Pasque pilgrimage

One of the Britain's rarest and loveliest wild flowers grows in Cambridgeshire, but I've never been lucky enough to see it growing in the wild – that is until today. Last summer a visitor to my studio let me into a secret, he told me where the Pasqueflowers grow on the Devil's Dyke.

Even though Cliff and I were weary after spending the whole day putting up new fencing along the boundary of a small addition to our garden (more about our 'wild wood' at another time) this evening while the rabbit casserole was cooking, we went on a pilgrimage to find the Pasqueflowers.

After a short walk we spotted some purple flowers nestling in the grass near the path along the top of the Dyke.

Pasqueflowers were first recorded growing on the Gog Magog Hills by John Ray, the son of a blacksmith and his wife – a herbalist, from Braintree in Essex; who studied and then lectured at Trinity College in Cambridge. While recovering from an illness he took long walks in the countryside around the town and was inspired to write his first book Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigian nascentium which was published in 1660. This small pocket book gave descriptions of 626 plants and their exact locations. This is the reason the Pasqueflower was selected as the County Flower of Cambridgeshire.


We sat on the steep grassy bank looking out over the farmland on one side and Newmaket Race-course on the other. Up close we could see just how beautiful the little purple flowers are - finely veined translucent petals; soft downy stalks and leaves; vivid yellow stamens. Shiny black pollen beetles scurried among the stamens.

According to legend, Pasqueflowers spring from the blood of Romans or Danes - their rarity and this story enhances their mystery. This myth seems believable because they like to grow on chalky ground with thin undisturbed soil, the few remaining sites are on ancient earthworks such as barrows and banks around hillforts, and on the Devil's Dyke - a thin strip of timeless wild-flower-jewelled turf.

An excuse for a party . . .

This lunchtime I put down my pen; locked up the studio; packed some bags and a basket with goodies and drove south of Cambridge to a . . .

Cupcake and Crochet Party

at Gina's, with Emma, Val and the little Pebbles and Cookies.

There were more than enough cupcakes and
dotty-cookies for everyone . . .

and we even did some crochet (eventually)

Lots of fun!

Birds of a feather flock together

Just before Easter the postman delivered a fat yellow package, it was from the United States, at first I was puzzled – then I realised what was inside . . .


Terry had sent me a signed copy of her beautiful new children's book Tillie lays an egg. As well as being a professional cook and author, Terry is one many hen-keepers who I've stumbled upon via PPPs and my Etsy shop, like our hens we flock together, pleased to find others who aren't bored witless by chicken chat. The photographs in Tillie lays an egg are wonderful, full of chicken decorated vintage delights to keep hen lovers of any age amused; I know from experience just how much work goes into setting up a photo for a book – Terry and Ben deserve a gold star.

Terry's hens can even be viewed via the Hen-cam; and 'the actress who plays Tillie' is a star of page, screen and library.

Happy Easter-ly

Yesterday we'd planned a day out, but at the last minute we checked the weather forecast and our faces fell – it would probably more cloudy and rainy than at home. "Try further East", I typed in various locations until I hit the jackpot,
Bungay = SUNSHINE :-)

We arrived in Bungay and the sun was indeed shining, making the flints sparkle on the walls. I spotted this shop, full of lovely tempting things (one of which I couldn't resist buying). Just opposite was the Earsham Street Café, the menu looked tempting and we felt hungry. We sat in the sunny walled yard at the back and ate our delicious salads. A card on the table said Earsham Street Café is one of 'The Times Top 10 Cafés in the UK', and well deserved it is too.

The sunshine was glorious as we drove down lanes past little round towered churches to here . . .

. . . mmmm? – great! A road to 'Gulliver' the wind turbine, between the Bird's Eye factory and the sea defences. Looks a bit dangerous!

But it's here you'll find this . . .


and you can have fun walking round the big outer circle and imagining places far away across the sea.



Back home, in the cloudy drizzly middle bit of the UK, I spent the evening baking and decorating eggs. Oh yes, that's my purchase from Bells of Suffolk – a wire-work egg basket in the shape of a hen.

HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!

Celia
x

Reasons to be cheerful . . .

Gardening is about hope and enjoying this moment

The Peas in the greenhouse –
Purple Podded, Reuzensuiker,
Golden Sweet, Tutankamun,
Carouby de Maussanne
and Carlin

The Polyanthus at the end of the vegetable plot –
Violet Victorians, Silver Dollar,
Marine Blues, Old Rose Victorians
and Chartreuse

The first spear of asparagus –
will it be
dipped in melted butter?
roast with olive oil?
coated with runny egg yolk?

The Greengage blossom about to open –
will the sun keep shining, bringing the bees?
will this be a 'Greengage Summer'?
green blushed, honey sweet
eaten outside straight off the tree

All photographed in the garden this afternoon.

I know that tune . . .

I've finished printing the first of my new set of designs and now I'm busy carving the blocks for the other two designs. I should have time for some lengthy sessions immersed in the details, because clients have been told that booking for work to be finished before Easter is now closed – I hope there's something good on the radio!

The first print is finished – when I scanned it I loved noticing the details and how the colours overlap. Transforming a sketch, through a planned design to a print from the hand carved blocks is like hearing a familiar tune played on a different instrument . . .



I've decided not to post the complete finished print today – they have a special date for unveiling, more about that another time.

Hand made

This afternoon I drove into Cambridge, I knew it was going to be busy in town, the glorious spring sunshine would attract the tourists in swarms. But as a local I know a few likely parking spots - and yes, I was lucky today. The walk into the centre is along a lane which propably hasn't changed for centuries, a route that once crossed boggy meadows now passes alongside playing fields and college gardens to a narrow bridge over the busy river and into lanes between ancient walls, emerging near the market square. I was heading for the Guildhall to the Handmade Craft Fair, surprisingly there were no signs advertising it was taking place until I was near the side entrance. I followed the arrows to the 'Large Hall' upstairs and found a room full of table top displays of colourful wares. Lots of vintage style and retro chic, I'd called in to say hello to Jon and Sarah of The Lapwing Printworks and see their lovely prints and paper goods. I couldn't resist buying the tiny Norfolk landscape wood engraving by Jon.

Just along the aisle from Jon and Sarah's stall my eye was caught by some subtle coloured jewellery - Quercus Silver is the work of talented designer Su . She combines skillful silver work with beautiful coloured resins - it was difficult to choose which design I liked best, in the end I plumped for a pair of earrings in a soft jade green - love the smart packaging.

A super day for driving home - blossom, flowers, birds, blue sky. Tea and hot-cross buns in the garden when I got home. Perfect :-)

Early April garden update

It's been a glorious week for gardening, in between ticking off the work on the 'to do' list in the studio, I've been working hard in the vegetable garden.

Ta-daaaaa! Just a teeny tiny corner to finish off and it's all spick and span. This has been achieved without any help from the under-gardeners – in fact, it looks so tidy because the hens have been banned from working in the vegetable garden. They couldn't resist scratching the soil back over the paths, I had to put my foot down with a firm hand!


Some of the beds are already planted with shallots ('Pikant' and 'Golden Gourmet'), tree-onions, garlic chives; but no large onions this year, they've been a struggle to grow successfully in the recent wet summers.

This bed is planted with 'Crimson Flowered' broad beans which were started off in the greenhouse. I saved seed from last year and planted only the pale green beans as these tend to have the best crimson flowers. At the other end of this bed is the strawberry patch.


In the heated propogator in the greenhouse the tomato seedlings are ready for pricking out. No sign of 'Lisa King', never mind. Lots of 'Liguria', these have a fantastic flavour when cooked; and this year's pick from the HSL catalogue 'Tiger Tom' is looking good too.


This year's strategy is to sow little and often and keep the crops coming right through the summer and continue into winter and plan for next spring (I've said this before, will I succed this year?). Here's a small batch of chard 'Bright Lights' ready to prick out.


It's not just veg – the salvias grown from RHS free seed are doing well. The hardier varieties are in the cold frame and the tender ones are still in the greenhouse benefiting from the heat of the propagator during the chilly nights. They are in their second year and I'm looking forward to creating a salvia border – it will be well protected with twiggy sticks to deflect the attention of the under-gardeners!

Knowing the voice

Each cutting blade has its own voice . . .

deep v-grooves; lines with tapering beginnings and endings;
small angular marks

a small curved scoop; long sweeping lines;
cleaning around the shapes; tidy; easy


a wide shallow gouge; curvy, satisfying;
shovelling away the spaces between


. . . conversations with my chisels.

Cooking with colour

With two blocks carved for the first of the new set of prints, it was time to start printing . . .

It's a bit like cooking, first I needed to assemble the ingredients and do the prep'.

Dark Bronze Blue, Yellow Ochre and White inks plus a dash of Extender makes pale turquoise.

Rolled out so it makes that nice chush-chush sound, and we're ready to go.

Block number one positioned on the drawing board and inked up

and after using a bit of elbow grease the first print is hung up to dry.

I don't have a vast array of tins of printing ink. Maybe it's a throw-back to A-Level art lessons where we were only allowed four tubes of watercolour paint: Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Light Red and Crimson. My printing ink collection consists of Dark Bronze Blue, Crimson, Yellow Ochre, Primrose Yellow, White and Black (which I've gone off using).

Yellow Ochre, a smidge of Crimson, and teeny weeny dab of Primrose Yellow, white and teaspoon of Extender and we have Suffolk Pink ready for inking up block number two.

I usually print onto BFK Rives paper, but results can be variable – temperature, ink colour, the size of the blocks all seem to influence the success rate. For these prints I decided to use a different paper, I chose Kitakata 36gsm paper which is handmade in Japan using 90% Philippine Gampi (Wikstroemia diplomorpha) and 10% pulp. It's got a lovely silky texture, a vintage book page colour and is very strong, but it's also slightly translucent which makes printing much easier because you can see what's happening as you rub the reverse of the paper onto the inked block.

The second colour was really quick to print.

So now I need to get that third block carved . . .

The tabby studio assistant was a great help . . .

Spring!

Today is the Spring Equinox, when day and night are of equal length and in the Northern Hemisphere it is officially the start of Spring.

This morning I put on my Village Magazine Editor's hat and walked through the village taking photos to cheer up the April issue. The morning mist was just clearing and although it was cold at 10.30am (I could see my breath) I could feel the sun's power. Along the grassy verges were clusters of violets - in fact white violets are more common along the village roadside than purple; I wonder if because they are unusual people have encouraged patches to spread. Where the white and purple grow together there were a few 'milk and water' violets.

Back in our garden the senior under-gardeners and Spice Girls had a jaunty confidence as they surveyed their foot-work along the garden borders.

The greenhouse has had a major spring-clean last weekend and it's all systems go for 'Veg-season 2009'.

I hoped to show you pictures of the inhabitants of the wild-life pond, but my attempts at night-time under-water wildlife photography failed miserably. I wanted to show how amazingly beneficial the pond has been for the local Common Newts - when we moved here ten years ago there was a tiny pond in the garden, one of those preformed plastic ponds in a bright shade of turquoise which I nick-named 'Barbie's swimming-pool'. After a few years we got round to digging a larger shallow pond next to it and lined both ponds with a black pond-liner. The liner extends under the surrounding garden to create an area for pond-edge planting. We moved nine newts from 'Barbie's swimming-pool' into their new 'wild' environment and bought them a Water Forget-me-not as a moving-in present, within a few days we noticed the newts had laid eggs, neatly folding the Forget-me-not leaves over to protect them. Now is the time when newts get amorous, so a trip down to the pond in the dark with a torch is rewarded with seeing them doing their flirtatious underwater dances; I was amazed to count sixteen newts in one corner of the shallow pond - it just shows how a small change to the garden can be beneficial to wildlife.

While failing to snap frisky amphibians, I noticed a movement on the far side of the water - a nocturnal huntress on the prowl . . .

Cluster; peak; overload . . .

Whatever you choose to call it, I'm a bit busy this month. But feast and famine is a fact of life when you're freelance – and the upside is that I work in a lovely studio with 'studio assistants', I can hear the birds singing outside, the radio is tuned to Radio 4 and when I do take a break I'm only a few steps away from the garden and the under gardeners.

When people discover that I work as an illustrator they often conjure up an image of Beatrix Potter sitting in a flowery field drawing bunnies, well it's not like that and I'm sure even Beatrix worked her socks off to meet a deadline occasionally. When I was at art school the Head of Illustration, John Vernon Lord, brought us down to earth by telling us his first commission had been to illustrate a plumbers' catalogue. I take on all sorts of projects; a rich seam of work comes from English as a foreign language text books – have you ever thought where all those little pictures come from? Well I'll let you into a little secret . . . I draw them. Well, not ALL of them, but over this week and last week and next week I'll draw 234 of them.

There are some things I love to draw . . .

Salad, cake and fruit

Client: Emc Design © Nelson Thornes

Plants

Client/© :International Teaching Services

When I was very young I loved looking at a very very special book my Gran owned, it was The Encyclopedia of Needlework by Therese Dillmont, with my Gran I tried out the embroidery, knitting and crochet stitches. But it was the illustrations that I loved the most, I spent hours and hours looking at them and can remember them all. I wanted to be the person who drew all those beautiful diagrams.

Dreams can come true – these are for some 'Textiles' worksheets for Key Stage 2 . . .

Tying for dying

Client: Black Dog Design © A & C Black

Stitching

Client: Black Dog Design © A & C Black

Must get on – today it's beans, biscuits, cereal, cheese, chocolate (need reference for that!), coffee . . .

We think she's forgotten something . . .

The ginger one: "Play attack! Play attack!"

The tabby one: "You do and I'll bite your ears!"

The ginger one: "Just a thought..." (thinks: boring girls!)

The tabby one: "Last one to the top of the wigwam is a fat ginger sissy!"

The ginger one: "Don't care! Why doesn't the boss come out to play with us in the garden?"

The tabby one: "She's too busy with stuff called 'deadlines', she hasn't even cleared up the mess the under-gardeners have made. She hasn't picked these old dry beans – I'll have to do it for her – and she's even forgotten it's that blog-thing's second anniversary tomorrow!"

Wuffing warriors and WAGs

OK, guess where and when this was made . . .

It's the design on a tiny silver coin made in Suffolk 1300 years ago. The period of history between the Romans leaving Britain and 1066-and-all-that used to be dismissed as 'The Dark Ages' - I always wanted to find out more, surely it wasn't just "dark" for a thousand years! Of course it wasn't, it was a time of huge change and resulted in the formation of a culture that underpins what we think of as "English" - our language, food, villages and towns. However inspiring the art of different cultures is, it will always be exotic and I will always be an outsider looking in; the art of the early Anglo Saxons is the art from the people who made my world.

While I'm working in my studio I like to listen to either BBC Radio 4 or BBC Radio Suffolk, yesterday afternoon when Lesley Dolphin, on her new improved afternoon show All About Suffolk, interviewed Caroline McDonald, the curator of a new exhibition entitled Anglo Saxon Art in the round - I pricked up my ears . . .

There's no time like the present, this morning we drove the width of Suffolk to go shopping in Ipswich and visit the exhibition in The Town Hall. The central display in Gallery 3, shows the 'De Wit collection' of Saxon coins in four display cases within a reconstruction of a long boat like the one found at the ship burial at Sutton Hoo (just along the coast near Woodbridge). What is amazing is the size of the coins - they are teeny tiny, the tip of my little finger could cover them! Helpfully the walls of the gallery display large dinner-plate sized photographs of the designs from the coins - birds, foxes, horses, kings . . . and there they are on the actual coins, miniature works of art, so fresh and imaginative.

Ipswich, or rather Gipeswic was an important sea port and trading centre, it was key to the power of the ruling dynasty - the Wuffings. The finds at Sutton Hoo revealed the intricately crafted bling worn by warriors and their horses, in this display there are a few finds from warrior's graves - shield bosses, daggers and spear heads, but it's the Wives And Girl-friends who steal the show in the displays of treasures from the Hadleigh Road site in Ipswich. This is what the warriors' WAGs wore in 7th century Suffolk . . .

The reason we have all these gorgeous Saxon accessories is because a single minded Edwardian woman named Nina Frances Layard who's hobby was archaeology, rushed home from her holiday in Scotland in 1905 because she read in the East Anglian Daily Times (presumably posted to her) that skeletons had been found by workmen digging near the Hadleigh Road back home in Ipswich. She took charge and organised 150 labourers to continue the excavation through 1906, unearthing 200 graves and the occupants' precious grave goods. The gentlemen directors of the town museum viewed her with amusement . . .


On our way home we went to the TV celeb pig farmer's place Jimmy's Farm, as it's the first Saturday in the month we knew that Emma, aka Silver Pebble would be there selling her wares. After munching our burgers in the 'Field Kitchen' we tracked down Emma in the barn. She was just about to pack up her lovely beads and silver charms, but very kindly let me select some beautiful moss green tourmaline beads from her stash and with a deft tweak of her pliers customised a pair of hoop earrings for me - thank you Silver Pebble :-)

As I couldn't take photos in the exhibition these pictures are scanned from the post card and guide book I purchased at Ipswich Town Hall. © Fitzwilliam Museum and Ipswich Museum.

Releasing the hand brake

Reading other artists' and makers' blogs is sometimes like being back at art school – I become aware of how other people work and how there isn't a 'right way'. Blogging about my printmaking has made me more aware of how I work . . . and it's not a smooth creative curve. Drifts of ideas accumulate in my mind, the build up starts to cause a sense of panic about the inactivity – but the brake is on. I need to give myself a deadline – there's nothing like urgency to make me release the hand brake.

Today I told myself that I absolutely had to draw out some designs for a new group of prints; I'd been thinking about them for too long. I needed the same short deadline that I get from publishers "artwork by 4pm today please" – so that my mind switches off and I just work until the job is done.

I spent about an hour in the garden drawing in my sketch book; back in the studio I worked on the compositions with acrylic paint – I like the way it dries instantly on the paper. By limiting the colours to a dark peaty green, terracotta and a pale blue/green I had to start to think in three different lino blocks.


I like to work directly over my sketches so that the initial spontaneous marks aren't lost and I enjoy working very quickly so I don't have time to consider and ponder before I make a mark. This afternoon I scanned the three images and adjusted the sizes. I could see repeated shapes – arches and circles . . .


Woohoo! It's a relief these are now down on paper!

The next stage is my favourite – cutting the lino :-)