Sunday 26 April 2009

Just a quickie!

Well, thanks to the (mainly) lovely weather yesterday we managed an outdoor product shoot. Now I have hours and hours and hours of photo editing, listing and listing editing to do so I'm not going to be blogging for the next few days!!

I will be back when it's all done but till I blog again I'll entertain you with some shots we took yesterday of Stanzi up her favourite tree, an ash that when it was younger we mistakenly thought was a rowan and wondered why it never bore berries...duh!


And also some lovely shots of our lime tree, destined to play a part in my new shop banners (yes, banners in the plural, some of the pieces we photographed yesterday will end up on Etsy, not on Folksy; I've finally decided to take the plunge!)

Tuesday 21 April 2009

A bit of holiday nostalgia.

Well, right at the moment I'm slap bang in the middle of so many things I don't know whether I'm coming or going so I thought I'd share a few photos of one of our favourite places, Wells Next The Sea in Norfolk.

(What things, you may ask? Well, besides the day jobs, I'm aiming to make enough pieces to be able to open a shop on Etsy as well as on Folksy and to have a decent amount in each of them. I'm also, for what feels like the millionth time, doing another complete re-shoot of all my photographs. And in and amongst I'm waiting to catch a great shot of our linden tree with all it's new leaves so that I can make myself a new banner. Gah!)

OK, here's one of the beautiful sunset we experienced on our last evening in Wells in 2008:








This really just didn't know when to stop, it was amazing!


And here's one of the lovely pinewoods that fringe Holkham Beach.











"No digging here!"


What's with this "No digging here!" lark, then?! Well, we discovered Wells by way of the ghost stories of M R James. Back in the late nineteen-seventies (yes, we are old!) one story was dramatised every Christmas by the BBC, over a number of years. Both of us are especially fond of "A Warning To The Curious" and, guess what, the dramatisation of it was filmed in Wells! We didn't know this till we picked up a copy of "Coast" and there was a photograph of the Old Custom House (where we stayed on our first visit). We though, hey, that looks very familiar, so on went the DVD and lo and behold, there it was!

On both our visits to Wells so far we've spent some time trying to identify locations for particular sequences in the film. With not a huge amount of success so far but we did manage to identify the steps that Arnold, the "boots", sat on while polishing shoes and whistling "Tea For Two And Two For Tea".

And since I seem to have lost the photo of said steps (*!*?!) here's one of the many skeins of birds that we witnessed flying en masse while we were there - a truly magnificent sight!

Wednesday 8 April 2009

Cat and wind induced insomnia...and the craft cupboard.

Well, this is what we should have been doing at five o'clock this morning and it's also what Stanzi does best, I sometimes think she's trying for the Guinness Book of Records for sleeping!

However we weren't, due to the fact that aforesaid puss was ballooning around the bedroom and up and down the corridor like a creature possessed. It was extremely windy here last night and wind is guaranteed to get Stanzi into hyper mode within seconds. She just wants to tell us all about it, in every possible permutation and at great length, bless!

It's also guaranteed to get me into paranoid mode as I lie there wondering just how much tossing around the huge lime tree in the corner of our garden can withstand (yes, that's why LindenTree!) Colleagues in our Parks Department, which is in the same building as the one I work in for one of my jobs, have reassured me that "lime trees are very supple". I so hope they are right... And Roger keeps telling me that it's been there a lot longer than he has (which is forty odd years at the last count).

So I'm pretty bleary eyed right now and my early morning resolve to photograph our Little Shop Of Horrors of a craft cabinet to post (inspired by a blog post from Julia of East of the Sun which was in response to the challenge by Nic of Nic's Knots to blog about craft spaces) has dissolved as I am somewhere near to the left of exhausted. Tomorrow, all being well - prepare to be horrified! (It's not that bad, really...)

More pics of the early morning madness cat, in awake yet relaxed mode!