rubykittyruby

  The hot weather continues, and I know I shouldn't moan.  I really shouldn't.  But I want RAIN!!!  I want a typical English summer.  Sunny days and showers, alternating blue skies and dreary grey.  I'm fair skinned and freckled and once - in my childish days - had bright ginger hair.  It's toned down over the years, but I still retain the kind of colouring that's not suited to high temperatures.  I go red and sweaty and come over all lethargic, I just want to lie on the couch like a swooning Edwardian lady, fanning myself and demanding a constant supply of cold drinks.   Okay, I'll stop whingeing now.  I just needed to vent.   These photos are from my jaunt to the Scrapstore on Wednesday.  It's located in Farsley in Leeds, which turns out to be a pretty place and I got the feeling it's a bit upmarket.  The high street has several fancy boutiques selling women's clothes, but I couldn't spot a single charity shop....

  Yorkshire's officially experiencing a drought, and I'm wilting from the heat.  It's that muggy, sticky kind of hot weather, and I'm lethargic and headachy.  So I've neglected the allotment for the last few days, just nipping down there to gather raspberries and the very last strawberries.  Instead, I've been spending my time reading the latest Richard Osman book - lovin' it - and messing about with junk journals.  These homemade books are my latest obsession.  I really enjoy making them, especially using up all that food packaging or scrap paper that'd otherwise be headed straight for the recycling bin.  Above is one of the journals I've been making and decorating, the cover being created from a tetra pack.  (That mess is my dining table!  I know, I know.) The other journal is much larger, and I reckon you can easily guess what the cover for this originally was.  That logo must be one of the most recognisable on the planet!  ...

  When I've not been picking strawberries off the allotment - they just keep on ripening - or reading Barbara Kingsolver's fabulous 'Flight Behaviour', or when I've not been trying to tackle the wildly dishevelled June greenery in my garden or moving furniture and cheese plants around in an effort to have a tidy house - I should give that up as a hopeless task - I've been dabbling in various crafty pursuits.   I've finished the scroll-like piece that I made as part of this month's Stitch Art group, based around an exhibition by Roger Ackling.  It only really makes any sense if you look at his artwork (and even then it doesn't make a massive amount of sense!).  But I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I've added it to the fabric book I made to collect up all my Stitch Art efforts.   I was hoping to roll this up into a scroll, like you would with a snippet roll, but including cardboard put paid to that.  So I folded it up and made a b...

  I'm not exactly good at painting, but I do love to mess about with colours.  These painted splodges are going to end up stuck in a junk journal.   But my flowery messes aren't the main point of today's blog post.  I mooched into the city centre on Wednesday for another of my monthly Stitch Art classes. This time we headed out of the art gallery and into the sculpture gallery next door.  It wasn't a building I'd been in before, but I will definitely visit again as it's a lovely space.  We had a chance to visit the archives, and in particular to concentrate on the work of a sculptor called Roger Ackling.  I confess I'd never heard of him before, but we had a talk from an archivist about his method of working and what inspired his art.  The current exhibition of his work is entitled 'Sunlight' and I'll quote from the printed guide:  ' For forty years Ackling made objects by burning wood, focusing sunlight through the lens of a hand-held m...

(Photo of my front garden.  Everything's growing like crazy!) Finally!  I didn't think I'd get any decent strawberries from the dried out looking plants on the allotment.  But recent rainfall's meant they've grown and ripened, and I've had delicious bowlfuls of 'em.  I don't eat them with cream - can't afford to scoff all those calories - but natural yoghurt instead.  Last year I tried freezing some of the berries I picked, but they really are best eaten fresh.  I'll save the freezing for blackberries instead when it's their harvest time.  So it's strawberries in my morning breakfast of either porridge or overnight oats, berries for pudding and berries for evening snacking.  Yum!  I finished reading the Stella Rimington book I picked up in a charity shop.  It was a decent enough spy story, but rather dry and I won't be in a particular hurry to read any more of hers.  I'm about to begin the Barbara Kingsolver novel 'Flight Beha...