Today I have been mostly making Christmas dresses. Yes, I only have the one niece… but I got a bit carried away in the fabric shop! The pattern is Butterick 3772, again. This time it’s in the largest size I have, so I want to get a few more made before they’re outgrown.
I didn’t deliberately buy birds and bees… in fact I didn’t even notice the combination until Paul pointed it out to me! But given that birds and bees are two of my favourite things, it’s probably no surprise that I was smitten with these fabrics.
I was waiting in line to pay for the fabric when I spotted this button across the store. How perfect is that? I kind of want to knit myself a cardigan now, and put great big BEE BUTTONS all down the front.
Not wanting the birdy dress to feel left out, and in the absence of a matching bird button, I thought these little pink flowers would do very nicely. In case the super-observant amongst you are wondering why you can’t see any buttonholes, it’s because the buttons have great big snap fasteners sewn underneath.
I haven’t added any pockets to these dresses, as I want to use the leftovers to do the same thing as last year and make a couple of matching outfits for her rag doll. I’ll make a start on those tomorrow, and if there are still any scraps big enough then these two dresses might end up with pockets after all.
We haven’t got enough space to put up our Christmas tree this year, so I wanted to try and make the house look a little bit festive with some other decorations. I’ve been coveting these tiny sparkly birds ever since I first spotted them, so I decided that a Christmas wreath was as good an excuse as any to go out and buy a set.
Heart rustic wreath, £6.99 from Hobbycraft (though mysteriously not on their website)
The birds and bees are all on little clips, so it was just a question of positioning them on the wreath and speading them out neatly. Easy peasy, took about ten minutes, and required absolutely no crafty or artistic skills at all!
Once I’d added up all the bits, £21.98 seemed like a lot of money for what looks like a few twigs with some chocolate wrappers chucked at them. But it looks very sweet (no pun intended), and I can put it away safely in a box at the end of the season to be used in future years.
Actually, as it doesn’t really look all that Christmassy, I might just relocate it to the Shed and leave it up all the time. It feels like better value for money if I can look at it every day, rather than just for one twelfth of the year!
This glamorous fellow is a Nicobar Pigeon. We met him at Bristol Zoo, in the Bird Forest. It’s a little section that you can walk through with lots of birds flying (or in fact mostly walking) around freely.
We also met a Roul Roul Partridge, who has an excellent punk hairdo and does a funny little dance when he digs in the leaves on the ground. He was the perfect size to pop in my pocket and smuggle out of the zoo, but I think they might have noticed. Shame.
I tried really hard to take a photo of the Nicobar Pigeons bathing in a little waterfall, but sadly it was just too dark in that section of the forest. You’ll just have to imagine how pretty they looked with the light and water bouncing off their feathers.
Way back in February, on our way home from Devon, we stopped off at Bristol Zoo.
I took a few photos, as usual, but I wasn’t feeling very well that day so I wanted to try and concentrate on seeing as much as possible and having a good time. I love anywhere that you can actually walk in amongst the animals, so getting to feed the lorikeets was the highlight of my day. You pay £1 for a little cup of nectar, stand in the designated feeding area, and noisy little parrots come and land all over you. Brilliant!
There was also a lemur enclosure that you could walk through, where we met ringtailed and mongoose lemurs and a bird forest. (More about that later.) There were also the most adorable fruitbats, but being February they’d wisely decided to stay indoors!
I loved the Twighlight area, which featured several aye-ayes, a not-very-slow loris, and the tiniest deer I’d ever seen. So cute! I also spent a long time failing to get a decent photo of a hilariously grumpy-looking chameleon, and laughing at a tern with a very dignified moustache.
I wouldn’t normally recommend going to the zoo on a freezing cold day in February, much less the first weekend of half term, but we really enjoyed ourselves.
The other day I went to see an exhibition of artwork by Polly Morgan at the Haunch of Venison. The exhibition is called “Psychopomps”, after the mythical creatures that conduct souls into the after-life.
This piece is “Atrial Flutter”, and it’s a human ribcage and spine, suspended from balloons.
Inside the ribcage is a beautiful taxidermied cardinal.
The pieces were displayed in a darkened space, accessed by a mezzanine walkway. You could also go into the room underneath, so you could see the sculptures from above and below and really get into the amazing detail and skill of the pieces.
My favourite aspect was that the room had been lit so that each sculpture left a delicate shadow on the wall or the floor. In this one you can see the colour of the balloons, but this angle makes the little bird disappear.
Polly Morgan‘s work is a little bit heartbreaking, but absolutely beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully you can all see this embedded video of the finches at the Barbican in London – an installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. We went on a little trip yesterday evening, and had an absolutely magical time watching and listening to a room full of little birds and musical instruments.
The video is of a previous incarnation of this installation, so the environment isn’t quite the same. The floor at the Barbican is wooden decking, with little islands cut out of it which are filled with sand and grass-type plants. The guitars and cymbals are mounted in these islands. The rest of the room is white, and there are roosting boxes high up on the walls so that the birds can hide away if they want to.
The sound at the Barbican isn’t quite as dramatic or as loud as it is in the video – unless the birds were just in a particularly quiet mood yesterday. The speakers are mounted well away from the individual instruments, so it’s quite hard to tell exactly where the sound is coming from. This makes the experience slightly more surreal, and presumably helps the birds not to be terrified that they’ve just made a bass guitar go CLANG.
The birds do fly free, so if you’re nervous about that it might be a bit stressful.
But you can get really close to the finches, and pay real attention to them as they go about their birdy business. I stopped noticing the sounds after a little while, but it’s really interesting how the noises that the birds make blends in really well to the constant little feedback sounds of them landing on the guitars or the microphone cables. Every now and then there would be a flurry of activity on a cymbal or a guitar, but for me the excitement and magic of the room was getting to see the birds up close and personal, interacting with one another. The whole room was filled with quiet, respectful, smiling people. You could see that everyone was dying to get really close to the birds, but everybody kept their distance – and if you got too close, the finches would simply fly away. At one point a finch sat on a man’s foot, and he looked as though he might explode with joy whilst standing extremely still.
Paul spent ages watching and listening to one little finch that liked to sit on the cable of a microphone that was attached underneath a cymbal. His little feet made scratchy pickup sounds as he shuffled back and forth. The cymbals were really lovely to listen to. They were mounted upside down, and two were filled with seed and another with water. As the birds pecked at the cymbals to eat the seed, there was a beautifully gentle ringing sound, like the softest gong.
I spent ages watching one little finch that had fallen asleep on the neck of a guitar. He looked so comfortable, perched on the strings! His eyes were shut tight, and he was gently rocking back and forth as he slept. Bless. There were also a pair of birds that had made a nest on another guitar. They were making a lot of noise as they rearranged all the strands of grass to their satisfaction. They were also quite defensive, and would sing loudly at anyone who came too close.
The Curve Gallery at the Barbican is open from 11am-8pm every day, and until 10pm on Thurdsays. We went at about 6:30pm, which turned out to be ideal. We only had to queue for about five minutes (sometimes the wait is up to three-quarters of an hour), and we spent around an hour inside. They only allow 25 people inside the exhibition at a time, so it never feels crowded. Entry is free, and sadly you’re not allowed to take photographs inside.
I only wish I lived close enough to go back again and again.
I’m just dropping in for a flying visit to upload the photos from the first part of our honeymoon – you can see them all here.
Yesterday we had a Falconry session in the morning, and an Encounter With Owls in the afternoon. This enormous chap was featured in both. His name’s Woolly, and he’s an Eagle Owl.
We also met a Merlin called Angel, a Gyr/Peregrine Falcon called Romeo, a Harris Hawk called Miller, and lots and lots of owls.
I have to confess that I am a huge fan of birds in general, and birds of prey in particular, so getting to spend a couple of hours getting to feed them and fly them to the glove was absolutely amazing.
I don’t know of anywhere local that rescues or rehabilitates birds, but I might have to do a bit of research when I get home. It would be brilliant to be able to have contact with birds like this more often.
To make the most of the fact that I happened to be off sick on the one day in the last fortnight when it wasn’t chucking it down with rain the entire time, I went for a very short walk with the camera – just down to the edge of the lake and back.
Paul’s taken the 300mm lens with him to Germany, so instead of struggling with the 200mm, I decided to have a play with the macro (70mm) lens.
Sitting on the teasels was a slightly ragged Painted Lady butterfly. I sneaked up on it with the camera, and it wasn’t bothered in the slightest.
A bit further along there’s a big bank of thistles, and they were covered in bees! I saw at least four different types of bee, although I wasn’t able to get decent photos of all of them.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a very positive response to my photos since I’ve been using a digital SLR. I do have some up for sale in my Etsy store, but I thought I’d simplify the process even further and make a page right here when you can buy prints and canvases in a number of different sizes.
Up at the top of the page, there’s a shiny new tab marked “Photos“. Have a look, and let me know what you think!
