Rainy Days, drawing and sewing

butterfly and fern in acrylic ink

 We have had more than our fair share of rain here in Cumbria.  We didn't let it put us off going to see the Olympic torch, standing in the pouring rain everyone was soaked but the young man carrying the torch through Kendal looked very happy and it was a proud moment for him.  It was probably the wettest day ever, as last Friday put down a months rain in twenty four hours!

 During these wet days I have found some time to finally do a little sewing.  I wanted to make something useful with my hare fabric so I decided to make myself two tea towels.  I made them from natural linen and then added my lovely hare drawings in the corner.  The one sitting upright was stitched with linen thread with straight running stitches and I always love the textures it creates. You can also see my pincushion I made last year and stuffed with sheep wool I collected on the shore.  I am very happy with my handmade tea towels and enjoyed my sewing days.

You can buy this fabric with my hare drawings on it at "Peony and Sage" .

I am going to enjoy using my own handmade tea towels,  my hare drawings  look so nice.

                                  There is a link to the "Peony and Sage" website in my side bar.

I have been drawing another  butterfly I found.  It is a little damaged but then there is no wonder in this terrible weather we have been experiencing.  I put it with the piece of fern I picked which also was damaged and curling,  they just seemed to go together.   I used my acrylic inks and a paint brush and also my dip in pen for the sepia drawing of the underside of the butterfly.
I have been thinking about the swan and wondering if she is safe,  because I do have some lovely news to share.  I don't know if it is the same swan but we have a family,  two  parents and three beautiful young cygnets.  I hope they have found somewhere safe to shelter,  we had such a terrible thunder and lightening storm and heavy rain yesterday.  We saw them earlier in the week on a fine day as we took a walk on the shore.

I will leave you with this gorgeous photograph taken by my husband.  I hope you like the drawing and seeing my drawing and sewing together too.  Hope you all have a good weekend.
Thank you for the lovely comments.                                                                Millyx

Green Wings

Everywhere is very green and lush with all the rain we have had.  The tall cow parsley is shoulder height along the lanes and looking beautiful.  The fields are full of thick grass and filled with yellow buttercups and white dog daisies.  Many of the village hedgerows have been cut back as the fast growing wild flowers hang over the narrow roads and make them look even narrower and harder for cars to pass.  The verges  are home to many plants  and then when the space is needed they get cut down too.  I like to see all  the wild flowers and then the butterflies and insects are attracted to the colours and scents.  The honeysuckle and the Elderflower are both welcome sights as they are now flowering in the hedgerows.

I had been to see my sister and we wandered through her garden  I admired all her flowers which always attract beautiful butterflies.   She told me a dragonfly had flown into her conservatory on Sunday, she sees lots over the summer because of the pond and stream at the end of her garden.  Then I was given this butterfly which she had found dead in the conservatory,  as she knew I would draw it.  It is quite small and has  pale yellow and white wings with green  lines.  On the way home the wind was really picking up and it looked like a storm was heading our way.  The trees were catching the strong breeze and the little green sycamore wings were being blown off the branches.  I picked some up off the road,  and found I had collected a triple one.  So when I arrived home they ended up on my page together.... Green wings on the butterfly and green sycamore wings.

I drew the delicate butterfly in pencil first and then again a little larger to add the colours.  I painted it using a number 4 sable brush and  my acrylic inks with sap green, yellow ochre, and white to mix the colours.  I also used a little red with the sap green for the sycamore wings.

  I looked up the butterfly in Collins Butterfly Guide and it is a "Green veined white".  I hope to see lots more colourful butterflies during Summer in my sisters garden.  I will take my sketch book to show her the butterfly.   It is raining non stop here, everything will be growing and I guess it will be even greener and the grass even taller.

   I have visited a garden centre this week and bought some new plants,  two new peonies and some Lavenders,  and  geraniums for the pots at my door. I am going to be gardening when the rain stops and hopefully spend lots of summer days outside and sit and enjoy the views across the estuary.  Hope you all have a lovely weekend.
Thank you for the comments which I love to read.                                                        Millyx
  

A Celebration.

The Jubilee celebrations are now over.  In our village we had a Gala day on Monday and it was a glorious sunny day, we were so lucky as we are having lots of rain today.   I was invited to display some of my drawings as part of an exhibition of art by people who live in the village.  It was a lovely display representing children from the village school, an art group and anyone of any age who enjoys painting or drawing.  I decided to put lots of little drawings together on a large sheet to show lots of different subjects which I draw.

I added some pencil work, some using black ink  and several pieces of coloured work in crayon and paint.   It was a sample of the kind of  natural objects that I always choose to draw, things I find when I go for a walk around the village or on the shore.  There was also a glass covered display of my work showing the real items next to some of the drawings, such as shells, feathers and seeds.  It was interesting for me to see lots of my old work as I went through it  deciding which drawings to include.  I do draw the same things each year but they all look  different.  I had a spell of using mostly coloured pencils as in the feathers, then I painted with acrylic paints and now I seem to use acrylic inks.  My love of pencil drawings and black ink is also represented.  Well it is all very much  me, with feathers, red berries, shells, a moth, oak leaf and sycamore seeds...all  the things I  love to draw.  And also it shows how I like to use tags to draw on.

I hope you enjoy looking at the drawings too. The Gala was a great success, a bonfire and fireworks ended a lovely day.  I particularly was wowed by the fantastic Cake stall and chose four different cakes!  Hope you all enjoyed your celebrations and had a great weekend too what ever you were doing.
I have also been to see the new film " Snow White and the Huntsman",  which I really enjoyed from start to finish.  Some of the scenery was filmed in the Lake District and at one of the tarns,  it is a great film.
Thank you for the lovely comments.                                                              Millyx

Strawberries in the garden

It feels like Summer. We are enjoying a wonderful week of sunshine. Of course,  it has to be enjoyed while it is here!  We had a walk on the shore and for once I never collected anything to draw,  instead I just took in the views and I felt so calm and peaceful  as we slowly wandering along the shore.  We sat on the large boulders and watched the birds on the sand, the ducks sieving in the water and the oyster catchers.  I felt really happy just looking around and enjoying the moment.  I had been to my Tai chi class and I have no doubt that also was contributing to my very relaxed state.  The sunshine seems to have such a huge influence on everyone, when you wake up to a sunny day.  Then we have had the strange creeping fog each evening,   changing our view of the estuary and sometimes it totally blocks out everything.

  We have woken in the early morning to views of the fog, then it all disappears to a wonderful bright day like today.  It is fascinating to see how it changes our estuary.

   I bought some English homegrown strawberries. They smell, look and taste like strawberries, the kind of strawberries my Dad grew when I was young. I wanted to draw them, so sat at the kitchen table and started a new page in my square sketchbook. I painted it with acrylic ink and a number 3 brush.  I could smell the sweet strawberries, I was transported to Dads garden.

Then I did the pencil drawing of another large strawberry. I liked the fact that they are all different shapes and have bumps and damage marks, real strawberries as nature intended.

I was thinking about the wild strawberries we used to find when we were children. They are so tiny and yet they have such a beautiful flavour like nothing else. The scent lingers on your fingers. I found an old sketch book, the drawings of those tiny wild strawberries dated August 2004. I know they grow in August because it would be in the school holidays when we picked them and ate them each year.

And I found I had drawn a pencil one too, placed in the middle of the page.  Just a minute I have some growing in my garden, or is it too early ?

The tiny white strawberry flowers will give me some of those precious fairy strawberries later in the summer.
And then I remembered that last year I was drawing a strawberry which was used by Kimberley Bell on Fabric, at "Peony and Sage" website. (Link in my side bar)

Picture copyright of  Peony and sage....used with permission of Kimberley Bell.

So after I had finished my page,  I sat outside in the sunshine with a bowl of strawberries and ice cream, yes they were delicious. The garden looked lovely, bees were buzzing, an orange tipped butterfly flew by and lots of white butterflies. It is nearly  time for the Snake head Fritillary seed heads to ripen and I will collect the seeds, then we will cut our wild flower patch.

It is not a perfect garden, but the birds and the insects and me,  all  love it. 

 I am hoping to have lots more days sitting out in the garden eating strawberries and of course some gardening too.  Hope you like the page.

Thank you for the lovely comments which I always love reading.                             Millyx

Butterfly Love

If you follow  my blog you will know how I love butterflies. This week I have been drawing the Orange tipped butterfly.  We have had some very wet days but also some bright sunny moments when I go for a walk.  On my travels around the village I keep seeing this lovely butterfly, it settles on a flower and I creep up to look and thats fine.  The minute the camera comes out it takes flight and a hide and seek game begins, before you know it has you here there and everywhere trying to take a photograph. We did manage one along the hedgerow.

the Orange tipped butterfly in the centre of the photograph

There has been so many this year, dancing around in my garden and everywhere I go I keep seeing them.  I managed to have a really good look at the beautiful pattern on the underside of the wings on a very still butterfly which settled in my garden. I really wanted to catch it and put it in a jam jar to draw but I knew it would never let me catch it... and even if  I could,  it would just feel too cruel and I would free it.

One of my favourite oak trees

After the interest in the Oak Galls I decided to try and find some of them to show you.  I tried the large oak tree pictured above and searched the ground hoping there might be some but with no luck. Later we found such a tiny tree with several still attached to the branches.

oak galls.

The gall is a wasp which lays eggs on a bud and the grub lives inside the oak apple or gall.  The ball is formed by the secretions made by the growing wasp.  Eventually the insect grows from egg to grub to insect and I expect eats its way out. The ink is made from the galls boiled and some source of iron.  Under this small tree I picked up the two tiny oak leaves. We found a different  place where lots of young oak trees have seeded from acorns from a larger tree.  The sun was shining and I loved seeing all the red glossy lady birds as they crawled in the oak leaves.

Two of the beautiful red ladybirds in the oak leaves

 We were lucky enough to see a birds nest,  well the expert spotted it and took the picture from quite a distance, but you can see the young birds.

A little face looking out of the nest

Of course it is bluebell time, so I took a slow walk through the  flowers and enjoyed the moment.

And the scented blossom on a Crab apple tree

So here is my page in my square book of the underside of the Orange tipped butterfly and the two little oak leaves and a single red berry which I found.  The berry is in such good condition having survived the winter. I found it in the grass under the Hawthorn tree which is now covered in fresh green leaves and buds ready to burst into the white flowers which will eventually be the red berries again at Autumn time.

  And I painted a butterfly on a brown tag.

 There is something so beautiful about a butterfly.  I have captured it using my acrylic inks and a number one   sable paintbrush.   I might finish my little butterfly patchwork one day, as seen in the first picture, I printed each butterfly using  fabric paints. Hope you like my page.
As always thank you for the lovely comments which I love reading.                                           Millyx         

Sand, Sea and Shells.

We went for a walk to one of my favourite Beaches. It is a long stretch of beautiful sand , and the day was perfect with sunshine and a clear blue sky. The wind was another matter , it was icy cold! In fact it was so cold we took a different footpath to gain some shelter behind the sand dunes, a walk we had not taken before. We found the Gorse with its sweet smell of coconut, a whole area blooming with the bright yellow flowers.

The beautiful yellow gorse with the Lakeland hills in the background.

We walked past several small ponds, some had ducks on, some were full of tadpoles and we also saw tiny violets growing in the sand. We also saw sheep with young lambs grazing between the dunes. We eventually climbed to the top of the sand dunes and back onto the beach with the fantastic views down the estuary to the hills.

Looking into the estuary.

Looking across the mouth of the estuary toward Black Combe, the hill we look out on to at  my village.


                                                                                             

We now made our way back along the long sandy beach where I searched for treasures. The high tide had left a huge tide line full of seaweed, shells, feathers, ropes, rubber gloves, shoes and many other interesting objects. From this tangle I chose the two lovely shaped shells which revealed their intricate form, not normally seen in a complete shell. We saw masses of seaweed but I just chose a few tiny twisted pieces.

I would have liked the fish......but left it.

The walk back to the car.

            

Now you can see how far we have just walked along the sand.

This is where I found the tiny shells by the waters edge.

I used a special ink given to me by Patrick. He made the brown ink from Oak galls which he had collected in our village. I drew the shells with my dip in pen and the ink directly drawn onto the paper. I liked the soft quality of this ink, its an old fashioned recipe.

I wanted to show the detail and simplicity of the shells by using the fine nib and the brown  ink. It is a slow relaxing technique, dipping the pen into the ink each time you want to draw a line. I am pleased with the results.

Thank you for the lovely comments I always enjoy reading them. For those of you who would like to know, this is Walney Island Nature reserve. Hope you enjoyed the walk.                                           Milly x




ps. see photograph at bottom of  blog,  the same beach.