Sculpture in the Garden.

We live not far from Leicester in the Midlands, and a few years ago I discovered that they have a sculpture exhibition in the Botanical Gardens each summer - we've been every year since. The sculpture above is called 'Souls'.

I love the Botanical Gardens - beautiful trees and plants, a real escape from the hustle-and-bustle of the city centre, and totally free to get in. I sometimes catch a bus there and sit with a book and read, it's like an oasis of calm in a busy life.

It's also about the only time I ever read apart from when I'm on holiday!

I also love sculpture, and particularly in the setting that a large garden offers, where you can see the light changing all the time and wander along coming across new pieces round each corner.
This year there were lots of sculptures, this one was my favourite - obviously as we're all so different we all are drawn to particular styles and make a connection with perhaps just a few pieces.

It's called 'Hold me Close', there was something about the intense expression, desperately needing to be held, that I found very powerful.


Here are a couple of others I liked.

This one is called 'Tree of Hope'.

These were beautiful transluscent coloured glass, but I couldn't get the sun to shine through them while we were there!

There's also a beautiful tranquil pool:

There's my OH sitting at the far end. There were some clever but not pretty large white flowers all made out of plastic bags, and a very bright bronze man you can just see, but I preferered the reflections.

There are always some flowers around and places to sit,


if your sons don't want to go home as soon as possible after you've dragged them round.

How to make decisions.

Roll the dice. Definitely always time for a cup of tea. A friend gave me this years ago and I found it at the back of my cupboard recently - it would be a great idea if you could personalise it for particular people.
Sadly there is no 'cake' or 'chocolate' option, or 'stroke cat' - I'll show you the others:
No thank you, I don't really iron.

What kind of shopping? Clothes/shoes shopping?

Only if it's cake.

Perhaps later.

Perhaps tomorrow, but I think cleaning's over-rated.


There doesn't seem to be one either for 'pull hair out whilst trying to re-format website', which is what I've been doing for a few weeks now. I'd been meaning to re-do photos for ages and have had a new layout sketched out for over a year, but have been battling with website-composing software versus Internet Explorer (which most people use but we don't - we use Mozilla Firefox because I live with a man who dislikes Microsoft intensely). To cut a long story short the different browsers read some website pages differently meaning that just as I thought I'd finished and published it all I re-checked it on Internet Explorer (had to use sons' computers - they came with it) and everything was all out of line. Thankfully the man who dislikes Microsoft also won't be beaten by a computer and eventually sorted it all, but it has taken SO much longer than I thought, not perfect by any means but better than it was. Wouldn't it be great to just be able to make things and have someone else do all the computer stuff and sales - I think it's rare to find crafting people who really enjoy selling, it's usually more about the making!

And so finally I've been able to get back to felting - tea cosies this week - they are drying on top of the boiler very high up. All felt, whether wool tops in plastic bags, pre-felt, wet felt, drying felt or finished felt, has to be stored on the top of cupboards out of reach of the cat - Archie is obsessed with clawing it and running off with it in his mouth. We keep finding bits under our bed which he's stolen. Last week after I'd re-photographed some of my felt notebooks I came down the next morning to find he'd chewed his way into the box they were in and taken three out and dragged one of them off into his cardboard box to play with, where I have to say it was looking very sorry for itself with puncture marks in the pages and cover. It's not for sale now. Newton never touched the felt, he just stole food - aren't cats funny, and all different?

Elsewhere the garden is still producing, though I'm waiting for my very large Brandywine tomatoes to ripen.

I started them off really early (for me) but I don't think it's been sunny enough here. The courgettes are busily trying to secretly turn into marrows while we're not looking - this photo was taken a couple of weeks ago.

The basket's now sitting in my kitchen full to the brim with much larger ones - just managed to sneak another two into our veggie mexican dinner but there are still so many.

As well as continuing to steal felt, Archie is really growing up and skips about the garden most of the day, very happy to be able to chase so many butterfies. If he runs out of energy he sleeps on the blanket in the old rabbit hutch (can you spot the feather?)

At night he curls up and mainly sleeps on our bed - he's started getting up for a little play with his feathers (if he can't find felt) in the middle of the night. He does like his feathers a lot - would you like to see where he's left them all?

Outside the back door.

By his food bowl.

By his cat tower with his other toys.

In our bedroom.

Under the bed- this one's for playing with in the middle of the night.

Of course boxes are good to play under/in too. With or without added felt.


Despite all the trouble he is, he is still of course my most favourite black cat in the whole world.

Catching up

It's been a busy time recently, as I'm sure it is for a lot of us with gardens to tend, although it's been such lovely weather it's been a joy to have a garden as well as a slight chore! Here is our bench which I've newly sanded and oiled for the first time in years, I must remember to take the time to actually sit on it now! I even have a few ripening strawberries in a hanging basket. The small white globes are IKEA solar powered lights which have been great, I ended up leaving them out all year and they even glowed gently in the winter!

And here is the best view of the vegetable patch:

from this angle it actually looks like I'm growing vegetables, because the runner beans are in the foreground, although a lot of it is just flowers. Of course flowers are very nice in a vegetable patch too and attract bees, it's just I didn't quite manage the amount of veg that I'd hoped for.
I'm trying to contend with the pigeons.

So far the score is me 2, pigeons 8 - that's how many purple sprouting brocolli plants they've stripped of leaves so far. In fact you may have to look hard to see the stripped stems on the left. I didn't realise how difficult pigeons were and am hoping to try and save the remaining plants with some netting.
Archie likes the vegetable patch too:

No prizes for guessing what he's up to here. As long as he's not doing it in the neighbours' garden I'm quite happy.

Archie has only just discovered catnip - he's literally turned his little nose up at it before but something must have clicked in his brain because yesterday he was rolling around and hugging it and squashing the little plants to pieces.

I re-planted three inside an upside-down hanging basket to protect the roots - we'll see who wins that one!

Lots to be thankful for, and yet I have to confess to struggling recently with keeping up with life in general. I have been functioning slowly but have been very, very anxious about everything and pretty low, in fact very low. There are particular reasons, but the reasons don't justify my reaction - I am one of those people who has spells of being unable to find a proper perspective on reality, cycling through anxiety and worst-case scenarios of things that probably will never happen - this is just the way some of us are I guess. I'm feeling a little better this week and am trying to take steps to keep calm, including herbal tablets which I think may be helping a bit. But a lot of us get these periods where everything is hard, I guess we must all find our way through in our own way and wise friends have advised me to use whatever 'tools' are necessary to help, even if that means seeking out a doctor's advice and possibly medication. I've fought against this a lot, as many of us do, but the sensible thing is to consider all options, you don't get a medal for struggling on, and life's too short to waste days if there's help out there. So I'll take it steady and see how it goes.

Frustratingly hard to create when you're low though - I've done bits and pieces of familiar designs but nothing new. But there will be time for that later.

Yesterday though I did do a craft fair - my first one outside - it was a good location in a local village square and they had live music and entertainment on all day so there was a very good atmosphere and thankfully lots of people. I was a bit stressed setting up because of course being in the open people just came early as there were no doors to open at a specific time!! But once I'd settled and contended with the wind lifting light felt things off my display, I did enjoy the day. This is the view I had - they even had the Town Crier ringing his bell and announcing things.


I don't know whether you can see the strange monsters opposite - you may be able to if you enlarge it -the man was selling his fantasy book and these must have been his creations, there were quite a few of them, rather odd to see a row of 6-foot aliens at a craft fair but all good fun.
Here is my stall:

lovely stripy cover and larger than I've been used to which was great. It's really nice to meet people and chat to them about felt - I was surprised that two of the most enthusiastic customers were men- one bought a felt bowl and the other was looking at things actually trying to persuade his wife she might like something (she didn't in the end but he did apologise to me and say he tried hard, which was lovely of him!)
And now onwards into another week. Hope you all have a good one.

Proper tea in the garden

I have to start by saying this is not how I live my life! I think it's the first and only time ever that I have bothered to make such an effort with a drink, I tend to whizz as quickly as possible from one thing to the next and find it difficult not to be doing something all the time, and the thought of sitting still and doing nothing makes me feel strange and fidgety. And I never bother to set the table for a cup of tea like this when it's just me, or two of us.

But then if I don't make an effort to have space in my day to stop, think and appreciate what I have got then my day is emptier, it just becomes a list of chores to get through.
So I am going to try and do this more often. It was such a beautiful afternoon and we'd had a busy day so it was lovely to stop and pick some flowers from the garden. Can you spot who suddenly came to join me, just for a fleeting moment:

Must love wallflowers as much as I do! The beautiful deep, velvety red is one of my favourites.

The china cup, saucer and milk jug are my latest e-bay purchases.

I have been wanting some proper tea cups for a while but it took me a while to find some I liked - these are apparently from the 50s and are made by Colclough, which I'd never heard of- very pale green and very pretty, and I'm not sure what's come over me really because I'm not a flowery or pretty china person at all. I bought some more today, on e-bay again, and they've got flowers on, so I must be having some kind of a personality change. Once I'd put my tablecloth on the table and laid everything out it felt like being in a cafe for tea!

The garden is at its best right now, it never quite regains this level of promise and colour again.


It's a long thin garden with a veg patch at the end and it gets progressively messier and weedier the further you get from the house. I'm busy sowing some summer-flowering annuals but it really is best in the spring and it was lovely to come down this morning to see the sun shining through the leaves and tulips.