Creativity and Hot Summer Days

 Today and tomorrow are forecast with 40*C temperatures so we are busy trying to keep the water up to some of our plants.February is a sad month for the gardens as most of the plants find the heat too much and disappear under ground.
The seasons are changing quite markedly now and it is drier and drier each summer.
The heat seems to kill any creativity in anything including us humans.
So my little textile/fibre artist booklets are in the doldrums.....

To find something to do, other than housework
or preserving fruit ( I have done 12 kg of sticky figs...and tubs of ratatouille marked as Rat and deep frozen....we won't starve this coming winter....) I thought the pieces of cover I knitted for the booklets and which did not work out, would make little cushions. Purely decorative and useless really, though they could be used to keep jewelry on perhaps, I did enjoy making tassels for them.....

 I forgot to mention the apricots. Last year I wanted Brian to cut the apricot tree down as it had not produced much fruit in its short little life.But he and Anton convinced me to give it another go. So we made a concerted effort to cut and poison all the suckers it was throwing up, watered it and Voila! a bucket full of lovely apricots which I made into some jam (my favorite) and stewed and deep froze the rest.
The tree is a Hunter apricot.

 All this preserving reminded me of a Gypsy saying I found somewhere and which always stayed with me " The winter will tell us what we did last summer".... this could be interpreted in different ways but for me it is to do with food.

This summer the bark and leaf litter of the gumtrees is astounding. I keep on raking it up near the house and putting it elsewhere but it could be done each day, a very contemplative act

We have also had some stunning sunsets this summer but there are only so many you want to record, I wonder what will happen to all the digital photographs we take these days....
The new rose garden has managed to survive so far, we only had one which didn't come out at all
The pond looks awful but the frogs seem happy and the white faced Heron has a lot of trouble seeing the gold fish, we intend to pump it empty when we get the first rains....oh, the first rains.....

Dwellings & Utrecht Psalter

Hello, to another project completed...
It is all still to do with using recycled tea bags which , when dry and emptied, turn into these fascinating and antique looking shapes.
The first lot looked like Medieval tents to me, so imagine my surprise when I started looking on the Web for information on these. They are actually making Medieval tents and pavilions today and there are societies which re enact jousts and other activities of Medieval times.

Getelds

The shapes on the first page look like tents which were called "Getelds" which originated in the  North of Europe. Pictures of these can be found in early illustrated manuscripts dating back as far as 840 AD in the Psalter of Utrecht. I found it rather intriguing that the University of Utrecht which is in the Netherlands and somewhat North east of The Hague, the city where I was born, has the largest collection of early illustrated manuscripts anywhere. Utrecht evidently was a very Protestant city from the word go, well, I guess since Luther split off from the Roman Catholic church in the early 15 hundreds.
The Psalter of 840 AD is an illustrated book of Psalms and were done by monks in Reims. Somehow the Psalter finished up in the Utrecht University. Apparently the illustrations are very lively and  not unlike the depictions by Hieroniemus Bosch of a later time.

On the second page the arrangement is that of a suburban landscape. Again there is a Society for
Philosophy and Geography which investigates the experiences and meaning of urban and suburban landscapes. This is so amazing I find,what will the human race do to keep itself occupied and interested in the way we all live.....
A lot of people love living in close proximity to each other of course and are quite lost when faced with open spaces, large open spaces especially.....

If the cursor has behaved itself (and so far it hasn't, placing itself somewhere without my permission) the page on the right is a take on a sampler my sister-in-law had hanging in her guest room in Sunnyside lodge at Beaumont.
It basically said the" The road to a friends place is never long" and that saying has stayed with me  the rest of my life, it is such a lovely thought. I do wonder what has happened to that sampler.
I have run out of denim to back the pages and so am using some heavy cotton a sewing friend gave me, but it is not as kind as old denim I find.

The back cover is a little different to the front as I forgot to turn the pattern around.
 The little base player is there to keep the book open at the right pages to photograph
He is made of steel rods and nuts and bolts, a friend sent it to me and he lives in the Studio.....