A jumper and a cardigan

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are two of my recent knitting projects. The chunky cable-sleeve cardigan was knitted in a day, and I learnt the magic loop method in the process (turns out you don't need circular needles of varying lengths; you can use long ones for small circumferences, too). It bought this pattern from Knit Safari and made it in size S, but I used different wool: Lana Grande from Cascade Yarns, which is 100% Peruvian highland wool and very soft and lightweight. I also love Tiam's designs with big sculptural sleeves and have bookmarked some I might try in the future, but I chose this one as it fits under a coat without being too bulky.

Making the jumper was a very different experience, and as I was switching between thick needles (I was working on a blanket with 25mm needles at the same time) and thin ones, my first attempt resembled a chain mail, as I didn't knit tightly enough. It is based on a free pattern by Paintbox Yarns ('Bubblegum Bobble Sweater'), but I spaced out the bobbles more - the original has two extra rows of bobbles between my rows. I also used different yarn again (a cotton/bamboo blend), and I didn't bother making the tension swatch. When I did measure along the way, I stretched the piece, which was another mistake (I do tend to interpret instructions as a rough guide...). In the end my head didn't even fit through the neckband and I had to make the front and back again. 

The result is now a mix of sleeves in XS, as they were fine, and the torso two sizes larger ('to fit bust 91cm', which I am not), but it is still quite small overall, so it works.

I am happy with how it turned out and didn't mind the extra work - I enjoy the process. Sewing it all together was the hardest part, and my seams are a bit messy. In hindsight cotton/bamboo wasn't the best choice for bobbles, but I just pretend the visible holes are deliberate. There are also some irregularities in the rows of stocking stitch, but I like the wabi sabi look.

I love bobble patterns - they are so tactile and fun - and am planning to make some cushion covers with bobbles next.

Flowers

From Lindgren, Astrid & Hartung, Louise: Ich habe auch gelebt. Briefe einer Freundschaft, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2016

I have been filling a sketchbook with botanical illustrations, experimenting with different styles, though most of them are quite realistic. I adore both the highly detailed botanical drawings of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and more stylised modern interpretations and am not sure where to go with mine, but enjoying the ride.

The ones in my sketchbook are all done with watersoluble coloured pencils. I only started rendering flowers in oils and acrylics as the main subject of a painting in recent years. Art history is filled with stunning examples of floral art, and they are hugely popular as a theme, yet for some reason I had only ever used them as part of a composition and rarely let them take centre stage.

I love Georgia O'Keeffe's big and bold sculptural paintings of flowers opening and blossoming. And cut-paper flowers and of course the real thing, fresh and ephemeral or preserved: For my birthday my nephew gave me a card with pressed flowers (which I will frame) and a beautiful necklace containing a daisy (and my sister's card was her own gorgeous botanical drawing). I've been revisiting The Paper Garden with Mary Delany's intricate botanical collages created with scissors and coloured paper and thinking about the lovely gesture of adding flowers to diaries and letters. Throughout their correspondence Louise Hartung would send Astrid Lindgren flowers in the form of bouquets and bulbs or pressed and attached to paper.

Since Christmas we've had two different amaryllises indoors, red and pink. Ever since my older sister pointed it out, I like to think of it as the plant of the three Wild sisters - my sisters' names are Anke and Sibylle, so bits of our three names are included in Amaryllis, in chronological order (I'm the middle child...).

The red variety, as so many red flowers, is a symbol of love, but in Victorian times, the amaryllis was associated with pride (which was seen as a good attribute, denoting beauty and strength) and in China the red amaryllis signifies luck. A pink amaryllis is a friendship symbol and I have been drawing it on cards. All varieties represent hope as well. Our two specimens brightened up our rooms in the darker months before the garden came into its own.

Bedrooms

Some normality has crept back into my days, and that includes getting things done around the house (we are still renovating three years after moving in). In autumn last year I deliberated over decisions, mixing three paint colours to get a calming shade for our bedroom walls (named 'Marina's Tears' by John), and spent hours painting. Fast-forward to October 2018, and it took me five minutes to pick a new colour without seeing it in real life, and this time we hired a professional.

For months we had noticed a strange smell in our bedroom, and after some detective work and paranoia (a diagnosis like lung cancer makes you extremely sensitive to any smells) it turned out we had got a bad batch of paint from a well-known company. In an effort to make their low-VOC paint even greener (not the colour), something to be applauded, they ended up with paint that allowed bacteria to grow, hence the cat-pee smell. The summer's heatwave aggravated it, but with everything going on we left it and moved into the spare room.

When I had recovered sufficiently from the surgery, the painter came and Marina's Tears disappeared under coats of stain block primer and the new colour (see first photo), which goes well with the blush colour in the dressing room. He also painted all the remaining timber and the radiators, and it has made a huge difference. We moved back into our bedroom, and that in itself has brought back more normality.

Though I happily interrupt that with different sleeping arrangements. My sister and her family stayed the night recently, and Aidan and I slept on the pull-out bed in the map room / yoga room. I had never shared a bed with a three-year old before; it melted my heart hearing his breathing.

I decided to tackle some small projects of my own and finally finished knitting the blanket that had been sitting in a big lump in various places for months and, momentum thus built, went on to knit a cushion cover for the guest room in two days, designing it as I went along, necessitated by running out of yarn: the other side features a pink square on a grey rectangle that has drawn generous comparisons to the art of Patrick Scott and Mark Rothko (apologies to both). 'Great to get that bit done', as they say here.

In progress

The moss stitch blanket I had been wanting to make for years is finally taking shape and is the easiest thing to knit, which makes it ideal for knitting while talking, but not necessarily to switch off your brain. Something more challenging would be required for that, though I do try to enter a trance of knit-purl-knit-purl, akin to a breathing exercise. I am using DMC Natura XL (cotton may not be the warmest choice for a blanket), but with size 8 needles, not the suggested 12, as it was too lacy with the latter.

The sky and the horizon in the large seascape change colour every day, as I cannot decide on the combination. Originally this was upside down and the dark blue was a beginning blurry cloud, inspired by a view from the car on our way home. Then John came in and turned it on its head, and now the sea has become the sky and the cloud is turning into who knows what, but I like it.

We watched a BBC documentary about the artist James Dickson Innes last night, and it made me realise once more how vague and shy my colours can be. I am tempted to start afresh.

In the kitchen | Quark bread and coloured walls

 Kitchen work-in-progress

Bread-making work-in-progress.

Illustration by Heather Gatley in this book, which has nothing to do with the bread and which I feel ambivalent about.

One of the things I wanted to get back into this year was making my own bread. Ideally sourdough, but I haven't started the starter yet. I used to make wholemeal spelt bread all the time and have stocked up on spelt flour, but I wanted to try some new recipes as well.

The other day I had to use up some quark that was past its use-by date. I always pick up quark when I see it in the shop, as it is a German staple, but then I never know what to do with it apart from eating it like yogurt or the two ways our family used it - German cheesecake, and potatoes served with quark whipped up with sparkling water and chopped chives and seasoned with pepper and salt.

A quick search online yielded quark oil dough, which apparently is a well-known substitute for yeast dough. In Ireland you cannot buy fresh yeast in the shop, only from bakeries on request, if they are happy to give it to you, and I prefer not to eat too much food containing yeast and haven't bought any dry yeast in years, so I was interested in how the quark oil dough would turn out.

There are various recipes, all very similar, but I didn't follow any particular one - I used around 180g quark, 4 tablespoons milk, 8 tablespoons oil (rapeseed), 1 egg, 350g flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt to make a braided bread (updated to add: I bake it at around 160 degrees celcius for about 20 minutes, though it might take longer, depending on the oven; with our oven, if you followed the recommended time, you would burn everything). You can add some sugar and raisins to make it sweet. It was so quick to make - no waiting, unlike with yeast - and came out well, despite my half-a***d kneading and braiding (hence the rustic look). It took only a few minutes to put together, still tasted fresh the following day, and we loved it, so this is where any leftover quark will end up from now on, and it will be great for making pizza. It is fluffy and moist, and I can imagine substituting kefir for the milk (inspired by my sister).

In August it will be two years since we moved into this house, and we still have a lot of work to do. The kitchen is one of two rooms where we left the old floor, and we also kept the kitchen that was there, but painted it (as well as the airing cupboard, on the left in the photo) and took out all the hanging cupboards. It is the only room that has colour on two small areas of wall (everywhere else is some shade of white, pale grey or charcoal, or - half the house - still unpainted). A few weeks ago, with the help of John's brother-in-law, we finally connected a lamp to the cable that was awkwardly sticking out of the corner between the blue wall and ceiling. Usually there is a small armchair in that corner by the stove - currently in the sitting room, as we had visitors and not enough seats -, so it is now a reading corner.

Reset - fruitfulness

A couple of months ago, when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and flustered, a friend gently reminded me of the Pomodoro Technique, the virtues of which I had extolled in the past. It was the same friend who had given us the kitchen timer that gave this technique its name. I was still using the system on and off (setting the alarm on my phone), but her comment made me realise that I needed to make it my default way of working.

This week I am working from home mostly. It is not quite back-to-school for me yet, as I won't be starting work in the Uni again until the end of the month, and I won't be teaching before October, but there are various things I want to get done before returning to the externally scheduled part of my work, and these quiet days at home are a chance to do that and also look after the garden. So here I am with the kitchen timer instead of the phone beside me (although I am not sure whether the ticking noise will become a nuisance. It is supposed to add a sense of urgency, but I don't want to view this as a race against time), and it has been going well. 

I am finally (finally) revisiting the Pirates poem that I illustrated years ago, and hopefully it will be a physical book soon. Having given away several of the drawings and not taken good-quality photos of them, I had some sort of block about redrawing them, but it is high time, or the author's children will be adults by the time this gets published.

For my Pomodoro breaks I mainly do housework, which tends to be the biggest procrastination tool for me when working from home. I can avail of the bursts of sunshine to get clothes dry outside and race out to take them in when the next inevitable downpour starts. Today I also made use of some garden goodies during a break, making apple sauce and preparing beetroot for tonight's dinner.

For the longer breaks or the mornings and evenings, going for a walk or a run is a non-negotiable, and as of this week I have made yoga a daily habit. My sister got me started again when I was in Germany, and I was embarrassed to see how much of my flexibility has suffered. In the past year other things had taken over, between the new house and the garden, and my haphazard routine often meant I would only do ten minutes on the mat. Better than nothing, but it wasn't what I wanted. So now I put on Yoga with Adriene every day and do at least half an hour. I used to teach myself with books (I have never been to an actual class), as I thought I preferred peace and quiet and following videos would just be another version of screen time, but being guided is so helpful and ensures that I show up.

Our summer-planning, bird-watching blackboard wall

In the house I lived in for the first six years of my life, our parents (both teachers) put blackboard foil on one wall of the kitchen (it was dark green, like the blackboards at school, and I remember it being very big, though it probably wasn't), and we spent a lot of time drawing and writing on it. My lasting memory is of my older sister using it to teach me to read long before I was meant to learn it, which was not what my parents had envisaged - they were not the pushy type and had not installed it for educational purposes. She turned out to be the strictest teacher I ever had.

We are now picking up the blackboard-in-the-kitchen tradition. John decided that the deep wall between the kitchen and the sitting room (previously they were two separate rooms) would be the perfect place for some blackboard paint, and it divides the two areas nicely.

Right now it serves as our 'summer diary' (though he immediately started worrying that having this all-at-once view of the months ahead would make the time pass even faster) and, in the lower left corner, our bird watching log, with the names in Irish. We keep a copy of Ireland's Garden Birds on the window sill where we can see the bird feeder and bird bath.

My friend also gave me a roll of blackboard foil, which we are planning to use in our studio and on the side of a tall kitchen cupboard. The teacher-daughter (and part-time teacher myself) me is very pleased, and so is the artist me, though so far I haven't picked up the chalk yet.

Red's Road to Green

 

Busy Red Tractor has made the journey across the Atlantic, and Red's Road to Green, the children's book by Amie Ní Nualláin that I illustrated, is now available in Ireland and all other EU countries via the Etsy shop I share with my sister. For the US, the book is available via The Indie Celt.

I am looking forward to furnishing our new studio bit by bit, so I can spread out all the drawings and paintings for upcoming projects and get stuck in. Some of my paints are still stored away, and I still need a desk, which is my latest excuse for procrastination.

Wild places

 

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind."

Katherine Mansfield

(quote chosen by my friend, author of this book of 'seeds', which is part self-help, part creativity notebook, part memoir, and one example of something intimate and personal that is at the same time all the more universal for it)

This collaborative project is now out in book form. Re-reading it, I stumbled across the part about the inability to finish a project. They are my friend's words, but that paragraph could have been written by me (less eloquently). The illustrations had been finished for a while, but finding the mental and temporal space to learn the graphic design skills I needed to create a book proved challenging.  But now, years after we started it, we are holding it in our hands. And it turns out I love putting together books. Not as much as I love the more immediate drawing and painting stage, the tactile, visceral bit, but there is something very satisfying about designing something for print. Thank you to Pilar and Irma for their patience. I am glad their words will reach more people now. 

Illustration | Red tractor

This little guy has accompanied me for well over a year, and it is now in the hands of the printers. The character was thought up by Amie Ní Nualláin, and we played around with a few different shapes to pin down what he should look like. I took inspiration from an old tractor in our friend's garden. The story will be published soon, all going well.

The builders arrived a day after I got back, and there is so much to do, I am getting by on six hours of sleep each night instead of my usual eight or nine. At night I slather myself in lavender oil to make the six hours as restful as possible, and I am doing my best to eat well to have the energy to get everything done. I imagine my current day-to-day is similar to what for many people would be their normal routine in terms of sleep and workload, but I know I wouldn't be able to function on so little sleep for very long.

New home | kitchen work-in-progress

 old chairs, painted

a still quite bare kitchen work-in-progress

 hot press corner, very much a work-in-progress

Work on the house (or Operation 'Add Charm to a Bungalow') is progressing very slowly. Winter doesn't seem to be the best time to get things done. Apart from painting furniture and moving things around from one temporary location to another we haven't done much. I did one paint job late at night and was rewarded with a streaky-looking lacquer coat the following day (see third photo above).

Because chalk paint has a very low VOC content and doesn't require much preparation work, I have been painting almost everything that needed painting with chalk paint. We are doing a lot of make-do-and-mend, and painting things can make such a big difference. We are keeping the kitchen that came with the house for now (but will take off all the hanging cupboards and put up a shelf or two instead) and painted it with Annie Sloan chalk paint, mixing 'Old Ochre' and 'Original' 50/50. The handles I painted a colour we got as a test pot in a DIY store, a pale lilac. There were also a couple of old chairs in the house, and a friend gave us another two. I painted them grey and pink, this time with chalk paint from Woodie's DIY, which was cheaper than the Annie Sloan and almost as good. Their range of colours is completely different, so I will probably buy from both brands again. Having said that, a small amount of chalk paint goes a long way, so I might not have to buy any more anytime soon.

For the black mosaic tile backsplash I got magenta tile paint, though we are also thinking of collecting larger ornamental tiles and creating a new backsplash at some stage.

The hot press is built into the kitchen wall and had the finish that is still visible around the doors in the last photo above. I painted the doors a light grey and took off the handles to make it look more like panelling and less like an inbuilt cupboard. For the frame we want a contrasting colour, but since we haven't decided what colour the wall will be eventually, we are going to wait.

Meanwhile this corner has become our favourite place to read and talk and drink wine. When we have visitors we pull up a small table and more chairs. We really depend on the stoves now that it has got colder. The sitting room (where the other stove is) heats up much faster, but a lot of life happens in the kitchen, which doubles as our office/studio at the moment. This is one reason we are going to knock down part of the wall between the two rooms. Large open-plan style wouldn't necessarily be my favourite (I quite like the cosiness of individual rooms, and open plan often feels cold, especially in Ireland!), but some sort of in-between makes sense.

*As always when I mention brands here, I do not receive anything in exchange for recommending or linking to things.

Happy Home

 Bought pumpkin pie. Almost as good as the homemade pie my sister gave us (no photo evidence of the latter).

 The Nicholas Mosse ceramics were a housewarming gift.

 

Little visitor

Our favourite card, made by the most adorable (and  perceptive) girl.

 Love the details (my palette and brush, John's stubble)

After a bit of a hiatus (that began when I started teaching again and may have also been triggered by the lukewarm reception I got for one of my DIY jobs...only joking - that was pure coincidence) we are making progress with the house. I was going to post some before and after pictures, but realised that I seem to have the dubious ability to make the after pictures look worse than the before, mainly due to light: All the befores are drenched in sunlight and the afters are taken at the end of the day, in artificial light, and look gloomy as a result. But they are coming.

We are still living in two rooms, and everything takes longer than we thought, but we knew that would happen, and it makes sense to take it slowly and not end up with panic purchases and all the wrong colours. It is such an exciting project. In the meantime we are making this our home with what we have and somehow don't even see eyesores such as the gas boiler anymore. It is also very much possible to get used to a chocolate 1980s bathroom suite.

We have had a good few visitors, with a good few kiddies on what we call the kiddies' bench (that we use a lot ourselves. I never had a bench before; it is now one of my favourite things in our house). We are finishing a jigsaw that four smaller hand were working on this afternoon. In the years I lived on my own I never thought of getting a jgsaw, even though it was something I loved as a child. I am so grateful for the constant surprises and ties to the past that cohabitation brings.

Pencil and paint

 Mounted drawings

 Mini-in-progress

Sketch for illustration

This has got to be the most productive phase of my life to date, and long may it continue. Though I realise there will be pauses and blocks, and they need to happen. Once I have figured out what has brought on this change from being an expert procrastinator to actually 'getting my stuff done', I'll share it here.

Preparation used to be almost counter-productive for me, a key part of the process that ended up being the only thing I would do for weeks (though the lines between preparation and the 'actual' work are of course often blurred). I would spend so much time preparing, organising and imagining and then wonder why I had nothing to show for all my 'hard work'.

A few weeks ago I ordered a lot of mounts (from a wonderful Irish company), intended for future prints of my paintings. I proceeded to store them under the spare bed, and then worried about them because a) I am a big believer in keeping the space under the bed empty, and b) mounts are fragile and Irish houses are damp. I would take one mount out to use it and try to wrap the rest in a way that would keep them dry and not damage the corners. Then I moved them to some thin drawers, which is a much better home for them.

And then I thought of all the original drawings I have and decided to start using all the mounts now rather than wait for the prints. Five of the original Jumbo drawings are now mounted and available for sale in our Etsy shop. It feels good to move from a preparatory state to action.

The mini paintings of Irish scenes have proven quite popular, especially the Long Walk one, and I finally bought some more 10x10cm canvases and work on them when taking a break from the large works-in-progress. I do a different underpainting each time and change the colours a bit, and they are never exactly the same as previous ones.

The illustrations for the book I have been working on since the autumn are nearly finished - one more double-spread to go, and of course that final scene is the most daunting.

With this newfound energy and productivity I hope to get back to posting here more often, and not just updates about my work...

Mini March

 A new addition (bottom right - a variation of the Long Walk view) to my series of 10x10cm canvases

Book and knitting - beautiful colour combinations happening by chance

Lionel signing books at his reading (photo by Conor Gallagher)

March is here and almost gone again, and my focus is on reducing or managing stress, panic and anxiety and working my way through everything that needs to be done with zen-like calm. At least I am aspiring to the latter.

The only thing I have painted this month apart from the illustrations is a tiny 10x10 canvas, which was a commission. Now there is only one of the ten mini paintings left (the one on the left in the photo), so I am going to get more of those canvases and continue with these scenes, parallel to working on some big(ger) paintings. I have unwrapped the canvases and lined them up; it's a start...

I am also knitting tiny things and hoping the babies they are for won't have grown too big for them by the time they are finished.

We had a room full of children (and adults, and beautiful paintings on the wall - this was The Model, which has a great collection, including one of the most significant public collections of works by Jack B Yeats) for Lionel's reading for the Sligo Children's Book Festival. It was a lovely event and one of the few times a year the three of us who worked on the books (Lionel, Conor and I) get together. Lionel did a mixture of reading and storytelling, and the children got involved, answering his questions with impressive attention to detail.

There has also been a short trip to Germany for my cousin's wedding, a long weekend that flew by but simultaneously seemed to stretch out, due to its being so different from my normal routine. That's a micro example of how 2015 has felt so far - one week rolling into the next, all a blur, while at the same time so much has happened that I marvel how it all fit into these almost three months. From next week I'll be teaching on Saturdays again after a short break, so Sunday will be my only day off, and it shall be a day for day trips, to capture a bit of that feeling of time expanding and a proper (albeit mini) holiday.

In a child's world

Print, mounted

Illustration and wet palette

A beautiful book

In the time that has passed since my last blog post I became an aunt (my older sister had a beautiful baby boy), which has opened my heart in  wonderful and wondrous ways.

Lately, a big part of my work has been populated by illustrations and paintings for children, and what a happy dwelling place it is. Several prints of the festival artwork have found new homes in nurseries and children's bedrooms (but not exclusively; it is nice to see that adults want the picture for themselves, too), and I am planning to do more in that vein. After years of teaching mainly adults, a new opportunity has come up to teach children again. Children's books and illustrations are such a big passion of mine, it is lovely to now be so immersed in this world as an aunt, artist and teacher.

Just before I was offered the new teaching job, I had made the decision to free up some space in the summer (the fringe festival I worked for over the last five years has been put to rest and will be replaced by a new festival, which I chose not to be involved in). I have a two-person show in August and hopefully another exhibition in September, and it feels good to see the next few months shaping up in quite a different way from previous years. Not least because this summer will bring another nephew or niece!

On a much much smaller scale than the truly life-changing events of my sisters becoming mothers, my working life has been revolutionised by the purchase of a wet palette. It keeps acrylic paint wet and means I can snatch 20 minutes here and there working on a painting instead of spending 20 minutes cursing the tubes that are so hard to open, running them under hot water in order to be able to open them, trying to gauge which colours and how much of each I need, mixing the colours, sticking the palette in the fridge afterwards in the hope they'll stay wet until the following day, when inevitably I won't have time and end up with hardened paint yet again. Now all my colours are there for me to use straight away, and when I'm finished I just put the lid on the palette and rinse the brushes. Increased productivity lies ahead.

Now that the busiest time of the year is over I am looking forward to doing things that have been neglected because they were neither work-related nor crucial for survival. One of them is to bake something from the book in the photo above, which my sister gave us. These cakes include vegetables and alternatives for regular flour, and, while far from healthy, are certainly better for you than cakes made the traditional way.