There is beauty in every journey …
… in every story …
… in pain and grief …
… in strength and courage …
… and in the spaces in between.
There is beauty in friendship …
… in connection …
… in hearing and seeing.
Beauty sits at the heart of life …
… in the midst of it all …
… it is with us.
For all the women and for their deeply beautiful stories.
This is the post I prepared to upload last Friday ~ before our wifi started to misbehave ~ we now have a new router … it is sitting in it’s box in the dining room! It has been a busy busy week for both Mr P and me, and the window of opportunity to swap the routers is yet to present itself … so I am hoping the dodgy one allows enough cyber waves to reach my remote laptop so that I can finally get this post to you!
It has been a little while, and here are some of the places I have been since I was last here …
~ at the sewing machine ~
~ walking the land ~
~ at the flower stall ~
I have some fabric baskets in the shop, some have sold already …
I have stitched up a prototype cross body bag which looks fab …
I have an heard from another gallery who wish to have some of my bags and baskets …
I have made an apron by special request … and have been pacing the floor awaiting the delivery of cotton webbing tape to make ties for said apron …
I have been pulling fabric off the shelves and mixing and matching it for new stitchy projects …
Yes, I have been busy … and it is all good … until, following a delightful wedding last Friday I suddenly found myself exhausted … you know, flaked out, wiped out, fit to drop, pooped!
And so I stopped, and realised that it was the first time I had stopped since the beginning of April … I had been ticking off day after April day without stopping. And I noticed that in trying to set up a business from home it is very easy to never take a day off. And so I switched off the computer, put away the sewing machine and took myself for a walk – that walk up above down the beautiful woodland lane … an old favourite of a walk … which ended with a cold cider in a pub garden, because it was probably the first day this year that it has been warm enough for a pub garden. And it was glorious.
Perhaps I will do the same this weekend!
Wishing you a restful and renewing weekend, whatever you may find yourself doing!
It seems I can’t do everything ~ although, secretly, I do believe that with an extra three days in each week, I would come close!
So my blog has been abandoned for over a week ~ the lemon loves facebook page is sitting idle ~ my sewing machine experienced an unprecedented ten consecutive days of neglect ~ and my camera has a backlog of more than a months worth of unedited photos … my heart gets a little nervous about all of these things …
… however, my nephew came to stay over for two whole nights ~ some long-loved friends rented a nearby holiday let for the week ~ a much delayed mate-date eventually came to fruition ~ I squeezed in some extra hours at work ~ and yesterday I caught up with one of my favourite girls for some brunch and a woodland walk … and it has been marvellous!
The past eleven days have been full of family, friends and food; laughter, love and friendship; woodlands, hilltops, streams, sticks, mud …
… and even a peep of Spring.
And now … I have two bags to complete stitching, some baskets to make, photographs to edit and stock to photograph and upload to my shop …
… one step at a time, keeping an eye on the bright side all the way!
After our trip to Lancashire, we detoured on the way home to Crosby. For years we have wanted to see Antony Gormley’s installation, Another Place on the beach at Crosby.
We arrived at high tide … a muddy whipped up sea, grey skied, cold to the bone kind of day … and there, head and shoulders facing the force of the waves stood an iron man … silent against the churn of the water …
… we waited for the tide to turn, watching gulls circle, daily runners and dog walkers brace against the wind, grey against grey as dull clouds slid across the sky …
… and then we walked, promenading above the beach, pulling scarves higher, hoods lower … and stepping down onto the dark damp sand, we were among them …
… the men who stare … solid, sturdy, sure … an army of Canutes …
…defying the tide …
… watching over the distant mountains of North Wales, the docks of Liverpool, the passage of time …
… some, marked by humans, jumped on by dogs, whipped, battered and scorched by nature …
… as the journeys of life pass by, day by day by season by year … the iron men stand, silently still, and present.
Gentle faced …
… and deep in sea, and sand, and the debris of life …
… as the tide rolls out and in and calms and storms in its rhythm … as the gulls and wading birds squawk and scuttle and flitter … as the dogs and children bounce and bark and bound … and the walkers pause and stare alongside and behind … there is a mark that some things stay, a constancy, an anchor, a deeply rooted surety to their presence. Here, and now, and tomorrow.
When new tides and new light will bring change to that which is the same.
Last week we took a little trip up the M6 to the lovely town of Lancaster ~ to deliver a freshly stitched batch of baskets to Gallery 23, the exhibition space above the wonderful Arteria, a shop full of gorgeousness if ever there was one!
I was a little anxious ~ never having done anything like this before, and still feeling very much like a learner in the whole ‘making things’ world ~ but I was welcomed so enthusiastically that all my fears fell away (thank you to Sharon). These and other baskets, and a few of my bags are now awaiting the Exhibition launch on Wednesday evening …
… how exciting is that!
Whilst in Lancashire, we took some time to explore and this is what we found …
… a peaceful, mirror-like canal, home to swans, moorhens, ducks, grebes and narrow boats …
… far-reaching views of the mountains of Cumbria from Morcambe …
… the beauty of light over the Lune estuary, fading sunlight, crisp air, the evening call of wading birds, the distant baaing of lambs …
… the glory of a sunset at Conder Green …
… a beautiful two days indeed!
A special feel good friday celebration this week ~ as I have finally completed the quilt I started over twelve months ago!! Oh yes! A big ta-dah moment indeed!
I have been following a quilt block tutorial by Jeni at In Color Order ~ she posted instructions for one block each month, throughout the year, so that all twelve blocks could be stitched together to make a completed quilt! And I am quite impressed with myself that I managed to keep up with it and to actually finish the quilt properly!
So here it is ~ in all its completed glory!
I chose to use up the remaining print fabrics as sashing around each of the blocks … I have noticed that people often use white which gives a lovely clean and fresh look … but I was inspired by this quilt on flickr to use colours, and I love the brightness it brings to the finished quilt.
For the reverse I used one of my favourite vintage sheets …
… which has a beautiful soft feel to it.
You can see on the picture above that I kept the quilting to a minimum … using tramlines horizontally and vertically … this is partly because I am still very much a learner … but also … I like to feel some movement in the fabrics of a finished quilt, I find that some very decorative quilting is so dense that you kind of lose the feeling of layers … maybe that’s the point … but I just like it this way!
You can see the quilted tramlines on the front in these pictures …
I am especially pleased with the binding … I adapted a really helpful tutorial from Petit Design Co I found that using a double layer of fabric has given the binding a density and weight which is very pleasing … and machine stitching it meant that I was able to bind it in an afternoon … my previous hand stitched binding on a much smaller quilt took me about two months!!
There is still so much for me to learn in the world of quilting ~ skills to hone ~ techniques to perfect … and I am sure many experienced quilters will see nothing but faults in this one … but it is my third completed quilt, and with each one I finish I see progress. And that is a good thing.
So there it is! And it is all mine! Completed and beautiful.
And a few other little highlights of the week include …
~ a lovely snow-dusted woodland walk with a favourite friend ~
~ two … yes, two dinners and a lunch cooked by friends last weekend ~
~ BBC Radio … so much variety … I am loving it ~
~ watching Wallander on DVD under a blanket in front of the fire while it is snowing outside … perfect cold weather viewing ~
~ eccles cakes … made for winter ~
and
~ Pinterest … you can find me here ~
Wishing you all weekend full of good things and shining lights!
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