Mellbreak and Hen Comb

A gloriously dry and cold day, meaning that the tops were frozen - more importantly - the bogs were frozen!  So we decided to do Mellbreak and across the bog that is Mosedale, to Hen Comb. We parked at Maggie's Bridge NT carpark in Loweswater and headed along the walled lane past High Nook Farm and out onto the fell. Straight ahead lies the scree face of Mellbreak - the direct route...which when we looked back from the way down at the end of the day, confirmed how steep it was. Anyway, after the scree a nice scramble onto the summit ridge and splendid views across Crummock and Buttermere. Then down onto Mosedale bog and then up onto Hen Comb. A suprisingly hard walk for two small Wainwrights, that brings my total, second time round to 100. 

Loweswater in the frost.

Looking down the scree path.

Needle ice.

The mighty Grasmoor.

Icicles...

Frozen puddle before the dog ate it!

Frozen bog.

Across Crummock and Buttermere to Fleetwith Pike.

Yellow Club Fungus.

Ice crunching!

A nice light as the day began to draw in.

Our descent route off  Hen Comb.

And looking back at our scree path up at the start. 

Speleothem Textile

Talk about putting myself out of my comfort zone! With no final idea of what I was aiming for I began by dying some different fabrics and tearing them up to form four small 'picture' bases, much in the way that I had done for the Gitbarrows pieces. Click here for that blog. Anyway, after composing the pieces I used the embellisher to 'stitch' the layers together and to distress some of the fabrics. Looking at them I then decided to stitch them together as one long piece - based on the textures in caves - and began to machine stitch and hand stitch into them. Finally I added wax to some areas, before scraping into the wax and pushing oil paint into the scratches - a technique used by Debbie Lydon and learnt on the Fibre Arts Take Two course that I am doing - although I have had a six month break from it! Hopefully the piece reflects the layered and rippled nature of cave deposits, with the wax relating to the shiny smooth nature of the deposits.

Initial pieceing ...

Using the embellisher to join and distress the fabrics.

Detail before waxing...

The final piece ..and detail below...

Bejeweled cobwebs

It gets rather hard sometimes to make different blogs about the same place, so I nearly didn't take the camera to Wedholme Flow the other day. It was dull and murky and the moss would be the same autumnal colours - however, the cobwebs were beautiful! Glad I took the camera! 

Looking in one direction you can't see the cobwebs....

but in the other direction they almost look like silver umbellifer heads.

Candle Snuff Fungus

I didn't notice the tops of the Cladonias acting as goblets for the water droplets until I downloaded my photos - if I had I would have taken more pictures! 

Autumn colours ....

..and reflections.

Buttermere delights

With a good friend staying for just one day, the good weather fell beautifully for, amongst other things, a walk round Buttermere. Perfect! 

Gaitbarrows NNR textile development

As part of a project that I am working on, I want to go down a more abstract line. So here are a few sketches of Gaitbarrows and then some abstracted landscape textiles...small scale; hoping to lead to something larger.