May

I’m just home from a lovely teaching trip to Moor Hall Studio in Shropshire. This beautiful part of the country takes me by surprise every time I visit. It’s such a quiet part of the country, tucked between busier parts of Shropshire and the Welsh border with rolling hills and lanes lined with wildflowers and bird song. The may blossom is just coming out, along with the froth of cow parsley. Bluebells line woods and verges and their smell, when they are on mass like that, is intoxicating. I heard my first cuckoo of the year, as well as such a chorus of small birds. I was teaching my Weaving the Land workshop, which I will next teach at Lund Studio in North Yorkshire in later June/early July. If you’d like to join there are still a few places available to book.

Lovely though it is to be away in different countryside and meeting interesting students, there is much to do at home and on the allotment. The poly-tunnel is now constructed on the plot, after a very busy two days in mid April with friends and family helping - helpers came from London, Dorset and Edinburgh to help. It was a proper team effort and I’m very grateful for the help to get the structure up and the plastic stretched and secured. We were very lucky with the weather on the weekend we had allocated (months ago) and we had a calm warm day for the crucial bit. I recorded a couple of hours on the Sunday morning with time-lapse and here is the result - you can see when we had a tea break!

The poly-tunnel is tucked in a space between my shed and my neighbour’s, and is in a good position to get sun through much of the day. There are still some jobs to finish on it, but the main work is done, and I’ve started creating beds inside ready to get the tomato plants, that are crowding my home windowsills, established in there.

I sowed my flax in mid-April and this is now showing small pairs of leaves, having germinated in the last couple of weeks. Other seeds are sown and continue to be sown regularly. I’ve had an odd batch of compost that I bought for starting off seeds and some things have failed, either not germinating at all or failing afterwards. I’m not sure if it’s a watering issue or something else. But I will keep trying and some things will work, even of not everything takes.

The couch grass roots that I set aside when I was weeding the ground where the poly tunnel is now sited (see my previous post) are now mostly arranged in a woven work - shown above. It’s a mixture of order and unruly, which is what I was hoping for. I’m hoping to work with some other roots to make this part of a series. A bunch of dandelions that were weeded out of the bed in preparation for planting my potatoes were put in a bucket to clean off some of the mud, and they valiantly flowered and seeded in the bucket – they really are the most tenacious of plants. Some of the growing beds are still full of self-seeders that have grown since the last crops were pulled up. I’ll work through these, as and when I need to plant new things in there.

The dandelions growing amongst long grass and on verges and in fields are now getting long stemmed and setting seed in their wonderful globes. I am collecting these when there is a chance, but I have most of last years (and possibly the year before) collection stored. I haven’t worked with dandelion stems much recently as I’ve been focusing on other materials. But at this time of year, I’m reminded of their wonderful qualities and can’t help picking the long ones when I get the chance. They’ll soon be mostly over and other plants will take over to appear in abundance.

My woven nest piece (see my post ‘How to weave a nest’ from January) that showed as part of the Textile Study Group’s UNmaking exhibition has now moved to Oxford, to the Bodleian Library as part of Wonder of Birds.

Inspired by The Book of Birds by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane, Wonder of Birds celebrates the splendour of the birds around us at the same time as recognising the steep decline in bird populations across our skies in recent decades. Following the ‘Seven Wonders’ of birds – nest, egg, beak, song, feather, flight, migration – this exhibition pairs the words and art from The Book of Birds with Oxford ornithological research and Bodleian collections to explore the beauty and mystery of these extraordinary creatures.

I’m really thrilled that my Nest is included in the exhibition and I’m looking forward to attending the official opening this week. As the piece is now on show in Oxford for the rest of this year, I will be making new work to show in the second UNmaking exhibition when it moves to Stroud in September.