Breaking Ground

ANOTHER WISLEY MAGIC SEED PLANTED

I visited old friends Ginny and Colin in Lancaster yesterday and they had saved the souvenir seed I sent them to plant with me. They have an enormous well tended vegetable patch on their farm and took me to their bean patch. Here is Colin pushing in the marker.

Like Roz I have been thinking about the interchange between indoors and outdoors and considering our attempts to control and order our worlds. I have been working with leaves, this Bindweed leaf being one of them.

Soon, when Roz gets back from her trip, we will have a meeting and begin to plan how to approach our first project space in a month's time.

Yesterday I met fellow a-n blogger, Caroline Wright. It was great to see her on Eastbourne seafront at the opening of her Towner Offsite project, "Impossible Changeling". She has gilded the inside of an Eastbourne beach hut using gold leaf, and is distributing gold-leafed pebbles from her local beach in Aldeburgh, Suffolk onto Eastbourne beach.

DON'T JUST SIT THERE

Been pondering how to bring the outdoors indoors during our Project Space work time. I look round my house and see how much is influenced by the natural world. We think we live away from nature but we surround ourselves with patterns, words and shapes from plants and animals. And think of cave paintings, ancient pots, mediaeval hangings.

The tea service handed down by my mother has red roses round the rim. I plant a pea (Onward) in a jug and an unidentified seedling in the cup and saucer.

STUFFED ANOTHER BIRD

I stuffed my chaffinch at the weekend. I had to learn how to do double feather stitch. Once I got it, it was easy, but as with everything , there is trial and error. I could not work it out and then suddenly I found the way and the instructions which had seemed crazy until then, suddenly fell into place.

As Roz says in her post today, she has spent the week organising & planning for us & has covered a lot of ground. It's very exciting to be working towards something definite now, especially as the first project space week is only a very few weeks away.

I'm pleased to say that I have made progress at the studio too this week. I have built my greenhouse and have set it up as my Breaking Ground work space. I'm enjoying the strange semi-opaque cover & the zip-up door cover which, when unzipped, flaps open just enough to be able to peek inside.

Yesterday I went shopping and bought seeds, beans, compost, seed trays and pots.