Truth is, I haven’t done that much in the last two weeks, but I’m still going to write, because I said I would write every two weeks in term time.
I painted the work bench my brother made me. He made it for me because he thought the Ikea ones I showed him were ‘flimsy and no good’, and also because my husband was adamant that I did not need another table in my room, telling me to use one of the other four tables I have in there. The trouble is, I still feel that I could use another work surface even now I have my new work bench, because any surface in my room instantly gets covered in things, leaving me nowhere to put all my other things. You could argue that I need less stuff, and not more storage, but you’d be wrong.
Anyway, the budget I gave my brother for the forbidden bench was about zero (for materials. I gave him money for the work) so he made it from scrap he had about the workshop so I painted it with left overs in the garage. It looks quite nice from a distance, especially with my new handwheel on the press. It makes everything much easier but it does make it much heavier, which is why I wanted a permanent bench for it in the first place.
The wheels were a birthday gift from my brother, after I told him I hadn’t bought any myself because I was ‘just shoving it about like it had wheels’. I did laugh when I opened them though- just what I always wanted!
I’ve also made some extensive sketches of mugwort. It should be a Lino cut at some point, but at the moment I’m mostly focussing on reprinting things that are selling out (swifts and hares) which doesn’t make for interesting viewing because you’ve seen it all before.
The garden is full of birds- all the local birds (that is to say, not the migrants like the house martins, swallows, and blackcaps who started nesting a little later having travelled here) have started to fledge. It started coming home from a walk, when the road was full of red kites, my son suspected something dead nearby but not finding any good reason, I came to the conclusion that the new batch was up and about. Next came the long tailed tits, returned from the hedgerows to teach their babies where the good fat balls are, followed by both the blue and great tits, flying all over the place shrieking at each other in what I decided was some kind of teenage gang warfare. I’m particularly fond of the blue tits, who I used to think were too commonplace to be interesting, who visit the peanut feeder and teach their babies how to peck out bits of nut. The grown ups are tired and ragged now,but their chicks are plump and round and faded, their colours growing in gradually, like a Polaroid picture developing before your eyes.
