It's after eight o'clock in the evening now and I'm writing this blog post by candlelight in front of the stove, heavens knows when I'm going be able to upload it! In general Irish weather is notoriously 'soft', no major extremes of temperature, never very hot and not often very cold, plenty of light rain throughout the year and the grass grows pretty much all year round.
Why would Rex need a pillow when he has a block of wood?
Well, these last few weeks we've been having loads of storms with plenty of high winds and lashings of rain, since early this morning I've had no central/underfloor heating (not that it's on very much anyway!), no Internet since mid morning and no power since just after lunchtime. Carmen called over before the winds had got too bad and brought delicious tapas for our lunch, as she was driving home two trees fell across the road behind her and a beautiful large tree had fallen at the top of her lane so she wasn't able to drive right to her house. I was meant to be facilitating a workshop tonight for 17 women in Carlow, luckily the organiser agreed we would reschedule because I discovered mid afternoon that Borris town (en route to Carlow) was practically cut off, fallen trees all over the place! Earlier in the afternoon I felted a small experimental piece, since the light has gone I've been planning some of the submissions I'm planning to make this year, sketching a couple of rough ideas for exhibitions pieces, doing a little organising on the iPad and looking back through some of the photos I've taken recently.
I use the camera on my phone a lot, probably I take at least 20 photos on any given day and more often 40 or more, last Sunday I actually had to back up and delete over 6,700!!! Alan can never understand why I frequently take many pictures of the same thing, for me though it's a way of visually recording what inspires me! This post includes a selection of recent images that excepting the beautiful stone walls would never usually make it here to the blog. Some of them are taken in the fields and the 'garden' at Clasheen and a few are from last Sunday when we did a bit of adjusting to the ropes on our boat at Graiguenamanagh. You'll probably never see a literal translation of these into felt but these are the everyday things that I love to observe, find inspiring and watch changing as the seasons progress. No captions, I'm sure you can work them out for yourselves!
Well I'm finally back online, it's Saturday afternoon at quarter to three so I'm going to post this right away as I'm not sure how long I'll be active for, more stormy weather is forecast so fingers crossed all will be well!!! Speaking of fingers, this morning as I was preparing to do some natural printing I cut the top of one finger in the mechanism of my tongs, stupid or what? There was plenty of blood but not so much pain, SO not what I wanted to do before laying out white wraps to print. Anyway, it's now bandaged, I can work wearing a sterile glove and am able to type with my index finger, all in all not the worst thing to happen!
Posted by Nicola Brown – I feel, I find, I felt
Nicola Brown Fine Art Textiles 