April Favourites

 With the Easter break and the longer brighter evenings it seems like I was a bit more productive in April! 

My blog header is from a visit to the Shackleton gardens last May when a friend from the UK was over for a week. It was fabulous weather, we went on two day trips, and another day he and I walked to the gardens along the canal bank while C was working. 

  The plant is Nectaroscordum siculum, and the clumps of it were absolutely thronging with bees. I have some coming along nicely in pot myself this year, I can see the buds developing. 

We have a holiday weekend here and I hope to get time to cull a bulk upload from two outings last week, but here a few as a quick sampling - Farmleigh and the National Bird of Prey Centre.

Hot off the needles

As well as going to hear Sean Ronayne when I visited my sister last month, I was able to collect my Christmas present - which was a session in a pottery painting studio just round the corner from her - Potteria . It's always buzzing any time I walk past, lovely to see something creative thriving. You choose your piece, and the price for a 2 hour session is dependent on the cost of your chosen piece. You can choose six colours of glaze - so different when painting it on that the glazed tiles showing the finished colour are very necessary. It was her third time there - the first time she did a tile for beside her front door, the second time she chose a little vase and this time she did a liquid soap dispenser. I went for a butter dish as being something practical that I would enjoy using. We had our session when I visited for her birthday in January, but you have to leave your piece for firing, so it's not an instant gratification project. She collected them in early February, but I didn't get down that month.

And when finished before firing - 

I was really pleased with how it turned out - I wasn't sure about the whole thing because I don't consider myself artistic, more a crafter. But it's definitely something I'd do again. 

Very hard to capture the colour of this sweater for C - it's described as Cornflower and I guess in the photos that's a good description, but it's a little darker and in some lights has a distinct purple fleck in it. But without taking time to set a customised white balance for the camera this is the best I could do. It's an Alice Starnmore design from her book of Aran knits. I started it on the ferry last August, but it's just as well I didn't get much done while on holidays because I had cast on the wrong size, so I had to rip back about an inch and all the ribbing of the first piece.  And it was a between-times project while I worked on something for myself, which I ended up ripping because I wasn't happy with it, so while it didn't take that long to actually knit, it was a long time in the wings. The one for myself that I ripped is back on the needles again in a different design. 

March Favourites

 Later than normal - it was an exceptionally busy week in work.

Not a lot because of high stress levels, but still a few...

The lion card was for a challenge to use playing cards, and was a great chance to use (when I found it) a postcard with an image by Belinda Northcote which came slipped in with something I ordered at some stage. 

The Woodstock one was to mark the day the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano, and was inspired by the following Peanuts strips from March 1981

Life has been busy, I fitted in a trip to my sister mid-March to attend a talk by Sean Ronayne, an Irish wildlife sound-recordist. Apart from that the weather has still not been wonderful. A lot of rain and wind, although temperatures have pretty much remained above freezing. 

The photo header is from the Jardin des Plantes (botanic garden) in Paris last April. We had visited several times, possibly going back as far as our very first trip to Paris together back in the nineties, and while my sister and her husband were always full of enthusiasm for it, we never understood the attraction. Maybe we just hit the sweet spot last Spring, when we walked through it several times. 

February Favourites

 Thin on the ground  - it was a very tough and stressful month on a couple of fronts,  plus we had a houseguest for a week - no stress there.  During that week it rained and rained and rained - we were lucky to get one reasonably fine morning to go for a drive and a walk with him. Even he decided that walking along the canal towpath would be too hazardous and slippy on account of the mud and rain. 

This morning we snuck in a visit to the Botanic Gardens after doing a charity shop and Dog's Trust donation run - it was too beautiful a morning to pass up. A couple of photos attached, the album is HERE. 

This month's header, in a throwback to my first blog post ( April 22, 2009)  is magnolia - this one taken in Farmleigh last March. 

January Favourites

 not many - it's been a busy month!

The second picture was for a sgraffito challenge. I had painted some excess gold acrylic onto heavy card, so for the challenge I decided to overpaint it with a dark blue, and I swirled C's comb through it. 

A couple of nice walks - we went to Bull Island one Saturday morning because the new mudguards for my bicycle had arrived, and the shop was not far from one of the access roads to the island.  We were lucky because it was a sunny and dry day without too much wind, and with the tide on the turn coming in, we got to see a good few birds. I'll add a few photos here but there's an album which you can see by clicking HERE. The following weekend I was down with my sister for her birthday, and we went to a reserve near her. Not nearly as lucky with the weather, but I was glad I'd brought my long zoom lens because we still got to see plenty of birds - more curlew, shelduck, a few wigeon and a lot of teal. The first three photos are from Bull Island, the next ones are from Harper's Island. And the last one was taken on the way to work on Thursday - two days after the worst of the flooding. On Tuesday most of the cycle path was under water. 

This month's header is a photo from a walk along the Lee in Cork last February - a curlew and some oystercatchers in flight. 

December Favourites

 I think 2025 was a long hard year for many - so I hope 2026 brings at least some good things.

My header photo is our neighbour's lobster claw shrub which overhangs our side gate and sheds copiously into our back yard, but which is very pretty at certain times of year. The photo was on a very frosty day last January - and it looks as if we have plenty of cold weather on the way in the next couple of weeks. 

I don't actually have many December card favourites - one Christmas card, one Paul Klee-inspired card and a thank you card which will go to my sister-in-law who always hosts a family get-together a day or two after Christmas. I think this was a hard one for her, because their brother who died in September was the next in age to her, and in recent years he had always been with them on Christmas Day.

Peaceful Wishes

 For Christmas Day and the holiday season...

We visited Wild Lights in the zoo again this year, after having taken a break for a couple of years. This year they were calling the theme "Kaleidoscope", and there was a rainbow zone and then several zones all themed around different colours. There was also an underwater "tunnel" with the fish and sea creatures painted on fabric with I guess maybe some fluorescent and some interference colours, so they were very hard to capture. I'm adding just a few photos here and if you have time for an album of about 100 images (winnowed down from over 300, and given how crowded it was, that was pretty good going!) you can find it HERE.  We were lucky - there was a storm earlier in the week and that afternoon when I was cycling home from my work Christmas lunch, I saw signs saying that it had been cancelled. It was a fine dry if slightly cold evening for us, just about perfect.