Long time absent

a few blissful hours on our way home from Ludlow yesterday were spent having lunch and walking in the parkland at Croft Castle (near Leominster, Herefordshire)

It feels like forever since I last posted on this blog; as if - for a tiny moment in time - I am emerging from the long end of a dark tunnel and able to write again. Not that I've been idle, or ill, or anything like that. Just in a perpetual circle of tasks, work, tasks, work, and time passed and the posts I planned to write were somehow irrelevant. Yet it's been two months; I can hardly believe it, and we seem to lurch from one major happening to another. But that's in the nature of working freelance, and having an old and crumbling home, and over-large wild garden. There's always something to be done. The positive side is that we do not have to commute - and that's the downside too, in a way; you never stop. Or at least, I don't!

my husband's beautiful photograph of bare birch trees which he took for me whilst I participated in a Photoshop workshop (see below) - taken on the Malvern Hills; he walked and walked to take this for me; I plan to use it in one of my textile pieces

Time solely to myself comes in snatches, like brilliant jewels on a string of days. "Refilling the well," said Julia Cameron in her books on creative writing that I followed so long ago; but had I not, I would not be where I am today; I'm convinced of that. Though 'The Artist's Way' was not the sole catalyst in my journey  into the creative world. Good heavens, here I am, not having blogged for two months, and I'm rabbiting on about trivialities, when what I meant to write about was the joy of trees in winter, and how - as the Spring approaches and leaves unfurl - it will be months before I can again take the bare-branch photos I love to use in my textile pieces.

The textile pieces (quilted journal pages) will appear from time to time (when I complete anything) on my journaling blog. And weekly posts appear on the "Gardener's Companion" I am commissioned to write for Dobies of Devon; e-newsletter once a month and blog posts in the intervening weeks (these include all manner of garden-related topics, and my hand-written 'potager diary' which I began a few weeks ago). So maybe you will understand why I have not visited for a long, long while, for which I can only apologise. Oh, and my email system is up the creek; should you wish to make contact, please check my blog profile, which I have updated. (If you've emailed me this year and I haven't responded, it's because I can't access my old emails.) I'll catch up with everyone soon - something I love to do of an evening, if I haven't been staring at a computer screen all day!

A manipulated photo I took of part of the rookery at the Malvern campsite where I was participating in a Photoshop workshop. I learned how to 'remove' the caravan satellite dish that ruined the photo. I've been trying to take pictures of a rookery for years and this was a good one, though the original (not this) is long and narrow and intended for a winter blog header.