Birthday Trip to Nymans

My birthday celebrations continued with a trip to Nymans garden. It's a National Trust property that we go to quite frequently (being members it's a great way to take Baby F out to lots of different places and poor Reece gets dragged through the gardens with me exclaiming over all of the trees and flowers and mushrooms or whatever happens to be there). 

I love to revisit these gardens at different times during the year to see how they change, and we will go in all weathers (not that Reece enjoys that so much) if I can get there. Luckily on this day the weather was really fine and warm so it was lovely to be out and about with extended family. 

Taking smalls out with us is quite eye opening as well. Baby F in particular sits in his buggy wiggling his bottom and kicking his legs and just saying 'wow' at everything, pointing at trees and birds and interesting bushes. As a parent I try and point out lots of interesting things and let him hold sticks and leaves and try to teach him to be gentle with flowers - not that it always works as he is still trying to eat everything. Sniffing is a strange thing to try and teach. 

The Hydrangeas were amazing, especially with the water droplets from recent rains lingering on the petals. 

It was dry enough to let the little ones roam around on the grass for a little bit, especially now ours bottom shuffles everywhere. He does not stay still and I'm endlessly washing trousers with little grubby patches on the bottom. 

We didn't go through the house this time (last time we went there was a chap playing the piano), focusing more on the garden and the beautiful planting. There's a new café at the back of the house in the old stables so we stopped for lunch there, sitting outside in the courtyard in the sunshine. It's such a nice place to sit. 

My absolute favourite part of Nymans is the walled garden. It's at the back of the house and has the most amazing central walkway through it with little offshoots to the edges of the garden with orchards and 'wild' bits, but the walkway is planted with incredible flowers. I took so many photos! The colours are amazing and there are lots of structural plants, some of which were taller than me - lovely blue thistles, bright pink dahlias, orange echinacea and many others I can't name. 

I don't know of a better way to end a birthday week of celebration. Keep scrolling for more delicious photos!

Adventure Days

It was my birthday in July and I managed to drag out nearly a whole week of events!! Firstly I cracked on with my Allotment Garden ATCs and discovered that plastic strawberry punnets were the way to go when choosing a clear plastic to stitch down and make the greenhouse all shiny. The plastic itself was initially stitched with long stitches to create the door frame (the door fabric stitched down first underneath), hiding the rough edges, and then I've added more long stitches around all of the edges of the plastic, and used the initial blanket stitches as new stitching points through the plastic. (If that makes sense?) Extra details for the framework of the glass house have also been added as long stitches, especially in the roof. I'm so pleased with how the long spindly plant looks now that there is a 'roof' and a frame for it to cling to!

Reece took a few days off during the week so we took Baby F out for some fun. Our first port of call was to Bluebell Railway which is a steam run line between Sheffield Park and East Grinstead, with four stations to visit in total. It was the most amazing day - there was barely anyone there and Baby F had the absolute best time! He'd never seen a steam engine before and the noise and steam and hissing and movement and chugga-chuggas just absolutely blew his mind. He quite literally waved at everything the entire day, choo-chooing at every opportunity. 

He was as good as gold on the train, sitting on the table with his nose pressed up against the glass watching the world go by. The route goes through a fairly long tunnel at one point which is pretty cool because you can see the smoke puffing past like ghosts and he was mesmerised. 

We were in a 3rd class shared carriage on the way to East Grinstead, then had a compartment to ourselves on the way back again. Excellent for bottom shuffling around. 10 out of 10, we would definitely go again!

The next day we were at Knockhatch Adventure Park. Reece and I had been given an experience voucher and one of the options was to sit in with the meerkats there and to learn about them. Ask and Jeeves (the adult meerkats, soon to be re-named!) were very sweet and the alpha female (not sure which name she had) liked to sit on our laps. They are a breeding pair and had six babies who had a penchant for shoes but mostly for the mealworms that were being thrown on the floor around us. I had thought actually that we would be feeding them but it was more of just sitting on the bench in the enclosure watching them be fed pellets, green beans, worms and carrot. Big handfuls were strewn on the floor and there would be lots of chirping and trilling, little growls from the smallest babies with the biggest attitudes protecting their newly sniffed out worm. It was really lovely to be so close to them and quite nice to have a meerkat sat on your lap. 

Back at home I am still working away on the August ATCs and have now added in my bean poles with a lovely yarn from Lamington Lass Yarns. I pondered over what to grow up them but I think beans are the only way to go really. I've made them with two strands of feather stitch with a variegated yarn and they've come out a lot lighter than I was thinking but actually I quite like it because they stand out more from the green background. There's more to be added, I'm going to put in the bean flowers because they are often that lovely bright orange colour which will pop nicely against all of that green. 

And the birthday celebrations continued - but more about that in another post I think. We are very lucky to live in an area with so much to see and do!

End of Term

We're on summer holidays here in England. It doesn't necessarily affect me because my little one isn't old enough to be in school but it means that we don't have Rainbow and Guide meetings so I get my Monday afternoons and Tuesday evenings back from volunteering as a Leader with both groups. 

For Rainbows we had our last meeting at a local wildlife reserve, Horsted Green Park, and took the girls (aged 5 - 7) for a wander to look at the different habitats. It was actually a really lovely evening; I hadn't walked around here before even though I live fairly close. It's one of those reserves built to offset the fact they have built/are building 1000 new homes on the other side of the road so it's relatively new as a place to visit. 

The ponds and waterways were a little bit brown and dry looking but this particular pond (overgrown puddle) did have water boatmen and other little watery bugs skimming across the surface. 

The grasses were absolutely stuffed full with crickets, which the Rainbows loved because they could try and catch them in their hands. There were also butterflies and bees flying around and we saw some buzzards flying overhead. 

It will be interesting to see how this reserve matures. Several years ago it was a farmed field - as were the ones on the other side of the road now covered in houses and tarmac roads - so I'm not sure whether there was an initiative to scatter around lots of wild flower seeds to encourage more varieties to grow. They've also planted little trees around the pathways so hopefully they'll grow big and tall to provide future habitats. 

Less guiding means more time stitching and I started my Allotment Garden ATCs shortly after my visit to Horsted Green. There was lots of inspiration for colours and tall plants, even an orchard. What would you include in an allotment garden? I actually roughly sketched this design to make sure that I had enough space for a greenhouse and some bean poles. I can use this sketch to make templates for the building to cut my fabric shapes from. 

I love the bottom batik fabric that I've used  - it really gives a sense of a ground surface and I like how there are splashes of that bluey/grey to match up with the sky fabric. 

At the parent's house they've had a whopping crop of leeks this year, all of which have flowered (I'm not sure whether that's meant to happen) with the most enormous purple allium flowers! Perhaps I could include some of those in my cards?

My greenhouse fabric has little grey leaves throughout to sort of hint at plants further into the structure than I would be stitching. This I've just simply blanket stitched with a single strand to hold it down but I have vague plans of layering this with a clear plastic of some kind over the top to make it shiny like real glass. 

I had to stitch my contents down first though so I have satin stitched a bench and a couple of flower pots to fill, leaving a gap at the other side for a door which will go down in a different greyish fabric later on. 

The top pot I have filled with a wild chain stitch plant. There was no planning to this plant so they are not the same, I've just gone straight in with stitching random branches using two strands. It reminds me of a Christmas Cactus! 

The bottom pot I've filled with a leggy climber plant, using a single strand of back stitch for the stems, overlapping them and working them up toward the roof of the greenhouse. Detached chain stitches are being adding at random points along the stems for the leaves, making sure to vary the angle and direction. I didn't actually plan what plants I was putting in these pots but I'm really pleased with how it's looking!!

Not A Fire Flower Stitchscape

I don't usually plan my Stitchscapes. As in, when I'm starting out I might not have an idea of the scene that I want to make, or I might just have one fabric to work a whole landscape around. Rarely something might be roughly sketched out - usually if I'm incorporating some kind of building and I have to have some kind of templates for specific shapes. 

This lack of planning also generally goes into kit designs. I do have to collect the fabrics first because I need to buy in bolts of multiple metres so I basically spend months building up a collection of fabrics and then select some to turn into a kit. The Fire Flower kit was theoretically easy to re-make because I had some of the fabrics already there, and I also had the template design to just recreate and improve but I wanted to try and change up some of the thread colours used to match the new fabrics and make things a little different. But, for this first re-draft, my winging it and seeing what happens didn't work! 

I chatted it through with The Mother at the time and we decided that there was too much sun centre and not enough rays, and the red flowers were too red and the purple, whilst nice, was perhaps too much of a contrast....it was enough to make me start again with the redesign and I'm thrilled with how it turned out, but it left me with a mostly finished Stitchscape that then looked so sad and neglected on my windowsill. 

There is nothing wrong with this design or these colours. (I never tell anybody that they are wrong and in my workshops I always say that there is no right and wrong.) It didn't have the kit qualities I wanted but there wasn't anything that I would unpick and do again. So instead I had a little fun with it!! I added extra colours in (more than I would a kit) and also added some green stems to the yellow french knots that I'd scattered between all of my detached chain stitch daisy flowers. They're a darker green than that in the print but I was using up some leftover threads and I think the contrast works well as the darkness doesn't pop so much and all of the 'popping' is done by the sun. 

I've also used up several colours of yellow and orange for the french knots on the stems over the grey lace, and added fly stitch birds over the sun rays in dark charcoal grey. 

Of course, if you purchase a Fire Flower kit, either the original or the new version, there is nothing stopping you from adding, adapting and changing the thread colours as you would like. I really try to encourage individuality and although most of my kits give you layer by layer instructions, it doesn't mean you have to follow them if you have a better idea or would like to try a different technique. 

I really like this Stitchscape, I like how the pattern of the fabric in the sun looks like a tree is growing up through the middle of it, and I like all of the colours in the daisies at the bottom. It reminds me of a wildflower meadow. 

Interestingly, the colours of red and orange and purple as a combination seem to be often used - both Fire Flowers have this colour combination in the bottom fabric, but I've not embellished the purple on either official kit. Would you have added the purple in do you think?

So, most of these stitches are the same as the kit but the stitch run down for this piece is; running stitch, couching, seed stitch, french knots, whip stitch, straight stitch, back stitch, detached chain stitch and fly stitch. 

It's currently hanging up in my hallway so I see it every time I walk through the front door so it's not such a neglected hoop any more! 

Summer Sunsets

 

In recent days the weather hasn't been brilliant for a summer month. It's been very wet and blustery and just grey, even when it's not raining. The hardest part is to know what to wear - do you take out a sunhat and sun cream in a light weight outfit, or do you pack umbrella and raincoat and wrap up against the wind. Worst of all, there's been a lot of high temperatures but rain and and an endless feeling of mugginess (I'm not sure if that's just a British thing? Where it feels hot and steamy on your skin but there isn't any sunshine to go with it?) that really messes with your wardrobe plans! And my hair.

With a little one to consider as well, we are lugging around far more than the kitchen sink! But, a few weeks ago it was nice and warm and summery, I was out on the balcony stitching and watching the great big golden orb sink behind the forest. 

Naturally I'm so far behind on my planned blog posts you are only just seeing these now. The pigs are characterful little chaps. It's a slightly larger hoop than I regularly do, to account for the scale of the pig print and, as such, they are a little bit more demanding than a smaller hoop. They didn't like being in my rucksack as a bus project and every time I lifted the folder out of the bag the fabric had gone all saggy and the edges frayed and it was crumpled and sad...so they've been upgraded to a home project where they can lounge around all day and wait for me to pick it up when I have a spare home moment rather than a bus moment. As such they aren't getting picked up that often!

That french knot section took me a LONG time to do! It's been done with a variegated thread and I'm really chuffed with it but I don't feel I've quite recovered from the number of knots that it required, all different sizes which is achieved by the number of twists around the needle (all done with 2 strands of thread). I was even more pleased to discover a hand dyed yarn by Lamington Lass Yarns in my stash cupboard which pretty much exactly matched the stranded cotton and could be couched along the top edge. Don't you just love it when that happens?

I will never tire of this view and the colours that it shows. 

When it hasn't been sunny and gloriously sunset-ted evenings, I have been finishing off my discarded initial draft of the new Fire Flower kit. Having now completed Fire Flower II, I have gone back to this sad little rejected hoop and have been injecting some love back into it. Now that I'm not so restricted by the number of threads I can use on it, I planned to fill in more sections and have a little fun. To be honest, if you purchase either of the Fire Flower kits (or any of my kits for that matter), you can also add more into them than I have instruction-ed, make it your own! 

I'll write a proper blog post about this little piece as I would with any of my completed Stitchscapes, but I thought it nicely rounded off a blog post about not very much at all.