Little book of lockdown 2

 I finished the second little book, this one inspired by walks and the garden during lockdown. If you follow my Instagram account you will have seen this patches in the making.

 The hay is being cut and baled up. Always in this field there is a ridge that can't be cut and so the wild flowers are left to prosper. My next piece of work is about this ridge.

 It was thrown up during the second world war as tank defences, or so the story goes. It is always interesting to see what flowers and when.

 Knapweed.

I love Scabious and its delicate shades of mauve.

Tiny patch book finished and same sea different boat.

 Here is the first tiny lockdown book finished. I have been rather tardy keeping my blog uptodate but with lockdown it has been hard to get on our P.C. So I will have a bit of a catch up. All these tiny patches reflect my feelings during lockdown.

 Some bright and some dark. Well there has been pros and cons of course. More local walks and time in the garden but awful news of suffering and death. So many tragedies. So I have spaced the monotone with the colourful.

 covers in progress and pinned.

 This is my collagraph for Sue Browns patchwork quilt project for lockdown. you can find her blog on the bottom of my blog list. It had to be a bird from me. They have kept me company every day.

cow parsley in stitch.

Well the weeks go by with much the same routine. lockdown is loosening a little but for us older people, much the same and fearing a second spike we won't be out that much where there are people about. Having our food and other stuff delivered or collecting it from outside the stores.
 Working on this piece at the moment. I seem awfully good at starting new pieces and hopeless at finishing them so want to get this one completed.

 Below is the other cover of the butterfly concertina book.

 This is me on my birthday with cake and sun hat tells you it was hot.

 Ending with a shot of dandelions from one of our daily walks.

artists book - butterflies.

 So life goes on in lock down. We are allowed a daily walk for exercise and I have been looking out for wildlife as usual and working in my journal. I have decided to make a little concertina book of butterflies as I spot them. Tortoiseshell above, large white below- please forgive my shadow!

 This is abeginning- butterfly with foodplant - well you can't have one without the other so nurture those weeds and nettles! This is a 6 inch meditation square I am working on too.

Wild flowers in the Field Book - finished!

 Finished the wild flower side of the Field Book. Cow parsley, cowslip, speedwell, ribwort plantain,

 vetch, pineapple mayweed ( a type of Chamomile) daisy,

 buttercup, dandelion,

red clover. There are many more but that is all the space I had!
We had a wonderful day out yesterday at Slimbridge WWT. We saw kingfishers fishing. No pictures because my camera doesn't do zoom close up but very exciting because we had really good sightings. They are nesting in a bank opposite to the kingfisher hide. The picture below is from Zeiss hide - there are avocets in the water there but you will have to take my word for it.  We also saw a spoonbill and heard a cuckoo. My cup overfloweth.

All yellow

 If you remember my winter field book, I drew the oil seed rape in leaf (looking like cabbage.)

 Now it is in flower and the enormous field has turned bright yellow - a rather acid yellow actually and bad for hay fever sufferers. A long time ago my husband kept bees and the honey they made with this turned solid almost immediately so not wonderful but abundant. Last year this field was barley so this is part of the crop rotation.

 I have been playing with patchwork fields for cards for the exhibition.

Just painted the border for this piece that I stitched last year but never finished. The sunlight on the loops cast wonderful shadows.
Happy Easter to one and all! I shall be away from her for a bit over the holidays. Thanks as always for reading my blog and leaving your comments.

winter field book finished and a new piece begun.

 The winter field book is finished ( I think.)

 As it is long these two photos show the front pages

 and the back pages.

 This is the beginning of a new slow stitch piece with threads. It is a map of the enormous field from above with a further field behind. The red stitching shows the original pack horse path, still a bridleway and official footpath. There is going to be lots of stitching on this for crop lines, unofficial paths and hedges. It is 3 layers of soft fabric - grey linen and tablecloth underneath all secondhand and well washed so delicious to stitch in its softness.

Winter Field Book Covers.

 As it has been so Spring like (back to Winter now though) I thought I should push on and finish the Winter Book. Here are the covers. This one on the front is a mini version of a larger piece I sold last year that started off this whole body of work. I was experimenting with loop stitches, which I hope to continue with, and thinking about the walks around the Enormous Field. You can spot the gates into the field (top right and top left) Bottom left there is a small tunnel in the hedge that all the walkers use. A desire path i.e. not an official footpath but one that people have created (see Robert McFarlane books for these useful landscape words)

 The other side has a tiny landscape on a scrap of indigo dyed fabric. This is the Lost Hedge in the enormous field. More about that to come in the future. I am aiming for 10 pieces to go to the Quennington exhbition but will continue with this theme of documenting our nearby fields.

I made the tie with a blue scarab beetle and a glass leaf - now I have to put it altogether.

Skomer- puffins- continued.

 The little book cover finished! So now I am working on the picture that I left half done last year. There were other dead lines to keep and I like this so much it takes courage to work on it further. Still I am determined to finish it. This is the right hand side.

 Details of the puffin in the grasses. Working on the left hand side today.

And the Autumn colours developing in the garden. This is my studio view. ( well yesterday in the sunshine!) I am so lucky.

Concertina book on Skomer.

 The front cover puffin is stitched and the pages finished on one side.

I am reliving this holiday and it is very sunny at the moment which helps because we had a really lovely day when we went to Skomer.