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.