Snapdragon's garden

Something a little bit special . . .

I have always been drawn to graphic art. 
Back in my art curating days I found myself petitioning my bosses to work on posters and children's illustrations, biscuit labels and woodcuts rather than oil paintings.  I liked the distillation of images down to basic forms and the lack of bombast.

When I left the Hunterian I was in the middle of researching the work of a Scottish C20th wood type artist, Mary Viola Paterson, an adventurer and possible spy, who had been strongly influenced by the Provincetown printmakers of Cape Cod such as Blanche Lazell.

What I liked about these works of art was their simplicity, the plain blocks of colour, the humour.

It was these printmakers that I thought of when I came across these fabric panels earlier in the year.  They are all panels cut from US flour sacks and illustrate nursery rhymes.  Presumably a farmers wife had carefully cut them out and stored them to make a quilt.

This was a marketing technique - farmers wives would use the flour sack material to make quilts and clothes.  By printing each sack with a series of images the farmer was more likely to buy more in a single purchase - it took 4-6 floral sacks to make a dress; I don't know how many nursery rhyme panels would be needed to make a quilt.

What struck me about the panels was how accomplished some of the designs were - this scene from There was a crooked man for example with its spotty deco tree and perfectly balanced red bridge, or the wonderful dotty pinny on the cow who jumped over the moon.

I wonder who drew the designs.

I pondered and pondered as to what I should make with these panels - they threatened to stay in the box of things I stash and never use "because they are too good". 
Part of the problem was finding something to team with them - the panels are on thin material, peculiarly flat in its finishing which makes them very pictorial.   They didn't seem to go with any of the textiles in my stash.
This week, kept inside by my cold,  I decided to have a proper go at transforming them into something and got out all my materials into heaps on the kitchen table.  It was very frustrating. 
Though the panels are bright themselves, they are diminished by bright colours, they seem to weaken.
Then I thought of my bolt of wool gingham,and how black and white checkerboards were often used in posters and labels from the 1920s.
And it worked.
I mounted the panels onto cream wool flannel and then onto the gingham to give them some body and made cushions.

I think that they are really cheery - just the thing for a playroom or child's bedroom that you don't want to date. 
It is the Green Gallery Christmas Fair in Buchlyvie this weekend - Sat and Sunday 10.30-4.00.  It is my favourite of the fairs I do  - the stalls are all lovely and there is an appreciation of art and craft amongst the visitors.  Becky Walker who runs the gallery is a great host, the fair spills out of the gallery and into her home there is a warm welcome and lots of cake.

It is a place where I can take quirky one offs like these cushions.

Seasonal Christmas wreaths

I love wreaths.
I love the welcoming look of a ring of flowers, foliage fruit, the air of celebration.

I would love Britain to take up the US habit of having door rings up at other times of the year.  Not just for Christmas.

Martha Stewart's book on wreaths is one of my favourites with its many variations on the theme.   I often try to persuade brides that a door wreath is exactly what the church needs!

For me the essence of a door wreath is seasonality - it has to be made from things that are naturally available.  This wreath, which has been hanging on my greenhouse door for the past week or so, is made from apples and dried hydrangeas with red dogwood, ivy and green chillies.  It is a scheme that I return to year on year as it reminds me of Carl Larsson, of healthy walks outdoors, appley cheeks and a pared down softly coloured Christmas.

   The other colour of wreath that I do each year is the traditional red and green - ivy, birch, cones with bright apples, cranberries, holly and chillies - a cheering sight on a cold day.

I much prefer these casually seasonal offerings to the fashionable wreaths in the magazines with their out of season roses and shipped in calicarpis (both interestingly in season when the photos have to be taken in August!)

Over on Snapdragon's chat I am posting about what people buy as presents.

I'd also like to point people interested in honest business blogging to Caroline at Twice and Pipany.
Both have a lot of interesting things to say about small businesses and trying to carve out a niche.
 

Bleurgggh

Today is a cold grey wet day and I am feeling sorry for myself as only someone with a sore throat and head cold can.
Euan has lit the fires for me so I am intending to write off the day and snuggle up under a quilt to get on with some of this knitting .
I can't post proper photos as somebody might see!
The yarn is a beautiful cashmere marl from colourmart and the pattern simple enough to do while watching movies.  I shall go and see what is on TCM.

Hopetoun House

I've been wondering all weekend about how to post about this Fair.  Weighing up the benefits of honesty over maintaining a chipper front.
If I had done the post on Saturday night it would have been very depressing reading but today it is a bit of a mix.
Hopetoun House Fair is a well established Christmas shopping Fair - I don't know how long it has been going but certainly a few years.  A percentage of the door money goes to Macmillan and the rest of the proceeds to the running of the house.  There are about 60 stalls spread out between the ballroom, the main house and the tearooms.  It has the reputation of being a lucrative show to attend, despite the £300-650 cost of the stalls.
Mum helped me to set up the stall on Thursday and it looked very pretty - we were in the main hall, just to the left of the door.  There was a lot of natural light and though it was cold with the opening and closing of the door we were also next to the fire which made up for that.  I spent my day worrying that I wouldn't have enough stock.

Ha!  On Friday there were masses of people, the place thronged with manic shoppers. I sold 2 handmade items, some cinnamon sticks and a few pretty bought in Grand Illusion Christmas tree decorations.  I came home absolutely despondent - Sally kindly gave me a lift and listened to me wail on about giving up and Chinese imports.

On Saturday it wasn't much better, though at least we sold more hand made things and managed to make eye contact and talk to some of the customers.  Thankfully  on Sunday I sold more - people commented on how lovely the stall was, they were interested in the fact I made things, they bought more than one item.  It was a relief, though the event hasn't made me masses of money at least I haven't made a loss.

So it all leaves me wondering what went wrong.  Was it the wrong market for me - the Sunday shoppers were notably younger than those on Friday and Saturday, they also tended to be from outside Edinburgh, from Perth, Stirling or Glasgow.

Does handmade just not sell as presents when it is not a specific craft event?  The one thing that helped on the Friday/Saturday was that the other proper handmade stall that I rate highly - a Perthshire company making lovely things from vintage materials - was also having a terrible time.  Co-incidently this was the one stall that I would have bought things from (if I had made any sales myself!)

Was it location?  The next to the door stand which looked so promising actually turned out to be a backward move from the ticket desk, a lot of people bypassed us altogether, heading for the stalls they could see in front of them and then due to the one way system they never came back.  My sales went up after a kind head guide started to point to my stall as she gave people their tickets.  I would never again take a stall in this position - I also found that it suffers from the "I don't want to buy something as soon as I come in" syndrome.

I don't know.

I post this not to sound gloomy but because I regularly get emails from people who start doing Fairs and find it difficult to make sales.  They often assume that they are the only ones not selling and that it is something they are doing wrong.  They aren't, but not that many people admit to doing badly, it is as if they are admitting to failure.

Anyway, on the up side I don't have any stock worries for the fair next week end at the Green Gallery!  As seems to happen, I woke up this morning with a sore throat and swollen glands - my body obviously knows that I can take today easy - so I shall pack up orders and unpack the van and do very little else.

Preparing for the Present Event

This is Minou - our youngest and baddest cat.  A proper bandit with a Zorro mask for a face.  He is our only boy cat and the fact that I put up with things from him which I would not tolerate from Bix and Phoebe suggests that it is fortunate that I do not have a son.
He is definitely my cat.  Everyone else in the house regards him as a bit of a psychopath - but well . . .he is good to his mother.
Today he has been "helping" while I try to replenish my stock for The Present Event, a large Christmas Fair at Hopetoun House in Edinburgh this Friday, Saturday, & Sunday.
I really feel that I am low on stock - somehow we lost 2 weeks this year.  Already I find myself sold out of some things - felted Christmas trees, honesty hearts & vintage pencil rolls all sold super fast at the fair last week & via Not on the High Street.  So this morning I have been trying to make up a few of each so at least I will look well stocked when the early birds come through the doors on Friday.  I wish that it was possible to gauge the best sellers a few months in advance!
If anyone is coming along to the Fair at Hopetoun do come and say "Hi" - we are in the hall on the left as you come in the main door.

The problems with photos

Ah, show us some photos! 
Well I have a great problem taking photos of wedding flowers. 
Partly it is timescale - there tends not to be much time between getting into a venue and having to get out so that the party can begin. 
Partly it is fatigue - there is so much emotional and physical effort in arranging so many flowers in a short space of time that I have a tendency to collapse a bit as soon as they are finished - there is no way that I can bring myself to start bringing out a tripod and lights.
Mainly however it is because weddings tend to take place inside, often in dark sumptuous interiors like the hostel at Balloch.  So I have to use flash and that makes everything flat and washed out, it changes the colour, it emphasizes the details that you can't change - the plastic light switches, the cables round the skirting board.
We live in a very visually sophisticated world - used to the glorious photographs in coffee table books and magazines, carefully lit and styled.  When we had photos taken here a couple of years ago the photographer took 20 minutes angling dining chairs "just so" so that they looked like chairs through his camera lens. 

The upshot is I always hate photos that I take of my wedding flowers - they just don't look right.
One solution is to take photos outside before I put them in the venue but thats not always possible.

The photo of the heart hanging on the fence was by my friend Jane Robertson - its the one photo in this post that actually looks like the object.

The solution of course is to be like proper florists and have pretend weddings as a photo shoot.  Perhaps next year.

Seasonal weddings.

When I made the decision last month to focus the flower side of the business on special events the one thing that worried me was how to cope out of season.  For the past 7 years I have closed down the flower side of the business each October and apart from a brief flurry into Christmas wreaths, haven't started it again until mid April.
Obviously, if it is to be a viable business that has to change.  I am not prepared to start jetting in flowers from Kenya or Columbia so it has to be a case of working out seasonal arrangements that can be made from flowers, foliage and plants available in Scotland.

This last weekend was the first winter wedding that I have done - hopefully the bride and groom will not have realised that they were guinea pigs.  They were great to work with as their main criteria was that the arrangements be seasonal and local  so they knew that we wouldn't be flying in gerberas or roses.

The wedding was in a beautiful venue - the youth hostel just outside Balloch.  It is a late arts and crafts style  mansion, all wood paneling, stained glass and tall windows.  The room for the ceremony was a double height with embossed leather wallpaper, plaster and wood angels and a beautiful inglenook fireplace.

The bridesmaids were in red dresses - an ideal colour to centre the arrangements on - so I used dark red dogwood in urns on the stairway, rosemary in zinc pots with red ribbons for the table centres and cranberries and apples in the mantlepiece and wall decorations.  Downstairs were planters of forced hyacinth and jasmine alongside a Christmas tree to make the place smell beautiful when guests entered. The ceremony  took place in front of a wall with a high dado rail - wood paneling below, gilded walls above - we hung two arrangements on the paneling and put a row of apples right along the dado rail.  Very simple, very festive, very cost effective (especially as the guests ate the apples afterwards).

The bouquets were red berries, cranberries, rosemary and hyacinth pips  encircled with ivy.

The buttonholes are pictured above.

It taught me that whatever the season there is plenty that can be used to make a wedding beautiful.

Team cats.

We get our cats in team colours.

Every cat we have ever had has been black and white.

Every cat we have ever had has been wonderfully affectionate and tolerant.

This is Bix and Phoebe asleep on our bed this morning, lying in a pile of discarded magazine supplements while we drink coffee and wake up.

Bix, on the left here, was our first cat - rescued as a great concession to me when Euan and I moved in together in 1992.  Euan was supposedly allergic to cats.  I felt that a house wasn't a home without animals.  We went to the cat and dog home and there Bix was - turning somersaults in her cage - she melted our hearts and has been a fantastic friend - putting up with all sorts of indignities post children with good grace.

Phoebe was got to keep Bix company - we lived in a flat and Bix spent her days climbing the door jambs, riddling them with claw marks.  Sometimes I would come back unexpectedly early from work and there she would be clinging to the  wood, six feet in the air.  Euan brought back Phoebe as a surprise, she was tiny - far to young to have left her mother but motherless all the same.  Bix loathed her, she was mewly, she was smelly - there had been no-one to teach her the basics. 

Then one day I came back from work and Bix had her pinned down and was forcibly cleaning her -  Bix taught her to wash herself, to eat properly, to use a litter tray.  She turnined into one of those soft cats, prepared to allow children to dress her up - she hasn't missed a bedtime story in 10 years.

Now Phoebe, our baby and most babyish cat, is suddenly getting old - she seems far older than Bix - creaky joints, losing weight, problem skin.  There is nothing I can put my finger on but something is not right.

If I pick her up after Bix or Minou (our youngest cat) she feels as though there is nothing under the fluff.  It is frightening.

Fundraiser

Last night's Christmas fund raiser for Strathcarron Hospice at Amanda Reid's house was phenomenally well attended - when I left late last night they had taken about £500 and there was still a tin to count.

It is so good to see a local community supporting local charity - especially when we all know how difficult it is to prise oneself out of a comfy chair and back out into a cold dark night.

It was good to see lovely stalls and I did a fair amount of my Christmas shopping.

Today I shall be working on arrangements for a wedding at the week-end.  I am really looking forward to it - great couple, great venue.

Probably not a post for vegetarians

Earlier in the year we got 2 weaner piglets to fatten up for the freezer.
I love pork but rarely eat it as it is very difficult to get local outdoor reared pork here and I am not prepared to eat meat from intensively reared pigs.
This seemed to be the answer.
It was our first experience of keeping animals to eat and I really wasn't sure how I would feel.  My Mum and brother think that I am a monster, my Dad is after some pork for his freezer too.
Not long after we got them the pigs escaped over the fields into a neighbouring farm where there were cattle.  One pig was kicked to death by a cow and the other ran home.  It was a great shock, I felt very guilty, it seemed somehow to be more wasteful then when we lose chickens to the fox.
Yesterday our remaining pig went to the abattoir - we decided to kill him when he was still light enough to go to the local abattoir.  we borrowed a trailer and yesterday morning at 6.30 Euan and I loaded him up and Euan took him to Dunblane, about 1/2 an hour away.
I hadn't known how I would feel - I had been aware of deliberately not bonding with him in case I ended up wanting to keep him as a pet.  We didn't give the pigs names - not even jokey ones like bacon and chop.  He was quite an aggressive chap and a complete bind when I put the chickens to bed trying to knock me over and eat the tags off my wellies.
Then last week he began to escape - My Mum and brother said that he had worked out his fate - he would go down to the river - walk along it for a few hundred yards and then trek back up the valley sides into our neighbours horse field.
She wasn't impressed - he spooked her horses - I came back one night to find her screaming at Euan on the doorstep.  He escaped 3 times - on the last 2 occasions she called the police. 

The upshot was that I spent more time with the pig in the past week than I did in the past 3 months- coaxing it across pitch black fields with a torch and a bucket of feed and, with the help of a neighbouring farmer, we made him a pen out of field gates so that I could keep an eye on him from the house.  He resented his smaller space so I fed him lots of apples and scratched his back a lot.
I wondered if I would have a problem seeing him go.  But in the end it wasn't like that.  He lived a happy life he went into his trailer happily, according to Euan he trotted ] off into the holding pens without a look back.
My only regret was over the tagging.  We had been advised to tag him just before he headed off as pigs are renowned for taking their tags out.  So, in the dark, at a ridiculously early time of the morning, I attempted to tag my first animal.  It is a plastic tag , it folds over the ear and a small plastic plug goes through the ear, locking into a hole in the other side.  It  has to be punched through the animal's ear with a plastic plier type contrition.  My friend Peter showed me how to do it in theory the night before.  And I did it - nice and smooth into piggy's ear while he was eating - he didn't even stop his chewing.
Then, once he was in the trailer, I noticed that the tag had disappeared, it was no longer in his ear.  He needed it for the abattoir so I had to go into the trailer (crouching down as it was pig and not human height) and re tag his ear.  Euan shone the torch through the sides.  By this time pig wasn't as happy, I missed his ear the first time and then I  got a bit of ear that was perhaps thicker than I would have chosen if I had had more space or light.  He didn't make a fuss, but he did notice and I felt rubbish.  It wasn't the way I wanted to leave him.
The next thing is to pick up the meat tomorrow morning and take it to the butchers.  I don't know how I will feel.