Month: May 2010

Wolf Conservation Trust

Wolf

Today we took a trip out to the Wolf Conservation Trust at Beenham for their open day. They’re not usually open to the general public, so the place was very busy. We took our cameras, and so did almost everybody else, but we were saddened to notice that the bigger the lens, the ruder the person behind it. Admittedly it was quite a difficult place for taking photographs. The wolves were often lying down in the long grass, so it was difficult to see them, and in most areas they were behind two layers of chain link fence which makes for irritatingly obscured pictures. But we saw people barging to the front of queues, pushing small children out of the way, hogging the limited space on the viewing platforms with tripods, and generally moaning that they weren’t able to get that elusive perfect shot. One man was even complaining that the birds of prey display had been set up “all wrong” because he couldn’t get a picture of a peregrine falcon without the owners’ vehicle behind it – as though the entire event should have been rearranged for his benefit!

I must admit that I was feeling a bit grumbly myself. I’m not very good at taking photos through wire mesh, I didn’t really have a long enough lens, and it’s difficult to manoeuvre an SLR and a walking stick at the same time. So I made an active decision that I didn’t want to turn into one of those whingeing photographers, and had a much nicer afternoon as a result. It was much more satisfying simply watching the wolves and the birds without squinting through a viewfinder and worrying about depth of field.

Much as I love taking photos (and you can see the ones I did manage to take over here), sometimes it’s nicer to put the camera away and simply look at the world. If you really want to take photos of wolves, the Wolf Conservation Trust run special photography days, where they’ll bring the wolves right out so that you can interact with them and get your perfect pictures without the fences being in the way.

We came back via something I wish I had taken a photo of – a lovely cream tea at The Spring in Sulhamstead. Two scones with jam and clotted cream, two pots of tea and two big slices of cake. Just what we needed to cheer ourselves up on a Bank Holiday afternoon.

Mini-Me – for SCIENCE.

Mini-Me - For SCIENCE.

Please excuse the nudity – this is a 6″ felt doll that I’m making for my submission to the Stitched Self project. It’s a collaboration between Stitch London and the Science Museum, where an exhibition of all the Stitched Selves will take place for the re-opening of their Who Am I? gallery in June.

I wasn’t very keen on the pattern that was provided, so I made my own. The doll is exactly 6″ tall, and is made from two pieces of felt, blanket stitched together. The hair is a little piece of wool roving, and the face is simply embroidered on.

Given that I’ve just come out of hospital, my surgical scars are very much at the top of my mind at the moment. Because of that, I decided that my Mini-Me should have them too. So, the apparently random embroidery you can see on her body is the result of one mistaken appendectomy, one laparoscopy (which found and removed the real cause of the pain), one operation to remove an osteochondroma from my left hip, and the most recent one which was an arthroscopy on my right hip.

I haven’t included any scars that I ended up with as a result of accidents, clumsiness or stupidity. So I haven’t embroidered the scar on my right shin, where Matthew Bricknell was riding his new bike straight at me, and I jumped up the garden wall to escape (age 11). I haven’t embroidered the scar on my right forearm, which I burnt on the lid of a bun toaster whilst making a batch of McChicken Sandwiches (age 22). Nor the one on my right knee, which was the result of an incident where I learned that I can’t drink beer and walk and send text messages all at once (old enough to know better).

Obviously my Mini-Me now needs some clothes. She’ll definitely be wearing a pink spotty coat, a black t-shirt and some silver Doc Martens. Then I just need to decide whether she needs a skull print skirt, or a little pair of cropped jeans. I’m quite intimidated by the prospect of sewing clothes on such a little scale, but I think I’ve worked out a pattern for the tiny boots, so I might just start with those.

In and out and in and out and in and out and in…

accordion

This is a Wheatstone English Concertina. It belongs to my friend David, who has very kindly allowed me to borrow it. I’m not entirely certain, but I think it’s about a hundred and twenty years old. It makes a lovely sound, and I can’t wait to learn how to play it.

I’ve had a couple of hours’ practice so far – this started going more successfully when I stopped reading forums telling you how to play the concertina, and just started pressing the buttons. Funny, that.

I tried to start with scales, just going up and down the C major scale, to learn where all the buttons are. That very quickly gave me brainache, and isn’t often how you play an instrument in practical use, so I dug out the few pieces of clog music that we play in C (so as not to have to worry about accidentals) and got stuck in.

It’s hard work trying to look at the fingering chart and read the music and find the right buttons and squidge the bellows all at the same time, but I’m slowly getting it. Once your brain’s got the hang of the fact that the notes that sit on the stave are on the left hand and the notes that sit in the gaps are on the right, it becomes fairly intuitive to work out where the next interval should be. Kind of.

So, I can now play the notes for three tunes (Donkey Riding, Click Go the Shears and White Cockade), in the right order, but not at the right speed or in the right rhythm. And with a few extra wrong notes thrown in for good measure. This could take a while!

I had a particularly stressful day at work today, so when I got home I immediately grabbed the concertina and headed out to the Shed. I’m having to limit my practicing to an hour at a time, otherwise my thumbs and wrists start to get a bit painful, so I figure it’s better to build up gently. But today I’m better than I was yesterday, and tomorrow I hope I’ll be a little bit better again.

I can’t wait to be able to do justice to this beautiful little instrument.

Yoga pants and psychic powers.

Last week I was looking at these lovely yoga pants from Gossypium, and lamenting that I didn’t have £35 to spend on a pair of trousers just at the moment.

Today I was finally able to reach into my pattern stash at the back of the Shed (which still has a great deal of kitchen piled up in front of it, as we gradually move everything back indoors) and pulled out Vogue 8396. I must have been hanging on to this pattern for a long while, as it’s now out of print, but version C has that fold-over waist that I was looking for.

I unfolded all the pieces and pulled out the ones I’d need to make the trousers in view C. Then I tried to figure out which size to cut. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my psychic powers out with me today, which means that I still don’t know.

The trouble with dressmaking is that the measurements given on the pattern envelope are almost never the same as the finished measurements of the garment that you’re making. That’s because each pattern has a certain amount of “ease” built in, to make sure that you can still breathe and eat and sit down and move around once your garment’s finished. So the pattern pieces usually tell you the actual measurements of the finished garment.

Except that this one doesn’t.

Given that they’re close-fitting trousers, made from stretchy fabric, it would be reasonable to assume that there isn’t any ease – that the measurements given on the envelope are the ones you’ll end up with. But then again, stretch garments (especially leggings) tend to have negative ease, so that they stretch when you put them on. That’s how they stay up.

Normally I’d cut out the pattern, pin it together and carefully try it on – but for a stretch garment that doesn’t really work. I can’t afford to waste either the time or the fabric to make a pair of trousers that don’t actually fit, so I guess I need to iron the pattern pieces, measure them carefully, subtract the seam allowances, and try to work it out that way.

Or, given that the Gossypium ones are now reduced to half price, I might just give in and buy a pair!

Benign Neglect

Courgette

When I came out of hospital I assumed that most of my vegetable seedlings wouldn’t have survived. I forgot to ask Paul to water everything for me, and although he did take care of the pots in the garden the ones in the Shed were left to their own devices. So you can imagine my surprise when I went out there yesterday evening and found that some of the seedlings had actually thrived on a week’s total neglect!

I have three courgettes like this, two pretty impressive pumpkins, and the sweetcorn and tomatoes are starting to show signs of life. No such luck with the peppers, or the tomato plants that I bought from the garden centre, but everything else in the garden seems to be doing okay.

Yesterday afternoon I popped the larger seedlings into some little pots, and decided that they were probably big enough to survive out of doors.

This morning I woke up to the sound of the weather report on the radio telling me that the temperature had fallen to -2° overnight, and that there’d been a frost.

This morning Paul woke up to a cry of “Oh no!” and the sight of me leaping out of bed* and dashing down the garden in my dressing gown to make sure that my seedlings had made it through the night.

The pumpkins seem fine, but the three little courgette plants were looking a bit sorry for themselves. They’re all now residing on the kitchen windowsill, just in case. Fingers crossed that they all survive!

*Turns out that leaping’s quite difficult when you’ve just had a hip arthroscopy.

Arthroscopy

Monkey slippers!

My monkey slippers are having a bit of an outing today. By the time you read this I’ll be in hospital, waiting to have an arthroscopy on my right hip.

Way back in February 2009, it snowed. I had a doctor’s appointment that I couldn’t miss, so I put on my army boots and walked. In the space of two and a half miles I fell down, hard, not once but three times. Naturally, this hurt. I ignored the pain for quite a while, thinking that of course my hip would hurt after I’d fallen down on it. But during the course of 2009, I became slower and slower. Walking is my primary form of transport, so this became a bit of a problem.

In the summer I bought a new bike with lots of gears, but it was still painful to ride it very far. In the autumn I took up clog dancing, and that’s when things really started to hurt. I carried on ignoring the pain, partly because I was really enjoying the dancing, but mostly because I was getting married in October, and I was so busy that I didn’t have time to think about anything as trivial as a sore hip!

Our honeymoon was very active – we spent a week hiking and swimming at Center Parcs, and another week walking all over London. Some days I was in so much pain that I’d be in tears by the time we made it (slowly) back to the apartment. That made the holiday much less fun than it ought to have been.

So when we got home, I made an appointment to see the doctor. She sent me to a physiotherapist, who frightened me by telling me that he thought I had a crack in my femur that I’d been walking about on all year! I was rapidly sent off to hospital for x-rays, which showed nothing. Thank goodness! It did show the deformity in my left hip, but the right one definitely wasn’t broken. Then it was off for an arthrogram – a singularly unpleasant experience which I won’t describe and wouldn’t recommend! This was immediately followed by an MRI scan, to try and see inside the joint.

The MRI revealed a tear in the cartilage, and today I’m in hospital for the keyhole surgery which will fix it.

The down side of the surgery is that for several months my hip will actually be much worse than it is at the moment. This is extremely frustrating, as I want to be better as soon as I can! But hopefully, once the joint has settled down, my hip will be fine and I can get back to walking and hiking and cycling again.

I’ve jinxed the weather.

Sorry the weather’s so bad. I’ve never known a colder, wetter and windier May!

It’s all my fault though. Last week I bought sun cream, and a new pair of sandals.

Sorry about that.

Bramley the Barn Owl.

Owl, Mapledurham

Yesterday we went to a Live Crafts food & craft fair at Mapledurham House. The highlights of the day for us turned out to be the food fair, and the birds of prey.

Ben Potter had brought along owls, eagles, a kite and a vulture. Sadly we missed most of the actual displays, but Bramley the barn owl was out and about when we came past.

Owl, Mapledurham

I jumped at the chance to hold him, and was genuinely surprised at how small a barn owl is. When you see them on the television, gliding silently over fields at sunset, they give the impression of being absolutely enormous. But you can see from the picture here that he’s actually quite a delicate little thing – especially compared to Oska the eagle owl who was also in the display.

The Hawk Conservancy Trust, who are only about an hour away from us, offer a really interesting range of courses. We’d looked originally for photography-based days, but we’re now extremely tempted by the Training Birds of Prey weekend.

Depending on how quickly I recover from my hip operation (I don’t think I can negotiate walking on crutches and holding a hawk!), we’d definitely like to book ourselves in for some kind of time spent with birds of prey in the not-too-distant future.