Palace Green Pavilion Arts and Crafts Week

Monday the 1st August sees the start of the second Taster of the Arts and Crafts week at Palace Green Pavilion, Berwick upon Tweed.  Following on from the success of last year's event the programme has been extended and kicks off with a craft fair and demonstrations on Monday followed by a host of workshops where you can learn to make robots, jewellery and even fancy knickers!


Hopefully see you there!

Day 4

 The first ranunculus in bloom!  So exciting to watch them come from these beautiful buds, going to plant hundreds in the hope we can have some at our wedding.

Day 3

Driving home from a Crossing Borders bbq, a proper Summer's evening.

Day 2

When we moved I thought about taking a photo a day to document our first year in Scotland, however, with the chaos of moving it did not happen!  So, inspired by Lee May Foster-Wilson's (of Bonbi Forest fame) Project 29 I am aiming to take at least one photograph a day during my year of being 30.  My birthday photos (grr to not taking photos of R and I prettied up for dinner!) are day one so this post brings you day 2. . .

Detail from beautiful David Austin Rose box which we found sitting by the front door after the AA man dropped us off.  Much cheer, thank you Lynne!

Farewell leggy lilac, thanks for flowering once! R entering stage left ready to pounce and rip it out!

There will be a range of photos from the mundane to the beautiful, carefully edited or fresh and blurry from a camera phone.  I hope it will be an interesting record for me and insight into the goings on here for you.  I doubt I will post each image daily but more likely in weekly posts and I'll create a flickr set to keep them all together.  So far there is a distinct garden and flower focus to the photographs I've taken already, well I am learning!

Cutting out a new border by the garages, this is very much a 'before' shot!

Hope you enjoy the year! Stick around, there should be some good ones early June 2012, just saying!

My Thirtieth Birthday

It looked a bit like this . . .

Ahem.


It started so well with cards, gifts, a wondrous frolic on the beach and some excellent pottery and glass finds.  Then on the way home the Fiat beast broke down.  Obviously feeling her age she wasn't in the mood for starting so we were rescued by a nice AA man.  Have to say the AA people are brilliant, very calming on the phone and I was very impressed.


So our afternoon plans of cake making, Tour de France viewing, Johnson visiting didn't quite happen.  R and I did make it out for a splendid curry and an evening stroll led us back to the beach for a mighty bit of driftwood we spotted earlier.  


I'll bring you pictures of my gifts to see just how much I was spoiled, thank you everybody! xo

Ode to My Twenties

Driving home earlier today a song came on which reminded me of great friends, dancing in flip flops and proper summer time. This got me thinking of all the tunes which rocked my twenties and thus I bring you a musical ode to the decade that was my twenties!

• Girl from Mars - Ash.  By the time I'd hit my twenties I was just about over the horrendous homesickness of leaving Northern Ireland and venturing into my second year at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.  You can guarantee that pretty much anywhere in the world if you play Ash you will get people from Northern Ireland on the dance floor and my cord jacket twin and I were most definitely there.

• Last Night - The Strokes.  More Aberystwyth dancing.  Downstairs at The Bay.

• Hear You Me - Jimmy Eat World.  "I never said thank you for that".  

• Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead.  

• Last Goodbye - Jeff Buckley.  I could select any Jeff Buckley song but have gone for this one as we had to leave university and I wasn't quite prepared for how sad that was. I still love you all!

• Star, Star - The Frames.  Went to see The Frames with my brother and fell massively in love with their music.  Was so moved when my brother phoned me from a later gig so I could hear this.  Yes, I cried!  And black and white, vignetted video, yes please and thank you.

• All My Life - Foo Fighters.  Unfulfilling post university jobs, "done, done and I'm on to the next one".

• Strange Religion - Mark Lanegan. Long, long hours on PGCE, "just keep driving".

• Modern World - Wolf Parade. "I'm not in love with the modern world".

• Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  The fabulous Karen O helped me run many a mile around Lichfield!  Maps is still one of my favourites.

• The Blower's Daughter - Damien Rice.

• Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old-Girl - Broken Social Scene.  Again I could pick so many of their songs but watching my own classes change over the school year meant this song went round my head in a loop. For months.  

• River Man - Nick Drake.  Beautiful man.

• Gin Soaked Boy - The Divine Comedy.  Another lot from Northern Ireland who have been in my life for years.  This song has always been a favourite and now sticks out as being a track R and I played very loudly driving through Wales the summer after we had left full time teaching, very liberating!

• Rivers Run - Karine Polwart, with Steven Polwart and Inge Thomson.  Introduced to Karine Polwart's music by the wonderful man I will be marrying next year.  In return I introduced him to . . . 

• People Have Names - Juliet Turner, who has accompanied me since those early Summer Madness days.  Would love to hear more from Juliet but wish her every success with Speech Therapy work.

• Amelie - La Valse D'Amelie - Yan Tierson and Orchestra.  Deliberately not linked to moving image, you must watch the film, it is fully splendid.

• Snow is Gone - Josh Ritter.  

• Charlie Darwin - The Low Anthem. 

• One Day Like This - Elbow.

• To Go Home - M Ward.  Discovered M Ward, again thanks to my brother, after we'd moved to Scotland and he is a constant in my ear when I'm working.
• In the Wee Small Hours - Ben Webster and Oscar Peterson.

This soundtrack is getting huge!  I am quite sure I'll be back to edit and add even more, am thinking Sigur Ros, REM, TV on the Radio, Tori Amos, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire and The Killers, who inspired this retrospective!

It is difficult to select just one track, sigh!  Hope you discover something new to enjoy.  

DEC East Africa Crisis Appeal July 2011

Please help the 10 million lives at risk in East Africa by donating to the Disasters Emergency Committee.   


Thank you.

The Found Gallery, Dunbar

Last weekend a beautiful new gallery opened on the High Street in Dunbar.

Look closely . . . left window, oh yes it's a Rich Johnson original!

I can assure you The Found Gallery is beautiful as we visited yesterday to replace one of R's paintings which sold on the opening day, yay!

There are so many splendid pieces within and owners Amy Christie and Simon Glover offer a warm welcome to a gallery of work they should be justly proud of.  The vibrant paintings in the back corner shown above are by Siobhan O'Hehir whose work I first saw at the Crossing Borders Gallery, Paxton House.  On my day working their last month I spent a lot of time looking up close at her work (fret not, my nose did not, at any point, make contact with canvas!) and the textures achieved with wax and paint are mesmerizing.  

Lace textured porcelain jugs by Stephanie Earl.

Simon Glover and Rich Johnson, The Found Gallery, Dunbar

A marvelous mooch around Dunbar followed and, as you may tell by the fact that I have left the house on a non work related venture, I have finished the marking work at last!  Free time is amazing, in the last day and a half I have weeded and planted in the garden, cycled and wandered, scraped, sanded and oiled the garden benches.  Am I ever glad that's marking done for this year!

Green Festival

Last weekend was the Borders Green Festival: hot, sunny, bright, chilled, cheerful and fun!  Well the Sunday was, Saturday was a bit quieter and I was a bit grumpy, but on both days I had the company of my lovely holidaying parents and their nutty-terrified-of-people dogs!

Highlights of the weekend were the egg and onion rolls and picnic joy supplied by my Mum, watching little toddlers stare under my stall when the breeze lifted the table cloth to reveal the snoozing hounds, chatting with a load of people on Sunday and the mighty Dull Fudds!

They, along with a whole host of musical talent rocked and, even though most band members remained headless from the vantage point of my stall, it made for a very entertaining weekend!