June favourites

 In spite of ongoing stress and a heatwave,  June was quite a productive month.

The first two cards were for a sewing/stitches challenge. I made the Tyvek one and then remembered I had wanted to revisit a challenge where you stitched a grid on some paper with the sewing machine, then soaked it briefly in warm water and then distressed it gently between your fingers till some of the paper came out, leaving a lacy like (more or less according to your taste) panel. I'm still not happy that the purple ink I stamped the sentiment with is a totally different tone to what I used to colour the aquilegia, so I might yet stamp it again in a dark green...

The last two were for a technique challenge - I had decided last year not to feature it myself because the lovely examples I had scene all used scenic DP which is something I have very little of. But I looked through what I had and reckoned this paper pad would work well, just meaning that I had to cut my strips narrower than most people did. And with the wonders of hindsight I realised after I had made them that of course I could have just stamped a scene and used that.  Stress and tiredness are what I blame...

The header photo this month is from when I visited Ballybeg Priory in Cork with my sister last year. I thought I should have had more photos from Doneraile Park, but I know it was a very hot, sunny day and it wasn't the best for photos, and the one I would most like to have used wouldn't really work for a blog header. 

One week, two walks

 Last Saturday we picked C's niece up from the Luas terminus ( light rail network) and went for a walk in Phoenix Park before lunch. First thing we saw after parking was a group of people with large nets, and when I looked back, it was four years ago less one day that I had also seen a similar sight, and it was people looking for the young fawns to tag them.

Mallard with chicks on the bank of one of the ponds, hen tufted duck with chicks on the Quarry pond (they're hard to see, but if you zoom in you'll see the chicks are still so small that one of them is standing on a lily pad)... When C's brother and all the family were over here 20 years ago we also went for a walk in the park, and when the girls first saw the deer, they were so excited that they were finding it difficult to hold their cameras steady to take photos. So it was nice to see a large herd of deer again this time.

We've been having something of a heatwave here - not as extreme as the UK and mainland Europe, but still hot by Irish standards. Last night we went for a walk along the canal in the evening.

The foreground in the heron shot is one of the houseboats moored along the bank. There were two adult swans and four cygnets down at the 12th Lock. And walking back I spotted a hen blackbird gathering berries to bring back to the nest. 

May Favourites

 Exceedingly thin on the ground. We had a guest for a week, I was down cat-sitting for my sister for a week...

Photos are a reflection of bamboo from my sister's backyard in a dish on the kitchen counter, a mural on the wall of a derlict building across the road from her, the nectaroscordum emerging from its sheath (last month's header photo was a picture of it in full bloom in the Shackleton Gardens. I'm glad to say that ours has been attracting bees too), and a field down in county Carlow when we brought our house guest down to visit a friend. That was a rather overcast day by the time we got there, but the morning had been good enough for us to take a long and scenic route for the drive down. 

This month's blog header is a photo of The Lough in Cork, when I was visiting my sister last June while C was over in Thailand. 

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.