Back from London and starting to get my head together. Added inspiration from seeing friends and finding out about all sorts of creative goings on has given me even more of a spark to begin putting into practice all the scribbled notes and ideas from 5 months on the road!
I set about painting a room and setting up a little work studio living space where I can hopefully push through the constant urge to procrastinate and distract myself (unlikely!) and start drawing, sketching, designing and visualising!
Slightly stumped by the problem of wanting to put up lots of different pictures, maps etc on the walls but also wanting the ‘display’ to be changeable so I can put up current work more so I don’t stand on it or ruin it by spilling coffee all over the paper I came up with an ingenious solution using simple dressmaker’s pins tacked into the wooden beam, from which clothes pegs (which I’ve whittled a little hole in one side!) can be hung giving an easily changeable wall display ‘system’ that’s damn cheap to make and looks rather handsome to boot!
First drawing commission is close to home, well can’t get much closer to be honest. It’s our house! Can’t reveal what it will be used for yet but it’s coming along and I’m loving doing some proper hand drawn illustration for a change rather than the computer renderings.
On a completely different note, I spent a lovely day accompanying my mum on a Fungi Foray walk around the local Pensthorpe nature reserve. A great few hours wandering the woods, led by the Fungi expert Dr Tony Leech. Having been a dry summer the prospect of finding many mushrooms was slim, but to everyone’s surprise the group snuffled through the leafy woodland finding ever more incredible varieties of fungal specimens! Our naive hopes of hopefully finding a good crop of edible shrooms was somewhat blighted by our discovery that the sheer variety of mushroom and toadstool found in the UK makes the distinction between edible and inedible really quite difficult. It hasn’t dampened my interest in forraging the wild larder for food though, collecting fruit and herbs on my travels cemented my love of searching through natural surroundings to find something tasty and I hope I can take advantage of the beautiful and hopefully bountiful Norfolk countryside while I’m here.
Even though we didn’t return home with our pockets full of tasty Chanterelles, we did stumble upon a huge Sweet Chestnut tree that was shedding it’s prickly seeds as we wandered beneath. Scouring the leaf covered ground we spent a good half an hour bend double filling a rucksack with beautiful brown sweet chestnuts ripe for roasting back at the ranch!
• EXPLORINGFOREVER • 