Visit to Shirley and her family

As promised, now I have finally come to the end of my holiday posts, (breath a sigh of relief), I can tell you about our fabulous visit to Shirley.
We arrived at bout 10.30 last Tuesday and I had the whole day to look at Shirley's beautiful work while our OH's did their own thing, as they had a common interest in photography. Speaking of which, Shirley's OH very kindly took my Oh with him to a very special camera club meeting in the evening, to a bay just outside Whitby to catch the sun setting at low tide. Unfortunately for them there was no sunset that night, but my sneaky OH miraculously managed to find us a wonderful cliff top camp site the next night, and OH!! surprise, surprise it was right above this bay, so he got a second go and took loads of pics , one of which was this one.



Shirley has to be the most prolific worker I have ever met and I only had time to see her complete Egyptian series, which is amazingly diverse in its content, from bags to wall hangings and over 70 pieces in all, it was a real privilege. Both Shirley and her OH were extremely generous with their help and hospitality and we ended up spending the night in their caravan. Not before I had a full explore of Shirley's workroom and quizzed her continuously about all the amazing things she has to play with. There were so many things to explore and discuss we could have taken a week over it :-)

I hope that maybe one day soon they may venture into our neck of the woods so that we can return their hospitality, but I think Shirley would manage to zip through my work and stash in about 2 hours max!! anyway thank you both very much for a great day and evening.



The next morning we set off for my beloved Whitby, how I wish we could have a holiday home there. We headed off for our favourite coffee shop, Sherlock's, which as its name implies is decked out in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and this is the Watson room upstairs.



Next it was a bit of shopping in a lovely little craft shop that has expanded to three shops since last year, not surprisingly since the stock is so varied and very well priced. Also, Val the proprietor, is brilliantly helpful and very knowledgeable, which makes shopping such a pleasure.





Then there was Boys's the North's best kept secret for really cheap habby items.



After all that shopping it was time for a stroll on the pier which heads right out to sea in a big arc.



On the way back I spotted this beautiful gate dedicated to Whitby seafarers.






Well that's almost it for this year,barring a lovely stop at Harcwick Hall, a wonderful Elizabethan manor, on the way home.

Hope you haven't been too bored with my travelling diary.

Time for my OH

Belated Post 4

As part of the fair holiday plans it was time for me to take a back seat, (and get down to some creative stuff) on Monday, while my OH went round the Washington Wild Fowl Trust. It’s a very nice relaxing place to be first thing in the morning before the school children arrive, so I did manage to stick around long enough sketch a couple of birds, before I retired to the van for some art therapy.







I really liked the patterns and the colours on the red breasted geese, good job they had these illustrations, as my photos were useless. The Bewick swans were preening and they were moving their necks at the most amazing angles so it was really hard to try and catch any position at all.



As for the Ringed Teals their colours and patterns would make a great design source. You may notice an escapee puffin sketch (above) and I’m sorry to say that this and the Shag were all I could manage on the day we went to the Farne Islands, it was too windy and cold to have a sketch book out for long, Hmmm!!! Very, very poor excuse!!

Anyway I spent the afternoon happily working on my journal, that I had prepared bfore leaving home, so here's a few WIP pages.

Front cover,a melted wax exercise from Traci Bautista's book.


These 2 pages were centred on rubbings done at the Lindisfarne Centre, meant for children to play with , I suspect!





I just used WC's and any bits I found or packaging etc. as I didn't take that much with me, it was a good discipline exercise.

And these are some puffin experiments that I did from my photos and a PC. I also made some crude printing blocks with cardboard.




Just the outlines drawn on velum



At the end of the day we decided to move on down towards Shirley, who I’d arranged to meet up with before I left home. She had told us that there were some nesting Avocets near a petro-chemical site, so we headed off in the direction of Hartlepool.



As we’re both Southerners, born and bred, my OH and I haven’t had much experience of heavy industrial plants in our neck of the woods. It came as a bit of a shock then when we arrived at a sandy beach outside Hartlepool with this group of buildings in the distance.



As we got closer the Avocet site we met this bizarre line up over the brow of a hill, as the sign on the gate said it was a salvage company I can only assume these old ladies had gone there to die!!

We finally found the hide that the company had erected to view the birds and while we waited for the morning we took the opportunity to try out some night shots.



I must admit it did feel a bit like being in the middle of some awful Sci-fi movie being so close to all this industrial power with it’s occasional rank smells and strange noises emitting from the chimneys, as whatever it was puffed out at irregular intervals.

But it was worth it, my OH did get his sighting of the Avocets and a seal colony for good measure, so it has to be said that the vast amount of land these places occupy does become a nature reserve, by the simple lack of disterbance by people.

Second Sunday

I’m going to show off a bit before I continue with my holiday blog and show you this pic of our first harvest from the garden. I hope it makes your mouth water, because it certainly did mine when my OH brought them into the kitchen!! And the taste was to die for.

Post 3 of the delayed holiday postings.

On Sunday we paid a visit to Hadrian’s wall. For those who don’t know it as well as we do in the UK, it was built by the Romans in about AD 122 at the time of their occupation of Britain, to keep out the invaders from the North. The place we chose to go was called Housesteads Fort, which is owned by the NT, and is the best preserved Roman Fort in Europe.

Needless to say the fort is situated on top of a hill and on the day we went the wind was howling, making it feel like the bleakest site on earth.





This pic shows the way they put in pillars under the floor of the grain store to create ventilation to stop the grain from getting damp. I thought it was for the under floor heating, but that was only used in the fort Commander’s extremely large courtyard house.

The most interesting thing I saw were the latrines complete with washing bowls in tact and then this account of how the sanitation worked. Quite ingenious I thought!! But for those of a delicate nature you may want to move on down the page past the NT explanation!





We also visited another NT site that day (we do like to get our money’s worth out of the membership), and this was a lovely river walk called the Allen Banks and Steward Gorge.






The Summer House

One of the things I found was this brilliant idea for an out door book, giving the history of the site, in the Summer House. It certainly gave me food for thought for a different approach to bookmaking.





As we walked through a more open part of the woodland my OH pointed out these beautiful wild pansies, they’re much smaller than the domestic variety, but exquisite in close up. I even had time to have a go at sketching the shape and record the correct colour, as I knew the camera would have trouble with the purple, that was till rain stopped play and I realised that I had a wet backside from sitting on the grass.



About half way along the walk I notice this suspension bridge and although we didn’t have to cross it, I had to have a go. It did feel pretty unnerving at first but once I realised it was safe I actually decided to take a pic of the river, not bad for a vertigo sufferer!!

Second half

This is the second of the five holiday posts that I couldn’t put up on line while I was away.





We’ve now moved into the second half of our 2-week trip to Northumberland and on the second Saturday we visited another National Trust property in the area, called Wallington. The house itself was built in 1688 and is a typical square building that has one reception room leading onto another round a central hall. Its jewel in the crown is the hall that is decorated with scenes of notable moments in the history of Northumbria.They are in the wonderfully romantic style of the Pre-Raphaelites, which you may have guessed is a favorite period of mine.

As usual no photos allowed in an NT property, which is always highly frustrating, especially as they no longer print many PC’s and the guidebooks are now £5.00!





I did take quite a few pics outside in the enormous grounds, which are apparently never closed. One of the things that caught my eye were these brilliant griffin heads, they look almost comic in a horrendous way.

There is the most wonderful walled garden there that I instantly fell in love with, as the planting is so well done, it leads you from one area to another just as if you were moving from room to room in a house. One of the areas that attracted me was a water garden that had this delightful small horse ornament with small ferns growing around the head. I was so inspired I decided to do a quick pen and ink sketch of it.





To one side in the walled garden there was a very large ornate glasshouse, that had been constructed in the early 1900’s by the same company that made Kew Garden’s houses at that time. It was filled with tender flowering and exotic plants and as the rain had started again it was a great haven of peace, warmth and light. I was so impressed I made my OH promise to make me a miniature copy in his newly acquired greenhouse.





I just had to take a couple of shots of the wonderful colours.





I was also very keen on the beautiful ornate ironwork that held up the roof, there must be a linocut in there somewhere!!





And for the final 2 shots of the day I found this amazing bark on a fallen tree and this lovely thistle in the walled garden.



Just in case you thought I’d forgotten all about my good intentions of doing some creative R&R, I did manage a longer sketch, in the walled garden, of this planter in a circular ornamental area. My OH was conveniently watching some grey wagtails that had young in another part of the garden.

On our way South

As I was unable to find another internet connection once I’d left Seahouses, I decided to continue recording our journey and post it up, a day at a time when I got home, finishing up with our Fantastic visit to Shirley. I hope you don’t find this too boring as it’s a bit of self indulgence on my part, so I can remember this holiday in the future.

BTW I'm making my way through the 102 posts I've missed on my Bloglines while away, and I've tried to reply to all those who were kind enough to leave a comment on my posts, so if I've missed anyone I apologise.



This pic was our parting gift from Lindisfarne.

We finally managed to leave Lindisfarne last Friday and start our journey south, even though it was only 20 miles or so.





But before I get on to where we are now I forgot to post up this little chappy that I saw on the back door of Chillingham Castle, and the lovely rusty door decoration.




Anyway onto Friday’s travels. We decided to go to a National Trust house called Crag Side in Morpeth. It’s a wonderful early 20th century house that was the first private dwelling in the world to have electricity, powered by water. The house is furnished in the Art’s and Craft style and has lots of examples of wallpaper, tiles and fabrics of the period, plus gorgeous pre-Raphaelite stained glass.

The restored kitchen looks for all the world like the film set for the film Gosford Park, and gives a wonderful insight into the rigours of running a stately home at this time, even with the latest labour saving devices.


Wallpaper



Unfortunately as this is an NT property there’s not much scope for photography, but I did take a couple of shots of the distillery which was outside the main house and I didn’t see any no photos signs.




I did manage to take quite a few shots in the garden and one of the most striking things I came across was this iron bridge spanning a huge hollow in the garden, imagine having that in your back garden!



I was also quite impressed with this lovely carved chimney.



We ended the day by a lovely river watching the golfers play out their games in the rain, while we had fish and chips with wine in our dry and cosy camper.