right now. I love them.I bought this hand-hewn wooden bowl and five stone eggs about the size of goose eggs.I love crystals and stones and I love hand carved wood of all kinds.This little bowl needs a good cleaning and polishing and moisturizing with some lovely bee's wax, and it needs a little gold to fill a small hole in its side. A sort of kintsugi Veronica style.And the last thing I got at the boot sale are these two large burlap pillows. I loved them! I couldn't help it.Rule Britannia...or something like that. :DHappy May Day friends. I hope May brings you flowers in your little corner of the old globe.

Buying an apple tree

Hi everyone,I was very excited today because today was the day we decided to buy a replacement apple tree for the one we had to take down last year to make way for the carport.Buying an apple tree is serious stuff for me because this is the ONE apple tree we can have in the garden, so we took some time to chose the one we wanted.First, we went to our closest garden center Frosts Farm, and we had a cup of tea and a brownie and sat for a while with our apple book and I explained a little about malling rootstocks to Robbie so he understood the choices and could be in on the decision.After looking at the selection of apple trees, we decided that Frosts didn't have a tree which would grow tall enough for us, but did have a great deal on 2 for 1 dahlias! I also needed a new pair of my favourite leather gauntlet gardening gloves, so I got those too.So we drove off to my favourite garden center Burford.We went straight to the apple trees and found our tree.We decided on a Braeburn apple on an M106 rootstock which will grow the height we want it to.Whew, when you only can buy the one tree! That's a big decision.Then I tried to pass up the other great deals on offer!But I did need to look around, (and garden twine, I definitely needed garden twine), so we parked up our tree and had a lovely walk inside the store.(you can just see our apple tree peeping up above the jasmine hoops)In our hood, there is a lot of spare turf off-cuts from the lawn which is being put into the new housing development and I was wondering if it might work to grab the off-cuts, turn them upside down, pile them into a mound, or into a barrel, and plant potatoes in that somehow.Has anyone done that? I've heard of it before.I think I might try.Oh swoon!Look at these amazing secateurs and gardening tools.And, for anyone needing some pest extermination work, there's a Dalek for that.I fell in love with this beautiful heart shaped trowel.I also fell in love with the potting bench the tools are on!There's my twine.Grabbed one.Now let's look around the store some more.This place is more than a garden center. It's a home, gift, beauty, antique, restaurant, deli, wine, toy, garden center.And they tend to have unusual things which I haven't seen other places.Look at those beautiful, multicoloured lights. They seem to be made from hand-blown bottles all bound up together. And those shiny velvet ribbon spools!I'd buy them just to have them around to admire and touch.These guys!This might be silly, but I'd love three of them just sitting like sculptures in the front hall.Some of the fabrics and cushions here are amazing.Handwoven and embroidered throws, kilim rugs, hand-dipped candles...And the colours!I love them.The throw, hung here on the wall like a tapestry, was a printed throw but really beautiful too. I love that whole feel of old botanical illustrations come to life.Also love the fox doormat.Here in the outdoor section is my dream apple storage cabinet for when my apple tree starts producing enough apples that we can store them up for winter, and my dream, hand-forged firepit for those late autumn evenings under the apple tree.Sigh.But too soon it was time to pay for the tree and twine and take our new baby tree home.I think I might have to make some time to visit again.

Hello from Sunday night, and a field walking, car showing me!

Hello everybody,Well, this is a turn-up for the books.Oxfordshire seems to have gone from winter to summer overnight.The weather turned and suddenly we have highs of 26 degrees, full-on summer dress weather, and I didn't pack for that...lol.But the fields are so tempting that, heat or no heat, I'm walking across them almost every day.As I walk I see the village children enjoying their regular after-school activity.And I have a chance to check in with our neighbours to see what's new.Along the ditches, the yellow flag irises have doubled in height in the past two days.And there are millions of dandelions everywhere.So many that I didn't feel guilty for picking some and twisting them into a dandelion crown.It only takes minutes but it leaves you with yellow hands...lol.(tutorial is here)So I put it on and continued my walk.Within minutes I was being circled by one or two of those huge flying grape bumblebees.They followed me and buzzed around me in great circles for a couple fields.I tried to get a photo for you but they were too fast for me. I managed to get a photo of a bumblebee bum! :DSunday Robert and I jumped into my TVR and hooned X country to the Bister Heritage Sunday Scramble; a thrice-yearly event held in an old WWII airfield.Since we were driving a heritage car, we were sent to the show grounds instead of the filed parking lots.We looked around for other TVRs and found the TVR Club area and parked up there.Most of the cars were modern TVRs and mine was the only one of two vintage cars there.We looked around the massive show area and headed into the complex of buildings.This is my favourite part of this car show.I love that all the buildings and airplane hangers are open and various companies set up displays for their engineering or selling trades.Some of the more valuable cars are housed in the hangers too.You never know what you can find.Here is a Datsun like my son has. I took some photos for him.Here is one of my favourite cars ever; a Jag E type!I've been threatening Robbie with a new project. Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted a car like Mr Toad from Wind in the Willows.So I always look around for the best "Toad" car I can see, and I come back to these.They are Alvis cars from the mid 20s.And this one is it.This beautiful, soft grey with black two seater, convertible, little dickie seat for the huge pot of margaurites and picknic basket.This one is perfect.And it happens to be for sale too! The only problem is that the price is 32,000 GBP, which is about $53,000 canadian! Yikes!This is one of R's favourite cars in the show. Amazing art deco details.And here is another one he loved. Except he said he wouldn't have done the roof chop.I loved this weddgie thing. No idea what it was. AC? Have to look it up.There was nothing here even remotely close to Robert's Medusa, but this one was very interesting and one-of-a-kind.So as the day wore on, we went back to my car and sat in the shade side for our lunch picnic, and some TVR people wandered by. This is our new friend Paul who we spent a good time chatting to.Then we met up with some of our Turbo mini friends, walked around some more......and by the time we were ready to go home, there were only two or three TVRs left!Anyway, that's it from our week and weekend. Hope you've all had an amazing week and are looking forward to your week ahead.It's back to work for us. Art for me and Medusa for R.Any special plans for your week ahead?Hope spring/autumn is bursting forth in abundance in your corner of the old globe. :D

Sublimation printing with disperse dyes...say that three times fast!

Hi everybody.I decided to do a little experimenting with art materials right now, and I ordered myself some disperse dyes from a dye expert manufacturer here in the UK.What these are are coloured powders which mix with water for a watercolour like consistency, or with water and a gum arabic type thickner for acrylic type consistency. Then you can paint a design on to paper and then transfer the design, using heat, onto fabric. The painted powders disperse into gas and resolidify onto the fabric. This is called sublimation.So here I am all geared up for toxicity (as per leaflet warning).To tell you the truth, I'm not sure this is any more toxic that my oil paints, but it is a complete unknown to me.And, as usual, I have very little idea of what I'm about to do.So let's just get our fingers gloves dirty, shall we?Here are 5 of the colours mixed with a little water.The leaflet didn't say how much water, but this looked pretty ok to me.The colour mix doesn't look anything like the colour it represents, so that was fun. I kept mistaking the brown for green and the blue for black. :DThe leaflet also didn't say what kind of paper, so I started off with a piece of Japanese printing paper and painted this moth on it.This paper turned out to be really absorbent!Then I tried with, (clockwise starting with the moth on the Japanese printing paper), regular, cheap sketch paper (grass), Yupo paper (woodpecker), tear-off palette paper (mushroom), and vintage onion skin paper (moth)Next step was to heat the whole thing up.Now I don't happen to have a heat press hanging around, so the trusty old iron will have to do.I also didn't have the required polyester fabric, but a piece of some synthetic white pillow case (maybe polyester or rayon or something like that) would have to do for this experiment.So, the sandwich went like this: cotton sheet on floor (not to make a mess), newsprint, painted paper, fabric, plain paper and iron on top.So look! Piece by piece I sublimated the paintings on paper onto this fabric!If you think they look a little fuzzy that's because they are! I didn't account for the wiggle caused by the iron and the edges are not sharp. Live and learn...huh? Either way, I'm super thrilled that the whole process worked.By the way, I managed to fuse several of the palette sheets together with the iron, so I may have to rethink that! LOL.And then, because there was still some time in my day, I mixed a couple of the watercolour consistency dyes with the thickner into more acrylic type consistency.Got that a little wrong too because it seems like you cannot stir a little in and try to add more without making lumps.But I still had plenty of paint to use, so...I painted a couple simple designs on paper and sublimated those.Hey, now I'm getting some more and deeper colours.There's no doubt in my mind that this was a useful and fun learning curve. And also that I'm bound to figure it all out.Right now I have visions of giant, colourful flags and curtain-like wall hangings.But maybe I'll start by getting some proper polyester material and figuring out these dyes. :DAcrylic prints are a rage these days and you could learn more about prints here.

Hello from Sunday night; which turned into Monday night again

Hi everybody,I'm in England.Just got here four days ago from a month away in Kelowna on baby and watch helping Kerstie and Adam with the girls and letting my daughter get a little extra rest.I'm happy to report that my newest little grandbaby, Nate, was born April 5th. We are all so happy.I'm also very happy baby Nate came on the 5th because I really wanted to be back in England with Robbie and for the wedding of our dear friends Nic and Sarah. Their wedding was last Saturday. It was a beautiful celebration, and we partied till far too late.But I got out for a field walk today with my camera because I wanted to show you my little corner of Oxfordshire.It's bright and alive with spring.I walked to the corner field and guess what I saw...The field is being used as a nursery!Aren't they the cutest things ever?Back past our house and into the fields.The weather's a little variable right now.One minute it's so warm that all you need is a sweater and the next minute a cold wind blows in making you grab a jacket.The hedgerows are starting to bloom.The first blossoms are on the sloes but the hawthorns and crabapples are in bud.At the end of the third field is a stand of poplars and they serve as a rookery for the crows.Boy, they're a noisy bunch.Here the pollard willow has sprouted new, fresh shoots.And I found some four-leaf clovers in the fresh growth.Good luck for me. :DIn one of the fields I found a lot of pigeon feathers all blown about.I wondered if the feathers were the result of the pigeony spring thing or if someone else got lucky...perhaps the fox of hawk.Around my fields were some signs of winter damage; like this willow.I expect it's been blown over during the winter and some parts are uprooted......but there's enough roots left for it to keep on keeping on.And that's really good because the bees are out and so are the giant bumblebees; which look like fat, black grapes.I snapped off a little hawthorn branch on my walk and spent a lovely hour at my art table drawing it in ink on some rice paper.And then I went on-line and ordered a bunch of art supplies.I can't wait to get busy with art again.How's spring springing along in your corner of the old globe?

Hello from Sunday night

Oh my gosh! You know how I watch for the first winter blooms.I'm not a fan of winters and so look for signs of spring the day after Christmas.So it's no wonder that I'm anxious for the snowdrops to start blooming. I was so excited watching them every day because the whole shade garden just outside my dining room window is full of them.Then, this!My car sunk and grew 6 inches overnight!There was only one thing to do to drown my winter blues!And then it rained and rained and rained for days.But suddenly, the sun came out.The snow was gone in the city and reduced to the mountains where it belongs, and everything started to wake up.Yesterday, was the first day that felt like a spring day.Even Morgan felt it and ventured outside for a few minutes.I did a little survey of the garden......and found the first sweet violet bud.It's a small thing, but I can't wait for the violets. I have a tiny vase which I've used for the first violet buds for a million years, so I had to get that out of storage.It's time to trim the roses too.There may have been an increase of roses in the garden.Oh boy, it might turn into a full-time job soon!The other day I got an email from Select Roses, my favourite rose grower in the Lower Mainland, who is opening March 17th, and I can't wait to pick up a new rose.There might not be room in the garden, but still...lolHow has March come in for you?It's come in like a FINANCIAL LION for me!There's been car insurance, Chloe's wisdom teeth removal operation, and a broken, therefore new, kitchen faucet all in three days.Whew!It's a good thing I grow some of my own fruits and veggies in my garden.Along with some saved seeds from last year, this year I'll plant these packets.And, speaking of bargains, I was at the local thrift and found a bird cage for $10.Now, keeping birds captive, actually any free spirits captive, is an anathema to me, but the cage has a beautiful structure and I thought it might make a great screen between me and the neighbours if I filled it with plants.It's covered in chicken wire zip tied to the original wires.But look, clipping off the chicken wire showcases the simple, elegant shape.A small tag fell off of it and as it turns out, it's a $300 ferret cage!Whoosh!Don't you love thrift store bargains?I hope the vision of birdcage turned into a plant stand works out.Somehow I think it will.Did you guys find any bargains lately?And, how's the season coming along in your little corner of the world?