Thursday's inbox, Friday's outbox. Hopefully!

Thursday's inbox looks like Everest, if I work hard keep my mind on the job rather than the many distractions ahead of me, I may just make it to the other side of Friday's outbox! All work makes me very dull.

a bit blue

My first hydrangea of the year has bloomed. I love them simply because my Nang (grandma) loves them so much and over the years her love for them has become infectious. I will always remember planting new ones with her as a child, adding along with the soil just the right amount of measured out rusty nails to achieve her perfect blue. She always throws in an extra one for luck. Her little garden now, is still full of them, all blue and very much enjoyed!

dreaming of sleep

I have long been fascinated at the point where sleep happens. That moment when reality slips away into another place, a place of sleep, that wonderful place where the dream-time happens. A place where you are whisked off into other worlds, where you stand at the top of high towers or the ever reoccurring dream where the tap starts dripping the river starts rising or the sea engulfs you, at the point where you might just drown, then you wake and realize it has been another night where you drowned in your dreams. Tell me, why is it that in those beautiful dreams, that you don't want to wake from, you wake at the crucial moment and the dream has gone and as hard as you might you cannot go back in to the book-marked place where you woke. I am not disclosing those dreams!

 I have sketchbooks full of people sleeping, friends, loves, people on streets, I am fascinated by the moment that we let go and sleep overtakes us and we are vulnerable and free to travel anywhere with anybody and do anything.

kiss me swiftly

I found this beautiful chair with the most horrible years and years of  brown varnish in a junk/treasure shop.  I have stripped it, painted it, re -upholstered it and hand stitched a design from one of my drawings. I am just finishing the last hand stitching bits, where all my pins are. Hopefully it will all turn out ok!

carnival

This Bank holiday was Reading carnival which I have visited for as many years as I care to mention. 
This year I walked a different way to the carnival and saw something I hadn't noticed before. The grey concrete of the tower blocks on a grey rainy day juxtaposed with the vivid colours of the carnival, seemed to make them all the more electric. Love those contrasts.

carry on regardless

The rain fell a little then the sun came out, then the rain fell a bit more, but in good old British style, people turned up in their wellies and carried on regardless to venture my open garden this weekend. Beautiful day of  sharing with friends, family, cakes and wine.

collections

I am a good thrower outer, I can be brutally un-sentimental about stuff that others would probably lynch me for throwing out, like photos, sketchbooks, old diaries, first drawings, love letters even my wedding dress. But that is how I have always been I always think if I hold on to old stuff, new things won't have space to come in to my world. This got me thinking about collecting stuff, and defining the word collecting and collections and am I a collector? I always think of collections being hidden away in cabinets or in pristine boxes untouchable objects, hidden from the world. Well outwardly some people would say I am, maybe my collection of old china all mis-matched well used and a bit chipped around the edges, my beloved collection of books, that are shared lovingly battered, torn, full of war wounds, read, loved and some held together by a wing and a prayer. Then there is my plant collecting which is off the scale from shrinking violets to an orchard I have been planting for the last 15 years. I don't define  any of these as collections, as collections for me are about collecting one thing and that particular thing only. So here as I write I start to look around and I am a collector, a collector of Vogue, Feb1987 - June2012 so far, every issue except July 1996 because I lent it to my sister, she read it in the bath and it drowned RIP. This collection is not immaculate, they are torn from, ripped, drawn on. They take up a lot of room. So why do I keep them?