Aurora Borealis

Do you know, in 2018 I went all the way to Iceland to see the Northern Lights - and they were rubbish! A white, barely there, mist in the sky, and a brush of green on the camera was all I came home with (obviously the holiday itself was amazing and I would love to go back, but the lights themselves were a disappointment). 

Last night (as I wrote this), I walked out of my back door at about 10pm, and was greeted with this fantastic display of bright pink in the sky! Which was actually visible to the naked eye too!! Not perhaps quite this level of pinkness, but there were definitely moving streaks of clear pink dancing around up there. I had gone outside by myself but immediately raced back inside, dragging Mr DT from his cosy spot snuggled up in bed, shoving his arms into his dressing gown and insisting he come outside with me. He wasn't quite as impressed as me (or at least pretended not to be) and didn't stay out in the cold as long, although that may have been because he didn't have shoes on and it was nippy. I even rang The Mother and got her outside her house as well!

I love the stars in these photos, they look like sprinkled fairy dust. Apparently there were quite a few shooting stars seen but I didn't see any. we are vaguely on the flight path to Gatwick airport so we did have a lot of aeroplanes circling in the distance which was quite cool through the pink haze. 

Isn't it amazing? And isn't technology amazing to be able to just snap these photos on a phone without having to change any settings at all. If they come back again I'm going to investigate what I need to do on my camera to get even clearer photos. This aurora was pink and purple, which is apparently down to nitrogen particles interacting with incoming particles. The green aurora I saw in Iceland was oxygen particles and is the more common colour to see so this is very exciting and utterly beautiful!! 

I was feeling very inspired by it the following morning and set to making my own version of the pink aurora - not that I need another project but this can be my bus project when I've finished the current one, and the Stitchscape Swap hoop I've not started yet! It was a landscape scene that needed to be immediately translated into fabric, even if the stitches don't come for a little while! 

The Courts Garden

 

Whilst on our short break away to Wiltshire, we visited The Courts Garden, another National Trust property within half an hour from the door of our holiday home. We were really lucky with our position actually because we managed to find lots to do within a short distance every day, and I think we visited at least one National Trust property every day too so it ended up being a much cheaper holiday than we'd expected - plus we were able to collect lots of embroidered badges for our camp blankets. Going away during the school holidays is always so much more expensive but with this being worked around a wedding, plus some of my family working within a school setting, we didn't have much of a choice so it was good for our bank balances to keep visiting National Trust locations. 

I'm not sure there's a hugely long or involved history for this place. It seems to have been linked to the wool mills as it is very close to Bradford-on-Avon which was a wealthy wool town in the 1700s, and one of its early owners was the builder of a cloth mill next door to it, part of which is now covered by the garden as it was later demolished. The courts part of the name came from its use as a village law court where cloth weavers could settle their problems. It's had a string of owners who have all added their own little stamp or mark on it, bits of architecture or a new garden element. Queen Mary visited at one point when it was lived in by Major and Lady Goff in the 1920s or so and I believe Lady Goff was the one who implemented all of the garden rooms that you can walk around today. 

Whatever its history, for us on the day it was a lovely place to visit. It also had the extra outdoor activities for the kids and a kind of forest school/mud kitchen/bivouac making area which they absolutely loved. We've got so many lovely photos of us and the kids so it helped us to make amazing holiday memories. 

The different garden rooms were gorgeous to look at, and I especially loved the ornate waterlily pond! The planting in general was lovely - with a kind of wildness to it so it wasn't all box hedge and straight lines but more free-flowing and natural whilst still being beautiful cultivated flowers, and the dahlias below were dinner plate sized!

My brother-in-law managed to badly break his ankle in three places about a week or so before we left for this trip and borrowed a wheelchair from a family member as he was all strapped up in a big boot. It turns out that the wheelchair really wasn't that robust and we have even more hilarious photos of him being pushed over the bridge in the below photo - I won't embarrass him by sharing them here but lets just say his facial expressions don't imply he had much confidence in my sister pushing him over the hump and down the other side. 

We spent the afternoon wandering around Bradford-on-Avon itself, although got very lost after following what we thought was an easy path to the canal and a playground that turned into a bit of an intrepid adventure through a graveyard, up steep hills and bobbly roads, across a railway line and through a load of fields. The wheelchair didn't even make it past the graveyard before they turned back, and Mr DT was ready to turn back at the railway line but we pushed on, eventually found a playground with a really old fashioned booth selling slightly bizarre flavoured ice lollies for more money than they were worth, which ended up staining the boys' skin and clothing. We ended the day slightly hot and bothered, if I recall rightly after our lovely start at The Courts garden, and didn't see the canal but it all adds to the holiday memories!!

Sunset Seascapes

The best part of our little flat is this view. It's not a huge property and it didn't tick all of our boxes when we were trying to get on the property ladder, but we decided that we could live with what it did have and make it work. This view was an absolutely unexpected bonus!! 

I think, had we lived here during the pandemic and lockdown, we would have gone slightly stir crazy but there is a fire escape balcony, which we use as our main entrance because it's so much nicer than the dark, cramped staircase off another door in an alleyway. I've added saddle pots to the balcony railings and pots around the edge and I think I've cracked the planting too as quite a lot died last year because it can be windy and stark being on the edge of a ridge. Alpines are the way to go!

Anyway, I bring this up because during the summer, the sun sets right in front of this balcony and when it gets truly hot, this is the best place to be. I love the golden sun moment and, occasionally when it turns to red, we get the most amazing deep red shadows on that side of the house. One of the best times of day to photograph Stitchscapes is when the sun is setting and the light is so warm and beautiful. 

This is a piece I started after the Sussex Stitchers workshop (in a previous blog post) as I really wanted to use that Pailettes yarn with the teeny tiny sequins, and also to experiment with the two new stitches I learnt. The fabrics are a little bit choppy but I was more interested in starting to add textures than worrying about what the fabrics looked like. 

I took this piece to work on at a craft fair I was at in Ringmer, organised by the Ringmer WI, and a lady there gave me a whole bunch of different craft flower stamens! How amazing is that? I spoke to the Ringer WI last year and gave a Stitchscape talk to them, which is how I ended up being invited to have a stand at their craft fair. We had discussed using these stamens then so when she realised I was there again she rushed home and picked them up for me. 

There were several more unusual ones but I really liked these little green stamens which have a very narrow and irregularly shaped head on them. I think some of these could be classed as 'vintage' as they have a slightly aged look to them and some of the ends are falling off but it makes them look really interesting when nestled in among rolls of furnishing tassel trimming. 

The combinations of the textures also look fabulous when silhouetted against the glowing sun. I love taking photos like this to show how three dimensional these hoops are, the glitter and sparkle of the metallics, and to see what shadows are cast.

You can see the Pailettes yarn used to edge the watery fabric running right the way across the hoop. The Sussex Stitchers lady who gave me a bit of each had two colours which work really nicely when twisted and stitched down together. I've made the rest of the water slightly glittery by adding some metallic stranded threads in a whip stitch over running or back stitches.

I've also used some 100% silk threads I was given which are much shinier than the usual Anchor stranded cottons I favour. You can see this in the Cast-on Stitches (one of my newly learned ones!) making kind of an orangey coral between the shells. Basically the stitch is a hybrid between a bullion knot and a drizzle stitch. You set the length of the stitch in the same way as a bullion knot, but rather than wrapping the thread around the needle, you 'cast-on' and make little twisted loops around the needle which then creates that extra flick and texture. I've deliberately done mine so that I've put on more cast-on loops than needed to fill the stitch gap so that they loop up and I can work them to overlap and twist around. I've seen these used to create flower petals but I was thinking more of seaweed or coral for mine. 

The silk thread is also variegated which has made it especially pretty when worked in bunches like this, although the thread is very thin so it takes a while to build up enough loops. 

The other stitch I learned was called Cup Stitch where you essentially weave a little cup shape, starting with a triangle of three stitches stitched through the fabric. Once the triangle base is in place, you come up on the inside of one of the stitches, slide your needle underneath the nearest stitch and then again to make a loop. Go through the loop and pull to tighten, then make another loop on the same stitch and pull, followed by two loops (or more depending on the size of your triangle) on each of the other two base stitches. When you get back to the beginning, you basically keep going through the top of the stitches of the previous round and can work up in a spiral as high as you like! When finished you can slide your needle down through the inside of the cup, or within the stitches themselves and gently pull the thread through so the cup stands up. 

Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to see where the loops on the previous round were so I think it will take a bit of practice (had a similar feel to crochet though), and it was definitely easier to make these stitches with a thicker thread. I've used a cotton perlé thread on these ones, also because it's a single thread rather than a stranded cotton. I wonder if you could stuff them with things, a big bead might be interesting - like a stalk eye staring at you!

This isn't finished, I've got a bit more to do on it but it's nearly there! I'm not quite happy with that top section with the cup stitches so I think I need to add something else to it, just not sure what yet. 

Cambridge Getaway :: Anglesey Abbey

We were back on the National Trust property hunt for the third day of our Cambridge birthday getaway. Wandering around Cambridge itself hadn't thrown up anything that would particularly suit a party of 11 with 3 boys under 4 years old so we resorted to our tried and tested theory that a National Trust garden works for everyone. 

Anglesey Abbey did not disappoint - what a beautiful garden it has!! It is simply stunning, and enormous. You almost felt like you were walking into different gardens each time as different walkways had different sort of themes to them. Our first area was quite windy (as in winding around not windy like the weather) and the path kept disappearing in different directions around corners, the Daffodils were wonderful and there were amazing Silver Birch trees.

But this copse of trees - I have never seen anything like it! And the photos do not do it justice. The bright purples, vivid greens and light blues were incredible against the pale silvery bark of the Birches. What amazing underplanting this was! Amazingly I managed to get photos without lots of people standing in the background (we were there fairly early) but it was possibly one of the most pictured parts I saw, everyone was gasping as they came around the last bend and saw this in front of them. I really must try and get this down into a Stitchscape somehow. 

Such delicate little Tulips - I think they were some kind of dwarf variety if I remember correctly so they were really quite short and diddy. 

Round another bend and this was equally beautiful and perhaps even more delicate! The colour of these flowers (I can't remember what they're called, some kind of Anemone maybe?) is sort of a light lilac/blue but they shone like stars on the floor of the little wood. 

The Lode Mill I believe is a functioning corn mill, having been restored to good condition by Lord Fairhaven in 1936, then restored into full working order by the Cambridgeshire Wind & Watermill Society (who knew there was such a thing?) in 1978/82. It wasn't working when we visited as I think it's under restoration again but it's always impressive to see the inner workings of mills. More interestingly for me, it seemed that the areas of the garden around it had been planted with white flowering plants so, combined with the white wood exterior of the mill, it was a wonderfully soothing and calming area to walk through just with a white and green colour scheme. I don't know if that was intentional but I was rather struck with it and the way the mill then blended so peacefully into the garden landscape. 

The Abbey itself is a very fine building, and again there are rooms open to walk through - although the upstairs wasn't available when we went as they were working on the bedrooms. It's quite a dark and almost moody or mysterious one with lots of dark heavy furniture and stone walls. I'm not sure Jacobean is my favourite style, but I thought this floral trellis decoration was really interesting! Remarkably fine details to the flowers and a lot of work in the twisty metal bits (technical term). 

In contrast to the much wilder, more free flowing gardens further away from the house, the ornate gardens close to the building were very rigid, with tight little square boxes for the plants to grow in and rigid topiary hedges. 

We'd just missed a would-have-been-spectacular Hyacinth garden as the flowers had all gone over but I can see that it would have been amazing if we'd only been a week earlier (what it looked like when we went is shown in the last image). I often wonder how close to what the gardens looked like in the building's hey day they are now, would those who lived there recognise the garden as theirs? What would they think if they saw it now? Would they approve? Possibly not with all of us wandering around out there!

Heading back toward the cafe and the exit, we decided to picnic on one of the wide areas of lawn (not the posh clipped lawns, this was a wild one) and the boys shuffled or ran around with other kids all doing the same thing. The sun was out and it was just really nice to see them playing together outside. We would definitely recommend Anglesey Abbey to anyone passing through Cambridgeshire.