Thursday 12 January 2017

Walk, Walk, Walk.....

Today I turfed out my hand dyed fabrics to see what I have left. Not a lot in reality.
The pile top right is for over dyeing. They either need pepping up or calming down, most of them are from my City & Guild days so a bit experimental. I'm sure they'll be back with the others before long once I've found all my white cottons and silks too. 

On Monday Ellie and I set off from the village at 8am for a walk. 


It was a beautiful, crisp start to the day and we had a lovely time but it did start getting greyer as the forecast had said it would. 

In this photo the faint hill in the very furthest distance, you can hardly see it in the middle there, is just about where we set out from. 


But 3 hours later and 7 miles further we made it to Badbury Rings. 

We walked down Ito the car park just as the heavens opened and John pulled up to take us home. It was the furthest I'd ever walked in one go! 

Tuesday I went to London to see the Opus Anglicum exhibition at the V&A.  My Southwest train took me to Clapham Junction and my ticket took me on to Victoria but the Southern Rail train part of the journey was on strike so I chose to walk it.  The map said 2.5 miles. My MapMyWalk said 3.4 by the time I had walked up the steps at the front entrance. 

The exhibition was really busy and it was hard to get close enough to a lot of the exhibits to see the minuscule stitching. It was still nice to see all the bits I had been looking at in my book over the past few weeks though. Silly thing that caught my eye was the huge size of some of the feet in the pictures! No photos allowed sadly.  After I had some lunch I wandered around a few of the other galleries for a couple of hours and then decided to walk over to Waterloo station as that would take me past quite a few of the sites of London starting with the Oratory and then Harrods which I haven't been to since the children were very small. Lots to see though and not just Buckingham Palace, Horseguards, St Stephens tower, now the Elizabeth Tower, and the Houses of Parliament but lots of really fancy fast cars going no where in the static traffic, dogs dressed up to the nines, street buskers, spray tans and piled on make up, suits of every colour and holiday makers wrapped up against the cold though I didn't think it was that chilly. Anyway that walk was 4.8 miles apparently so that, getting there and the walking around the museum totted up to just over 9 miles. I'm doing well!! 

Yesterday John and I did a bit of work on this little beauty. 
Only thing wrong with it was the paper didn't feed so we stripped the top carriage down, found a few missing parts in the works, gave it a damn good clean and it works really well now. It could do with some new feed rollers but we can do that another day. I'm over the moon with it. 

Tomorrow Ellie and I are off on another adventure but the snow is supposed to come. Nothing down here yet but it has been raining and now the sky is clear so it will be icy in the morning no doubt. I'm setting of early so I can go slow and steady. 

Red Sky in the Morning has a proper sleeve too now so that's finished and I've another piece on the go so if the weather does turn I've plenty to be getting on with. Have a great weekend!