Flying By

I don't know where this year has gone, I really don't! Summer appears to be over for us Englishers- although to me it seems as if places like Spain and Italy have pretty much stolen our sunshine as the last week or so has been cold and miserable. I could even see my breath misting in front of me whilst waiting at the bus stop one morning, and it is noticeable how dark it is getting earlier in the evenings. Perhaps we will get some late summer sunshine in the next couple of weeks?

Things have been rather hectic over the last couple of weeks what with one thing or another. These fabulous panoramic views are from a picnic had on Saturday on our way home from Waddesdon Manor. We stopped off at another National Trust site called Box Hill, based on this viewpoint over the North Downs, as a place to stop and have a picnic tea. Considering the downpours and thunder storms we'd had during the day, it's amazing how clear the sky was!

Dinosaurs came to the town where I work this week. They are motion-sensored and moved and roared and blinked and everything! It was very exciting!

A hugely exciting thing for me was the arrival of a new camera!! I've plumped for a Nikon DSLR camera which came with a fabulous carry case, an extra lens, memory card, cleaning equipment.... the full works! I've been testing out the various controls and buttons and gadgets to see what I can do- do you think you notice a change in the quality of the photos? The images on the new Nikon start with the blue sky above and the below photos are mainly my testing out the various zooms in the garden.

We have such a beautiful Sunflower patch. Well, we have two patches actually but this is one of them. The poor things are looking slightly battered now as we have been experiencing a brisk breeze (which translates into 'it's been bloomin' windy!') which has caused them to bend and sway like little ballerinas. We tend not to buy special seeds for the Sunflowers, rather, Dad goes around underneath the sunflower bird feeders and picks out the little shoots, collecting them together and planting them all out in a little Sunflower nursery. It's very sweet, but definitely pays off when it produces such glorious sunny heads.

I really love the above picture! Such detail in the little water droplets. Swoon!

My stitchscape minis are coming on rather slowly. I've put this hoop down temporarily as I'm trying to crack on with my Winterberry Stitchscape which is progressing even slower as it's only being worked on during commuting and lunchtime hours, both of which have been interrupted with various things. Currently I only have a couple more layers left to do on that one and then the overlaying details, so I might be able to get back to these minis over the weekend. For now though I have four completely finished and a fifth with just the remaining branches to go until it's completion- so I'm over half way through the hoop! It will be an exciting moment to get the card backings stitched on and the little individual minis cut out and packaged.

Although they are all very similar, I've been trying to give them all their own little unique features. Generally it's the different combinations that make them look different, even though the fabrics are being treated in the same way. There are a lot of bullion knot flowers going in at the fronts of these bare, wintry trees, but I've added some fly stitches in a darker pink tone to these knots to give it a different look.

The branches are so sweet. They are made with roughly grouped straight stitches to create the branches, finished with the skinniest of little branches (using a single strand of embroidery floss)- kind of like the ones you'd use to make Snowman arms. There are no leaves on these twigs as the stitchscapes are 'set' in the deepest of Winter seasons....which doesn't explain the flowers, but perhaps they are just hardy ones?

Monday was The Mother's actual big birthday, but we had a family party on the Sunday and invited our closest relatives for a slap-up buffet tea with a selection of handmade scones and fruit tarts, along with a double tiered chocolate birthday cake complete with sparklers. We decorated the sitting room with bunting, dangly things and balloons, and the kitchen was decorated with streamers and some more dangly things- most of which are still up because The Mother likes the look of festivity (and it drags her birthday out even longer...). All of the presents went down really well and consequently there has been lots of playing with new toys all week!

I'm hoping to get back into the studio this weekend as I haven't had a proper studio Saturday for several weeks! Perhaps I might be able to finish my Winterberry stitchscape in time to mount that one up and show you the completed  piece. For now though, it is most definitely bedtime, so I will leave you with these rather cool photos which were taken whilst testing out my new toy on the moon!

Waddesdon Manor

This weekend is The Mother's birthday weekend. Basically this means that the actual event isn't until Monday but she is using it as an excuse to have an event nearly every day up until then, and has been since Thursday. Yesterday she wanted to go to Waddesdon Manor, a place we had passed coming back from holiday last year, but never made it past the car park as you have to have timed tickets into the house and there is a coach from the car park to the main buildings- the estate is gigantinormous!!! This time we had planned ahead so it was an early start for the two hour drive to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

From the car park, there are two coach stops. The first is the main house and the second is a little further down the road to the stables which house restaurants, cafes, an ice cream/waffle parlour and an animal arts exhibition. You can get a glimpse of how grand the big house is going to be from the stables, which in themselves are enormous and ornate, with intricate carvings and lots of windows. There aren't any horses there now though, and little trace that we could see of there ever being horses living there, other than the wide arched doors and water trough at one end.

After having a quick wander around and a cup of coffee, we made the (quite steep) journey up to the big house just in time for the rain to come pouring down and us to enter the hall for our timed tickets. They are quite strict about the way you enter the Manor; you cannot take any drinks in with you unless they are buried at the bottom of your bag and you promise faithfully not to retrieve them, you cannot wear any heeled shoes (with heels narrower than a postage stamp), you can only take in small bags and they must be held in front of you- but you can take photos- without flash. Which is brilliant for a blogger like me!

As is my custom when visiting interesting places, let me give you a little bit of history about the estate. Waddesdon was built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild between 1874 and 1885 as a stage setting for his lavish parties and as a background to display his enormous and varied collection of arts and possessions. The building is in the style of a French Renaissance chateau, right down to the detailing of rooms decorated with wall panels taken from Parisian houses of the 1700s. 

As the house was built and furnished almost in one go, there aren't so many pieces that have been handed down through the generations; each item has been carefully selected as the best of the best, the highest quality. There are numerous paintings of beautiful women, many of them actresses, throughout the rooms, along with chandeliers dripping thousands of glass pieces hanging from nearly every ceiling; and flowers, clocks, vases, carvings, decorative screens, amusing statues and engraved glass everywhere you look.

The Rothschild's hosted many parties for royalty, celebrities and high status families, and as such needed a lot of china sets! Several of them are on display on one of the upper floors (which you reach by going up fantastic swirling spiral staircases), from the smallest egg cup to the largest soup tureen. All parts of the vast collections have been preserved very well, and this is a continuing theme at Waddesdon- started by Alice de Rotheschild, the youngest sister of Baron Ferdinand. As the Baron died childless (his wife, Evelina, died in childbirth a year after they were married), he left the estate to Alice who had often acted as his hostess and regarded herself as the protector of Ferdinand's inheritance. She established ''Miss Alice's Rules' which are guidelines for the care and preservation of the collections which even today form the foundation for those of the National Trust.'

The Mother and I were particularly interested in these beautiful embroidered panels which must have been at least a couple of metres tall. They appeared to have been created almost entirely from different coloured bugle beads, all hand stitched with thin strands of thread couched around them for the outlines. To preserve the pieces from little sticky hands, there is a thin layer of netting across the fronts of them, but you can still get close enough to view the finer details. Such fine, intricate needlework! I couldn't even begin to think how long one panel must have taken to make, let alone the five in the room!

It had just about stopped raining for a few minutes by the time we exited the Manor (by way of the gift shop- love a good postcard!) and we wandered back down towards the stables for some lunch before returning to meander through the gardens and to see the aviary.

The aviary was build by Baron Ferdinand in 1889, in a similar style to that of trelliswork pavillions designed for gardens in Versailles, and is an absolute 'must-see' in the gardens (as it was during his time at Waddesdon). They still carry out important conservation breeding projects here as all of their birds are on the endangered species list in some way or another. Walking up around the corner to the aviary, you can hear the birds before you can see them! Lots of twittering and chirping and singing going on from nearly all of the different species hiding within the beautifully ornate cages. There are about 10 different sections in total, but it has been presented almost as one continuous line, with a beautiful covered section in the middle with a fern encrusted water feature as its centrepiece. One of the birds, the Rothschild's Mynah, is named after the second Lord Rothschild, Walter (1868-1937) 'a famous zoologist who formed the largest collection of animal and bird specimens in private hands. He displayed these in a purpose-built museum on his estate at Tring (still open today). The Rothschild mynah (Leucopsar rothershildi), a snowy white bird with a startling blue eye mask native to Bali, was named for him. Waddesdon's mascot for family activities is Mini the Mynah.'
I just about managed to catch a photo of one of these special birds, which is on the top row, second in from the right in the above montage.

Also at Waddesdon (I'm starting to sound like a tourist brochure now), you can visit the wine cellars and have a go at tasting some of the wine as the Manor represents the sole UK distribution for all Rothschild family wineries- of which there are many. I'm not a fantastic wine buff, but perhaps some of you may recognise Chateau Mouton Rothschild, or Chateau Lafite Rothschild? Essentially it boils down to lots of different types of wines being made in various Rothschild-owned vineyards, and there are around 136 different ones you can buy at Waddesdon. That's a lot of wine! The cellars are also still used by the current Lord Rothschild, who can send down for as much as he likes from his collection which houses about 13,700 bottles!

There aren't extensive formal gardens here, unlike some of the more English style country houses which have various different types of garden, some formal, some less so, some completely wild. There is one big arranged flower bed and water feature at the back of the house, stepping down onto a patio overlooking a lovely grassy area with trees and a view. This particular garden is called the Parterre, and all of the reception rooms and main bedrooms look out over it as the highlight of the formal garden, more recently restored in 1994 by Beth Rothschild (hurrah for the Beth's!). 

It is breathtaking to look at- the colours are insanely bright and bold in their swirling cross pattern. The tiered beds hold a fabulous display of different coloured plants which are re-planted twice a year, with a new design each time, and using around 110,000 individual plants!! I particularly like the hot pink colour against the cool marble of the statues dotted around- it reminds me very much of my holiday to Rome where the lighter stone buildings would often have pots of hot pink flowers on the walls, or the Spanish Steps leading up from the Piazza di Spagna which usually house a pot of bright Azaleas on each step.

You could probably visit this place over and over and still find artifacts of interest that you missed the visit before, there is just so much to look at and absorb. I would love to live closer to be able to see how the formal garden changes over the seasons and to observe the songbirds- without the pouring rain. Still, this is why I like to take so many photographs during my visits to places. You can spend a long time looking around a room, and think you have seen everything, but when you come home and put the photographs on a computer, it is like you are re-seeing everything, and notice little details you missed the first time around. And, the best part about being a blogger, is that you create a visual, online diary that you can return to over and over again!

Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Sea

I am on holiday for a couple of days this week, which is marvelous as I have been struck with a cold/sore throat/runny nose ailment and being in an office at work really wasn't all that appealing- especially answering the phone without a voice! So it is something of a blessing that on my first day off, the weather was smiling down on me with beautiful sunshine making me feel heaps better as I hopped on the bus to Brighton for a bit of retail and seaside therapy.

Once I'd completed my shopping in the centre of town, I wandered down towards the beach, popping into a cafe for a takeaway coffee and sandwich before plonking myself and my bags down, straight onto the hot pebbles. You have to be a little wary of the Seagulls in Brighton- they are well known for their sandwich nabbing habits, but luckily they weren't that interested in me and I could enjoy my delicious Caesar chicken and bacon roll in relative peace.

They are building a wind farm just off the coast of Brighton and you can see the platforms and giant cranes out on the horizon line, busily putting in the new turbines. I know a lot of people don't agree with these and consider that they spoil the view, but actually I rather like them. In terms of creating energy, I much prefer the idea of some turbines out at sea rather than burning fossil fuels which create all manner of environmental problems, and, after a couple of years, these will just become another part of the coastline- rather like a new block of flats, or the i360 which has just been installed on the beach.

The sea is fascinating isn't it? It's one of the great wonders of the world, to be respected and admired. It can be calm and violent, playful and dangerous, fun and scary. It is unpredictable and uncontrollable, yet is entirely necessary towards the cycle of life. There are areas of it that are so deep and hold such mystery that we may never reach its depths, and will probably never find out all of it's secrets. I love watching the sea horses race in and out, listen to the gentle roar of waves frothing against the pebbles and hear the washed stones tumble over each other in the drag of the water as it retreats towards the wider ocean.

After sitting and soaking in the sunshine for a little while, I wandered onwards, and outwards along Brighton Pier. It wasn't all that busy considering that it is half term here and a beautifully sunny day, which was rather a lovely surprise.

I have a bit of a love/hate thing with the pier. I love that it takes you out over the water so that you can look back at the seafront and have such wonderful views of the cliffs and coastline in one direction, looking out towards the endless blue sea in the other direction.
I hate that you can see through the planks that make up the floor of the pier to the water below. I have a real thing about being able to see through floors, or floating steps that have no back to them. My knees lock and my legs go stiff and I have to really force myself to walk like a normal person, trying to convince myself that no one else has these fears and that it is highly unlikely that the planks should crack and send me plummeting down into the water below. It is quite irrational and I have to order my legs to work against their will, walking, if possible, on the filled in parts of the floor put in for those in wheelchairs or with buggies. I have been on this pier many times, and it still gets me, every single time!

Along the side of the Palace Arcade, one of the big buildings at the centre of the pier, crammed full of different arcade games, are the most amazing stained glass windows. I haven't really paid a lot of attention to them before, but they reminded me of glass stitchscapes! They depict local scenes, from the pier itself, to the Seven Sisters cliffs (with customary Seagull), and the Brighton Pavilion. There are many others all along the outside of the arcade but these were my favourite ones. Aren't they lovely?

Whilst I was taking photos of the old pier, I suddenly became aware of this cheeky chap who sidled towards me whilst my attention was elsewhere. He seemed to almost be asking for his photo to be taken and I was more than happy to oblige. Smile Mr Seagull!

It was a beautiful day and I returned home full of salty air and sunshiny smiles. Just what the doctor ordered I think!