Joining in with Julie's colour week, today is green. (ok, it was tuesday when I wrote it, but I've been kind of sick and I didn't realise I had wandered off and not actually posted it!)
Grass and stains on my knees, steamed veggies - my almost daily delight, the spring onions that I ate today that survived winter(!), the weed that floats on the surface of rivers, the sea with it's bluey greens that I love most of all. Fabrics I use in my garden in summer, balls of wool and thread in my sewing room, the hills and fields that make me feel at home. I love green.
So the picture...
I love the way the grass grows into the dry ski slope. I was thinking about maybe using that stuff to create a green driveway. I always see piles of it lying around from when the slope gets redone, it would be great to recycle it. I'm sure it would be sturdy enough to take the occasional visitors that have cars, but would still let me have soil and low growing plants, grasses, even herbs like thyme and chamomille growing through (but maybe not to be eaten, what with the car fumes on them). Hmm, now I'm wondering if maybe I should do a post on green carparks for Sew Green, as I've always liked them. Perhaps.
I think there's someone hiding in my pocket!
Here's what a bunny in fancy dress looks like...
Hmm, can you imagine why there is only a head in these photo's, let's just say it's not because I had a visit from the Easter mafia!
Andy eats a lot of tinned fish, enough for me to have cute tubs for all my different sized nails and screws. Buttons would look good here but they live in clear lidded tubs.
Joining in with Julie's colour week, this brooch is part of my vintage jewellery collection.
Ok, I'm off to bed now, been up all night with dodgy breathing/chest trouble. The silver lining is that much blog reading has, at last, been done :0) And much listening of music (mostly french).
Still technically on my computer break so not checking emails or comments till tomorrow. I may have missed my camping holiday opportunity but I did have some holiday fun eating a Lindt bunny that appeared in my blue bag. How'd it get in there? Bunny pics to follow. x
I had deeply hoped to be going to sleep near here last night. And then waking up here...
Cramps dictated otherwise, which is a real shame, but I intend to have a quiet time anyway with books, films food, no computer and hopefully some animal visitors...
Spring Magnolia just before the sun disappeared behind the hill for the night. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend wherever you are. I'm going to have a mini blog break so I can at least pretend to myself I'm away, can you believe I've not had an actual not visiting people holiday for at least 4 years!
That's why I was so keen to go camping. Every bit of holiday time I've had from work over the 4 years has been used up visiting friends and family, which is lovely, but not the same as having time to yourself and freedom to just do whatever takes your fancy in the moment, to eat and sleep at any time and to change plans without having to run it by someone else first.
Can't wait for the next few days to pass, cramps to go, meetings to finish and then, a bit of social life! I'll be going to meet Daphne for a picnic in town, weather permitting. I'll be taking my camera with me, Daphne is a great photo buddy, she's more than happy to spend time off the beaten track having a gentle adventure and taking pics of random things. Remember our day in town last year, we had a real day of finding colours we love (blues for me, yellows for her). Here are a few of the photo's I never quite got round to posting last time...
Have a great weekend folks, don't eat too many eggs, as tempting as it may be!
Are you green and creative? Why not have a go at the Inhabitat T-shirt design contest. They talked about it here today after yesterdays post on Organic T-shirts by T.S.Designs.
I love Inhabitat so much, they have been such a huge inspiration to me through the ongoing refurb of my mobile home. Did you see this recent post they did about the possible greening of the gherkin in London? Given that I love pod shapes I ought to like that building, but I don't. Or rather, I didn't, until I saw the rendered image of it with plants growing around and on top. Much nicer.
I've been working out ways to use waste plastic bottles, the big kind that water and things come in, and one of my experiments is in using them to create a green living wall to cloth part of my house with. Nothing to show yet, I don't have enough bottles yet, but I think it could be quite effective.
Also shown last month were nifty little mini wind turbines (seriously, they are tiny tiny tiny), which I thought would be ideal for powering a greenhouse heater to extend the growing season in cooler weather). Not that I have a greenhouse yet, but I will in the future.
I was also immediately drawn to the article about the cow poo eco flooring! I'm very 'earthy' (says Mr.P) when it comes to poo, and often pick up dried sheep and rabbit droppings to make things with. Seriously folks, they are cute, and really just little grass sculptures. And cow pats, when they are fully dried, can be really gorgeous and have amazing colours. I'm just a country girl at heart.
Did I mention the sun is shining gloriously today? And I can hear the tractor cutting the grass between the houses so there will be that lovely smell I call the smell of childhood. It's a proper spring day so I marked it with an outdoor skin brushing session this morning. I don't much like skin brushing indoors, too dusty! So when the weather is good I get out to the private corner of the garden and have a good go at restarting my lymphatic drainage system. Very invigorating I must say.
Barbed wire or blossoms, which would you choose to see against a blue sky?
I liked both when I took the photo's a few weeks ago, and then I realised they were relevant to my 1st Sew Green post today, Ethical Banking.
It's basically about how your savings can make a real environmental/social difference by being in a bank that supports ethical investments (blossom) rather than being used to fund unethical sh*t like the arms trade (barbed wire).
I hope you'll link in for a read and hopefully it'll be food for thought (but not preachy) about what is happening with your money when it's not being used to buy that incredible can't-believe-no-one-else-has-spotted-this-yet piece of fabric in the charity shop.
Yes, you know where I'm coming from with that experience. You see, you lunge, you look round expecting someone to fight you for it, but then realise they couldn't give two hoots about some old retro rag. You head home with your swag bag feeling like you won the craft lottery.
Some Green things from my day, a day of 1st's...
My 1st day out walking since I got sick.
The sun was glorious and I saw the lambs near my house :0). I walked (v-e-r-y slowly) to the farm shop and bought bundles of organic greens. (to answer V's Q, it was painful but well worth it)
My 1st day of properly doing the garden.
It was slow going but I managed to fill 4 compost bins! I doubt I'll be able to walk tomorrow. My old osteopath used to say spring was his busiest time for that very reason.
Best of all (though amazingly I forgot amid my garden zeal), my 1st day of officially being a part of the wonderful new Sew Green blog! Yes, little old me, even though I ramble and can't spell to save myself. I think I charmed them with my post about peeing on my compost heap last month.
I think it's such a wonderful blog already and I'm really looking forward to posting on a wide variety of green things. My personal faves are green roofs, gardening, eco buildings, organic food. Oh who am I kidding, I have LOADS of favourites. I'll be doing my best to add some UK/European perspectives to widen the geographic interest and influence.
My 1st post will be on wednesday but no need to wait for that, head on over now, the girls have been doing great posts. I am thrilled beyond words to be part of it, thrilled!
Scenes of perfection like these are the reason I have always wanted to go to Havana.
Photo's by Luiz Alberto on Flickr.
They say it could dip to -2 degrees tonight, hard to imagine while the glorious sun is still shines. I bit the bullet and hauled my ass round to my house to tackle the stove, which was in need of a really good clean, you're meant to do it every three days of use. I'd not been well enough to do for nearly 2 weeks, so it was great to have the sun shine through the window in such an encouraging way.
The side effect of all that light was beeing able to see clearly the layer of micro fine ash dust that is enveloping everything within 10ft of the stove. I will have to construct some sort of circular shower curtain arrangement that I can whip around me whenever I clean the stove, so at least the black dust is contained in a small area. Unconventional, maybe, but practical. Actually, since I only use the stove in winter, maybe I can use my red velvet curtains (with inner lining that can be washed easily) and then the stove can really be elevated to the royal and theatrical level it tends to embody when it is firing up on a cold night. Hmm, perhaps.
But anyway, the sun was nice, especially as the other day it was so misty, the sun tried to shine through but never managed to burn of the haze...
And for no reason other than I took a photo of it recently, the carving on a bench we sit on when we are near my old house...
Objets trouvés, I've always loved that term better than 'found objects' which we use in English. Seems appropriate to use that term in relation to these wonderfully expressive masks by French artist Sophie Noel. She's got a nice little website, very individual, and full of other creations as well as her numerous masks.
I was going to show you a photo of my bedroom wall in 1991. My flatmates had posters of Rock idols on there walls. I had a wall of rust! I still love rust, but don't collect so much because I kept staining my fabrics by accident, though it did lead to some very interesting eco friendly colouring techniques as rust stains don't come out in the wash.
I need access to a scanner as photo's of photo's just look crappy. But I will show you sometime, it was really lovely, honestly. I'd been living in an old farm workers cottage so the fields and roads all around were full of the most interesting little bits of rusted farm machinery. Big bits too, but I had to draw the line somewhere. It began as a little collection on the outside kitchen windowsill but grew very quickly. Many of the pieces were incorporated into my artworks, and to this day my eyes are scanning the ground for little gems just as much as they are appreciating the views around me.
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