happy mothers day

"chicken wife," original papercut by Sarah Bell

Happy Mothers Day, everybody!
Just to wish all the mums who may read this a happy day...

I'm lucky to have a child still living at home to say this to me,
and bring me coffee and a pressie in the morning, and it's always a special time.

Mother's Day this year will be rather poignant though, as it will be the first year when I shan't be picking up the phone to ask my own mum if she has received her card and package in the post,
all those hundreds of miles away in the North of England.

At teatime on the last day of last year I received a phone call to say she had been rushed into hospital. The following hours were awful: hanging on the line waiting for each text and call from my sister who was with her. Mum died suddenly, twenty minutes into the New Year of 2011, whilst all the celebratory fireworks were popping and fizzing over the night sky.

I don't want to linger on that time here, and it's still difficult to believe that she's not in her little flat in our hometown, always ready to chat and dispense good advice and home remedies. I want to say something positive rather than disheartening on Mother's Day.

Mum: I'll always love you.

I wish , wish , wish I'd made the time to see you more often. But when I did it was wonderful.
You were wonderful.

One of my great ambitions is to be as good a mum as you were for me and my sister, but I know I can never come close to the example you gave me. But I'll keep trying.

Mum was only 68 when she died. I'd expected we might still perhaps another ten years together.... Ten years of trips up north to visit her; take her out for lunch or a night away; have a little potter around Clitheroe, or St Annes or Southport. Of sitting with her as a matching pair in the chairs by the fire after tea reading the local paper, listening to the radio, (and sharing an illicit bar of chocolate before bedtime.)

Well it turned out that those extra years weren't to be, but she has left me a lifetime of memories as priceless and rich as a tapestry.

Thank goodness for mums. Let's cherish them.

Happy Mother's Day, all....

Walking the Dog

Eliza and Rowan enjoying a stroll by the river

Well, here's a short version of how we got our new lovely, lovable English Cocker Spaniel, Rowan (see soulful photo below)

Here at Sampsons Farm Hotel, as well as cooked English Breakfast, out in the garden we also serve teas and coffees and cakes, and scones and jam and yummy Devon Clotted Cream....well, you get the picture....and we have a group of local dog walkers who walk along the meadows of the River Teign here every day and come back to Sampsons for a coffee at elevenses time.

A couple of months ago, Ann and Alan, who have two cocker spaniels, suddenly turned up with three. Three and a half years ago their girl dog had a litter of puppies, and the new third dog had been one of them. His owner had recently returned him to Ann and Alan after three years, saying that the husband was allergic to him and they couldn't keep him any longer. They were looking for a good home for him.

Every day I would go out to say hello, and every day , Paul, one of the other dogwalkers in the group would make a joke about me meeting my future dog. "Ha ha" , I would say. "But I'm not a dog person."

This went on for several weeks, Paul insisting that this was the perfect dog for us, and that Sampsons was the perfect home for the dog.

As the days went by I did start to consider what life would be like with a dog. And begin to think that it could work. And then I would just as quickly talk myself out of it again. (We do have rather a chaotic lifestyle here.) I had several long distance telephone conversations with my mum about why we simply couldn't have a dog. But that he was lovely. If we had in the position to have a dog, he would be perfect.

Every day Alan would smile in his quiet way, and occasionally ask whether we had made a decision yet. I wasn't quite aware that I'd said I'd even think about it.
But I had been thinking about it . A lot. I had a hundred reasons not to have a dog. So why was I constantly thinking about it?


And after two weeks of telling most of the people I knew about this lovely, rejected dog who was coming to the farm every day, and why we couldn't have him, I found myself asking Ann and Alan if we could try having him for a week. (????!)

Ann came with him a couple of days later with a bag of his home from home goodies: feed bowls, cushions, dog bed, Bonio biscuits, a tooth brush and
poultry flavoured toothpaste.....
After a quick scout around the house, he settled down by my feet as I worked at my desk, and he hasn't been much further away from me in the two months since then.

He is totally gorgeous, and we love him to bits.

I can't say he's the most expressive dog ever: it's a bit like he's had an over the top Celebrity Botox Job and can't move his forehead. He has just one look, and it's a constant unblinking gaze. He could win a stare-you- out competition anytime. But check out that tail. All the expression is going into the tail: it never stops wagging. And when we go for a walk that little dog bottom skips along with this waggy tail and he looks
very, very happy. And so are we....

And whilst we're on the subject of dogs, here's a pic of some American Cocker Spaniel puppies who came to stay at Sampsons with their owner a few weeks ago. Have you ever seen anything like them?! They look like they've been designed by Walt Disney, they are so cute. If I hadn't seen them with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed they were real.



And here's the lady who is their proud owner. Hope she brings them to visit again soon.



And on another subject entirely, below is a photo of a very tiny portion of of a vast amount Somerset strawberries I bought to make jam with a few weeks ago.


Making vats of the stuff I was, the week before we went on holiday to France. I'd bought a whole crate of punnets of strawberries to make jam for the
cream teas at Sampsons.

I was Total Earth Mother, complete with my 50's apron, listening to Radio 4, with three collossal Kilner Jars at the ready, as well as twenty odd small mismatched jam pots that I'd saved up over the year, boiling up strawberry jam in just about every bucket sized pan I could find. I used special jam making sugar with added pectin, which you only have to boil for five minutes before bottling. It sets amazingly quickly. I used it last year and it worked a treat .

Only this year it didn't bloody set.

And I didn't have time to re-boil it before I went on holiday. My lovely mother in law Hazel, got the three huge Kilners out whilst we were gone, bless her, and boiled it up again for me with a bottle of pectin to get it to the right consistency. So the Sampsons Devon Cream Teas are no longer in jeopardy in the near future, I'm pleased to say.

But my own twenty odd mismatched jars of extremely sloppy jam are still sitting on the kitchen worktop (yes, that same worktop that is not meant to be a storage area) staring at me balefully every time I enter the kitchen, and it's already a month since I made it.

I keep avoiding its eye, and hopefully some good elf will turn up in the middle of the night whilst we are all asleep and empty it all out, sterilise all the pots, boil it all to setting perfection, and repot it all without getting half a kilo of hot jam smeared over every part of the kitchen as well as over the outside of every pot. Oh, and if he could label it too, that would be even better...........

Come and pop over again soon for tea and scones and strawberry.....soup....
Love,

Back from Sunflower Land

The view from the car as we pottered along the rural roads of France last week....


Hello Darlings!
Well here I am surfing the blogwaves again after a very big gap (sorry....)
The two weeks before I went away were manic, then I was away on our family holiday to France for ten days, and now this week has whizzed past in an awful frenzy of post holiday washing activity and trying to tidy and clean the house before my mum arrives for the summer hols this Sunday..... (although why I'm even attempting to execute about six months worth of "tidynclean" in just one day I don't know. )

When we first moved into our house,which is a converted barn , a friend of mine asked if another friend of hers, who was a freelance photographer for interiors magazines, could come over because he was always looking for fresh homes to photograph and write about.
I agreed , and he duly arrived on the given day, after I had been cleaning non stop for the previous two days. |Obviously. "Hmm......," he sniffed, as he surveyed my kitchen, " I'm always telling my own wife that work tops are for working on: they are not storage areas..........."

Needless to say, he was not offered a cup of coffee, and our house was not featured in a magazine.

And I am not tidy.

And as my mum so rightly says,
"There are those who have a tidy house; and there are those who make things....."

Love,

PS I realise that I haven't even mentioned our holiday, and neither have I told you the story of our gorgeous new dog, Rowan. But I will next time I promise, and in the meantime, here's a pic of Eliza having a cuddly moment with him...

Our New- to- You Dog

It's very odd but in the last year I've developed a bit of a thing about dogs......
During the usual scavenging expeditions to flea markets, car boot sales and charity shops, childrens books, old cigarette cards, old black and white photo's of dogs have joined my more usual purchases of fabrics, jugs, buttons and books. I've done paintings of 1920's ladies with Airedale Terriers and Greyhounds; embroidered tea cosies with pictures of Labradors, Fox Terriers and Jack Russells and have been taking photos of lovable, scatty dogs all over the place.
But I am not a dog person.
Or rather, I wasn't until last week.

But now, here we are, seven days later, the new and besotted owners of our pre-loved Cocker Spaniel. He's three and a half and very gorgeous. Here he is on the beach at Teignmouth tonight, contemplating his rubber ball. He doesn't have a huge repertoire of expressions, but he's an absolute master of the "thoughtful", "patiently wise" and "soulful" looks.......
Here's another shot of Teignmouth, which was looking particularly beautiful tonight: we took him for a walk along the promenade. You can see the Victorian pier in the background.
And here's our daughter Eliza with the new light of her life.... As I write this on the computer, our new dog is sitting quietly under the desk, tickling my toes with his lovely silky fur. Happiness is a dog.....

In the next post I'll tell you the story of how we got him.
So sorry I haven't written anything these past few weeks: chaos has reigned in our household, our home looks like someone has just burgled it, and despite complaining to my husband that we never do anything, we have had so many social occasions recently that I'm on the point of collapse ( two evenings a week is really pushing it for me, staid homebird that I am.) But within the next few days I'll check in with you again and I'll put the kettle on for us.... Come and visit soon.

Have a lovely weekend!
Love,

Sarah x

Mothers and Daughters

Last Saturday I was having a tranquil time, teaching watercolours to a group of beginners, with the sun shining in on the jug of tulips on the table, and some 1940's big band music on in the background... Couldn't have got much better, really. The postman arrived, and I opened some letters as I waited for everyone to finish an exercise in mixing colours.

And then the day got even better. This photo (above) came out of an envelope. It shows one of my students, Jen, with her daughter Sarah, and Sarah's tiny daughter, too. Here's what Jen's husband John said in his letter,
"My wife and daughter enjoyed the "Painting Chickens and Ducks Workshops" last Wednesday so much that that they decided to practise the following day.
Of course Sarah's daughter wanted to join in as well, as you can see. But she has to learn that you have to paint on paper and not cover your hands in paint!"

Although the little toddler is using a brush, her hands are covered in paint right up to the cuffs of her overall. I just love this photo. It makes me laugh, but I find it really moving, too. As a child I loved nothing better than painting with my dad, or sewing and making things on the living room table with mum. And some of my best times with my own eleven year old daughter are when our heads are bent over the table together, drawing, cutting and sticking. ....

Well, on another subject entirely, I did promise ages ago, to show you the photo of the twin orphan calves at my friend Elizabeth's farm. Here they are, below. Aren't they beautiful? And they are doing a great job of looking after them down at the farm. I'm hoping to get over to Elizabeth again in the next few weeks and I'll take another photo of the twins as an update, to show you.

" I never thought I'd see the day..."
Nope, I never did think I'd see the day when I would bake an apple pie ( and make the pastry by hand!!) like this.
Although I love the idea of baking, and have every kind of tin, biscuit cutter, piping bag and dish under the sun, the idea somehow rarely becomes a reality.

The last time I made a chocolate cake it turned out like two oversized chocolate biscuits on top of each other, and I never remember to defrost the frozenm ready made pastry in time for an apple pie, so it always ends up as an apple crumble instead. But at the prospect of Nigel's venerable uncle and aunty coming down to stay from Tonbridge Wells, and in an uncharacteristic fit of bonhomie, I offered to cook Sunday lunch for all Nigel's family so they could all meet up with the long lost uncle again. I decided I'd better do something a bit more impressive than the usual crumble.
Luckily I saw a deep dish apple pie made on a TV programme and was inspired. Ok, it took a long time (most good things do,) and the apple inside wasn't quite as cooked it could have been, but hey! It looks pretty convincing, don't you think? I had to take a photo of it to prove that I had made something like this , if only once in my life...

Today is a nice calm day: the birds are singing, the sky is gloriously blue and sunny, my admin is finished for the day (phew,) I'm sitting here writing my blog and am just about to go out and plant some Sweet Peas and Ox Eye Daisies.

Tomorrow, however, the forecast is rain and cold, and I'll be driving to the county of Somerset to take part in a "Women Do Business" Day workshop on "Exporting Abroad."
Well, it sounded a good idea at the time....
I'll take a clipboard with me. It might make me look a bit more official.

And Nickie in America: if you're reading this, I might have to prevail upon you to buy one of my postcards next week or something, so I can say that the workshop worked, and that I've already started exporting my work .....

Call again soon! The kettle will be on....
( But it's only fair to tell you that last Saturday night I met up with my friend Alice again (the one who prompted my little diatribe about elections and voting a few weeks ago) and we were putting the world to rights once more. Some Rum and Cokes were involved.)
.
So you might be in for another lecture on The Nature of Modern Life, on your next visit.
And you can't say you haven't been warned....

Admin made my hair go frizzy...

Yup, I could be Marlene's twin right now......
Well, it's more my brain thats gone frizzy rather than my hair. Too many hours staring at my computer screen wrestling with charts, calendars, highlighters, diaries and scraps of paper in an attempt to finalise the dates for teaching my workshops for the rest of this year.

I suppose I must be commitment-phobic at heart: it nearly kills me promising to be available on a date and going through with it. How can this be, when I enjoy the teaching so much? When I did a few years of teaching at a local school I had no problem at all in the commitment, but now that I have the choice of which days to work I get all shifty and evasive.......... But what a luxury problem: I have nothing to complain about!

So after setting the dates; doing a mass mailing to my email list; sending the dates to Matt my lovely webdesigner; and then deciding to overhaul virtually my whole website
( well what a great idea THAT was: there's no such thing as a little website project....) I was feeling very frazzled last night. I thought I'd better still make the effort and go to my Monday night SalsaDX class ( a provincial girl still needs her Latin rythm, even if it's in Bovey Tracey Church Hall) so grabbed my dancing shoes, and steamed off in the car to get there just in the nick of time.
To arrive to closed doors and not a soul around.
Odd.
Usually the doors are flung open; some of the girls are having a quick cigarette in the carpark and the sound of Havana is blasting out. I hung around for a while then checked my watch. I had turned up an hour too soon.

Went back home, spent another frenzied forty minutes scanning pics in , writing stuff and emailing it to Matt, and then returned to salsa. Late this time.... But it was all worth it. There's nothing like wriggling those hips to Latin music played loud to perk you up.
And tonight, here I am on the sofa, after ten hours at the computer, a human vegetable with a very bad back. So no more computer for tonight. The lovely Luther is on BBC1 right now and I think it's time I watched him. I can tell he wants me to.

Well that'll be all for tonight then, folks : it's Luther, a cup of tea and a hot water bottle for my back. Night, night!
Come and visit soon for morning coffee.....

paintings of chickens

"buff orpington chickens at sampsons farm" by sarah bell


Good morning from Ruby, Olive and Doris...........

Yes, here are my beautiful chicken girls, first thing the yesterday morning, deciding whether to venture out or have a lie in for a bit longer. We've moved them into new luxury accommodation, that is, Eliza's old Wendy House.

I had to brief them before breakfast with some modelling tips, as it was the third day of teaching my watercolour workshops, and yesterday was "Painting Chickens and Ducks". After a few pointers on deportment, holding a pose for as long as possible and keeping hydrated with lots of water, I left them to it.

Below is a pic of Jamie the miniature Pinscher, who is now an expert on watercolours. He came all the way from the Netherlands with his mistress, Susan, to take part, and slept and sat quietly in his basket in the studio for the whole of the three day course. Well done, Jamie...

Here's one of my lovely students showing off some of her one minute paintings of the chickens in the paddock.

And below, one of the models, striding back to the field after coming to do a quality control inspection some of the drawings

The students had a visit from our newest babies, two of seven tiny bantam chicks currently having a very snuggly time with their mum in the maternity unit (I'll post a family photo of them later this week.) In the meantime, here's a shot of them sitting on a drawing board, but we didn't keep them out long enough to draw as they get cold very quickly.

We had a fantastic day, bobbing in and out of the studio, visiting the chickens , sketching and painting....

The next two paintings are some examples of paintings by my clever students: all eight of them did some fantastic work, and we all had a really enjoyable time.

And here we all are for a group photo at the end of the day. I don't know how everyone managed to smile, as we were all exhausted by such hard work by 5 o'clock: I think it was only those vats of coffee we consumed that kept us going. ( And my boundless enthusiasm , of course!) It was a really lovely day: lots of lovely ladies, lots of painting, lots of chickens, lots of lunch, lots of tea and coffee, and best of all, lots and lots of laughter........
Well done, everybody!

And another exciting thing happened during the three day workshop. I received an email from my friend Jilly Balantyne. She is Artist in Residence at Villa le Reve, in the South of France. Villa le Reve is the former home and studio of one of my artist heros; Matisse.
I spent some time painting there last year.
I even stayed in his bedroom.
So I could almost say," I slept with Matisse".........
Hmmm.
Anyway, here's a little sketch I made whilst I was there:

I watched a wonderful documentary about Matisse last Sunday night, and had a lovely surprise when they spent a long time at the house, and also interviewed Jilly. And now Jilly has sent me an email to ask me to come to the house in France to teach painting alongside her in September.

OH JOY........ thankyou, thankyou, thankyou. Yes.
Of course, I mean I'll have to consult my diary.............. (not!)

If you'd like to watch the programme about Matisse, and I can't recommend it enough, here's the web address:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sfsnd

I'm off now to have a dig around to see if I can find my sketchbook from Villa le Reve, and a few photos that I can show you next time you pop round.

She hadn't yet decided....

Well I'm sorry.
I'll only mention it this once. The election of course.

I have Been and Gone and Done it. Voted.

After weeks of agonising about who to vote for this time I still only made the choice when the pen was actually in my hand in the voting booth. Despite feeling disillusioned with all the major political parties over the last few years I've still been deliberating endlessly on where my vote is going to go.

Having a small business which often balances the tightrope between profit and loss, and living in the often politically overlooked countryside, being concerned about food security and a lack of support for farmers, lots of people would think it natural to vote Conservative.

Having a mum who survives frugally on her state pension and values her free bus pass as a wonderful gift ( particularly last year when she has having to use it to take three busses a day to visit her partner in the Hospice,) it would seem fair to vote for the Labour Party who made it possible.

And anyone who thinks electoral reform is important; and that people who struggle by earning less than £10,000 a year shouldn't have to pay income tax, and that the banks deserve a good hammering for messing up big time and then not lending to good businesses in the aftermath (oh dear: I feel a rant coming on.....) would have to vote Liberal Democrat.

I can't help thinking that my vote doesn't matter in the least anyway, and why on earth am I taking it so seriously? My friend Alice remarked yesterday that her two nieces at university weren't going to bother to vote, and that her own daughter of 15 was appalled at their decision. I can't help thinking that the 15 year old schoolgirl is a lot wiser than her older student cousins.

It also makes me wonder what the point of a University education is if it results in such apathy? As Alice mildly pointed out, some people in Africa walk for days to get their polling station because they see their vote as being so important. Afghani's and Iraqi's face bombs in order to vote. So many people bemoan the state of Britain and say things are so awful, but surely things can't be so bad for many if they can't be bothered to vote. And it must be the sign of a stable nation free of serious strife where people assume that everything'll be ok whether they vote or not.

My daughter Eliza has been interested in the election , as have the children of my friends , which is interesting. When I was eleven it all just passed me by, really. There was little political conversation in our household. It mostly amounted to my dad swearing under his breath whenever Margaret Thatcher appeared on the news. (But hardly surprising in view of the fact that he had been made redundant three times in not many more years as the factories in our Northern industrial town closed down , one by one.) His hatred for the Tories didn't prevent him from joining the town's Conservative Club to drink their cheaper beer, though, as most working men seemed to in our area!

Eliza couldn't believe it when we said that women had died in the early years of the 20th C so that we could have the vote. And it wasn't too much earlier that ordinary working men with no money behind them didn't have the power to vote either. So it seems frivolous not to exercise our right to vote however excruciating , or easy, the choice may be, or however obvious the result may seem to be.

And as a footnote to all this, I do wish that they would put up some big signs in the polling stations saying that it's a cross you must put in your chosen box, and not a tick. I had to triple check with the ladies behind the table at the station this morning. Because a tick is precisely what I entered on my polling card as a politically fired-up eighteen year old using my right to vote for the first time in the 1980's. Rendering it vote null and void. And I've been mortified about it ever since.

Well that's my journal entry to mark the election, and I shan't speak of it again...

Next time, lots of jolly, lightweight stuff about chicks, lambs and the dawn chorus.

Over and out !

Honiton Textile Market

Vintage Foraging...

At last! Yesterday my friend Val and I spent many happy hours foraging for old and beautiful bits at the Honiton Vinage Fabric Fair in Devon. Val was so enthusiastic that she had even managed to buy a 1970's apron even before we got inside the door of the church hall where it was held......

I do apologise for the photo above, which does no justice whatsoever to my lovely finds: perhaps a verbal description will help them come to life for you: the two bottom layers of fabric are felted wool squares dyed in different shades of pink, next layer: vintage French monogrammed linen hand dyed a beautiful shade of lavender; a card of lavender linen 1" wide braid; 2 metres of Swiss flower embroidered ribbon; 6 lavender glass buttons; some French Grey darning wool; some cotton lace, and top right, a 1950's cotton print wrap around apron/overall.

Below is a slightly fuzzy photo (sorry: rubbish quality photography,) of the monogrammed linen and glass button type things.)
Below is a close up of the apron: I had a lovely vision of what I'd look like wearing it. In my mind's eye I looked winsome and sylph-like: quite elegant, despite wearing an overall. Unfortunately, when trying it on at home , in the mirror I just looked very pregnant. ( And I'm not . .... A year or two I got quite traumatised when four different people asked me if I was pregnant over the space of about six months. I ended up at Slimmers World for the next half a year, trying to lose my barrel waist. My husband said I should think myself lucky that people thought I still looked young enough for it to be possible.)

But anyhow...... here's my other purchase, below: some vintage curtain fabric with a seagull and lobster pot print. Which hopefully will one day become two cushion covers.

I think my blog could be very useful in that if I tell you what I'm planning to do with my purchases, I may feel obliged to actually do that thing, rather than put it in the airing cupboard for the next ten years.

So here goes: Here Is My Pledge

• I shall make a pink woollen cushion with applique bits on it from the felt squares


• I shall remodel the apron so that I look less pregnant;


• I shall make a classic full length apron with the lavender coloured French linen and tape;


• I'll make some cushion covers from the seagull print.


• And pigs might fly.


• But I Have Pledged and So I Will. Make them. Soon.


• 

I saw lovely Lis Van Hasselt on her stall at the Fair ( that's where the seagull fabric came from) : and she was the person who first got me thinking about starting a blog, a year ago. She gave me some tips about uploading photos this time which were very handy. Thankyou, Lis! Here's her blog: http://thewasherwoman.blogspot.com/ If you like vintage stuff you'll love her blog.

And thankyou to everybody who has joined the followers section on this blog. it's really really interesting reading your profiles. It's amazing how we are all so far from one another but have such similar interests.

Later this week I'll tell you about a really interesting meeting I had today about an art holiday I've been asked to tutor at a beautiful hotel in the seaside town of Sidmouth. It used to be the Georgian holiday home of an English Lord, and is a confection of white Regency Gothic architecture. I took some rather mediocre photographs with which I shall also regale you......

Until then......

Love,

The Innkeeper's Wife

PS. My blog doesn't seem to want to upload another photo at the moment, so I'm afraid you'll have to visit again in a day or two to see the photo of the bottle fed twin South Devon red calves at my friend Elizabeth's farm..... keep the kettle on!

Honey, I'm Home...!
Just got back last night from my trip to The North to go and see mum for a few days, and here're my two jars of Lancashire honey to prove it. Phew: my porridge just hasn't tasted right these last few weeks.......

Mum, Eliza and I made a trip to a little market town called Clitheroe, where my dad's family came from, in the beautiful Ribble Valley area of Lancashire. First stop was to the special Butcher's stall on the Saturday Market where they sell phenomenal local honey.

We made a little detour to another butchers where I spotted some tripe to show Eliza, who'd never seen it before. For those happy souls who aren't sure of what tripe is, it is the rubbery, bleached stomach lining of a cow. Mmm, mmm... The previous night Mum had been regaling us with some horrifying stories of having tripe for lunch every day for six months, about twenty years ago, and how much weight she had lost. (Some might say it was hardly surprising: it would put me off eating for life...) On the days when there was no "honeycombe" (that's a particular kind of tripe,) available she would have to make do with a cow heel. Aargh! And that's what I spotted at the butchers stall: some genuine, bleached white ankle bones complete with the insides of the hooves. (Hoofs?) Eeeeughw.... I know it's considered a delicacy in Venice, but even the Venetians can't get absolutely everything right.

After that little diversion we ambled on to buy some pie tins and muffin tins from my favourite baking stall; pottered around town and then drove on to Oswaldtwistle, a little former mill town where one of the cotton mills has been converted into a shopping centre. There I bought some crafting materials and three scrapbooks. I've got plans ( well I've always got plans, but it's a miracle whenever that actually come to fruition!)

The plans are to make a scrapbook called "A Year at Sampsons Farm", to show the visitors to our B&B a little bit about our life here; another one about the Watercolour Workshops I teach here, with lots of photo's of students' paintings; and the third one, well I suspect that one will hang around in a carrier bag in a corner for a while. Probably for a couple of years, on previous form. Here's a pic of the window box of pansies, for the scrapbook, and another chicken one (oh, surprise!) of Charlie:Charlie , our Buff Orpington cockerel,
Whilst at mum's I managed to do the first three double page spreads for Winter part of the Sampsons scrapbook: I'll post a photo tomorrow. As much as I love crafting and scrapbooking , I do seem to spent two thirds of my time searching through every item I possess for the elusive perfect colour of paper, or the right kind of glue, and just one third actually making it. But I managed to get lots done and it was really satisfying, sitting at my mum's dining table by a big window, sorting through photo's, stamp pads and ribbons, my daughter curled up in a chair, engrossed in a book, and hearing the squeak of the rocking chair and the gentle click of knitting needles as my mum soldiered on with making a cardigan for her friend Janet. How lovely and homely. Time spent with my mum is very precious......

Tomorrow I'm off to Honiton Textiles Fair. Can't wait! Will tell you all about it very soon.

And I know that in my last post I promised some lovely photo's of lambs and calves from my friend's farm where I've been sketching and painting. Well, they are coming later this week, but here's just one as a little taster...


Come and see me again soon, and don't forget to put the kettle on ready for next time...

Hello world!

Well here I am, writing my very first blog.....

Hello World!

Hello My Public!

(That'll be my mum and my daughter, then.)

It's the same kind of feeling I have when I'm starting a new sketchbook: there seems to be such a weight of responsibility to start with something fantastic that I usually miss the first page out and start on the second page instead. I always mean to go back to the first page when I'm really on a role, and can make something that will impress anyone who looks at it. Needless to say, it always stays empty, even if I've finished the whole sketchbook. Of course, I can't leave the first post of this blog blank, or any passing reader (Ha!) will assume that there's nothing here. and surf of to more interesting climes in the blogosphere.......so here goes...

It's Thursday the 29th of April, and I'm having a very lazy morning: I've snuggled back into bed with a cup of tea and my laptop, listening to the sound of rain hammering on the roof, and dripping from the newly green Chestnut tree outside my bedroom window. I could also hear the sound of the rush hour out there too, thirty minutes ago: here's a pic of the traffic:

Yes, it's our friend Farmer Martin's herd of Friesians fresh from the milking parlour, plodding down the lane to have munch on some new grass for the day. This twice daily rush hour is pretty frustrating for the many dogwalkers who drive down to park in the leafy lane to take their dogs down to the river here. The few cars going in and out of the hamlet are held up whilst the 160 strong herd amble down and stop for the inspection of the odd juicy plant over the neighbours' garden wall.

Here's another photo of them last week, enjoying better weather, in the field at the back of our house. But we're thankful for the rain today: I'm reliably informed by two farmers that the grass is not growing properly here in Devon this spring. The ground is too dry, and without more rain the cracks already appearing in the earth will get worse; the grass will be yet more sparse, and the farmers will have to resort to buying in more hay and silage to feed the cows: pretty disastrously expensive after a long winter of keeping them indoors on that same diet.

But enough of cows for now....

Let me tell you a little about myself:

I live in a little hamlet in the Devon countryside, in the South West of England: just fourteen houses down a dead end lane, which leads eventually down to an ancient fording point over the river. I am an artist, I teach Watercolour Workshops, and I help in our family business. My husband Nigel owns and manages our small hotel ( 14 rooms) and restaurant cum tearoom, and we live in a converted barn on site. So I am The Innkeeper's Wife.....

As a family, we have a bit of a thing about chickens....here's a pic of my daughter (11 years old) doing a bit of hen hugging:

She is busy breeding lots of new baby hens at the moment: we've got three sets of chicks at the moment: some are almost half grown, some six weeks old, and the newest ones are about three weeks ( see below for a sickeningly cute photo of one of the youngest ones when it was just a few days old.)

If we have children staying at the hotel Eliza loves to take them up the the chicken shed to show them the new chicks and let them hold them: it's so lovely to see. Kids are definitely at their best when there are young animals about... It reminds you of why you wanted to have them in the first place. Children, that is.

Currently we have an incubator full of eggs about to hatch in another couple of weeks, and as one by one, some of our hens turn broody (it's the season..) we've got a basketful of eggs from various breeds to be popped under the hens for them to keep warm and do it the way Mother Nature intended.

Here's a photo of me feeding Little Tim the cockerel, who came to Sampsons Farm, in the form of a "lucky dip" box of fertilised eggs that my daughter bought for £5 from a local breeder . She chose six interesting looking eggs, and after a few weeks, Tim popped out of one of them, and has grown up to be very engaging. He's like a little ballet dancer compared to our other Big Bruiser cockerels: very small, slim and leggy, with an ear shattering crow that sounds as though he's being strangled. Until he reached puberty he thought he was human, not a bird. After being let out of the chicken shed he would eat his corn with the others every morning, then hop over the fence to do the rounds of the nearest Bed and Breakfast guests, loitering around outside their french windows until they took the hint and hand-fed him their complimentary biscuits.

One day last Autumn, though, his voice broke ( that's when we heard that strangled crow for the first time,) and since then he's decided that he prefers chickens to humans after all. Despite being half the size of his girlfriends. That's one of them in the picture.

This summer, however, he's going to be a very happy cockerel because, as we speak, we have half a dozen eggs in the incubator of his own breed , so soon he'll have some matching mini girfriends. I'll keep you posted...

Yesterday we had a very famous animation company ( hint: Wensleydale Cheese/ Chicken Run) here for a meeting in our little meeting room at the hotel. The lady who had organised it said she thought they would really like the quirkiness of this place, with it's relaxed ( ha!) atmosphere and chickens. Afterwards I thought about how I could enhance that "relaxed chicken" atmosphere, and decided to encourage a few of the chickens out of their field with a bit of bread, so they could peck around the garden and the carpark ( no chickens were hurt during this production, honest) and look charmingly rural. Half way through the day my husband Nigel came to tell me that it hadn't been such a good idea after all. His mum, Hazel, who comes over a few mornings a week to help with the gardening, and who grew up on a farm, was shocked to see such poor animal husbandry, and so started shooing the chickens back into the field. She was making such forceful "shush"ing sounds that the cap on one of her front teeth flew out and dropped into the gravel. And was gone.

Poor Hazel was in tears, and I was mortified.

Thank goodness Nigel went back up to the gate to have a second look and FOUND it. Amazing!

That'll teach me. Presentation is not everything. Chickens are better off in their paddock. And I'd better cough up with a contribution for the dentist's bill.

End of post.

Well, almost. I feel I must mention Happy Harris, who has designed my blog banner and "bits" (can't remember the word for the little blocks for the links,) and made it so beautiful, despite me sending her virtually my whole life scanned in on a million emails, wanting her to design something that described me in one picture. I hope she has recovered from the shock now. She has made me very happy , too, and I apologise for the deluge I unleashed upon her....

I hope you're feeling better now , Happy..... here's her blog link:

http://happylovesrosie.blogspot.com/

I'm off on the long road to Lancashire tonight to see my mum for a few days, and do some scouting around the crafting shops Up North to see what lovely bits I can find..... And stock up on some more jars of Lancashire Honey.

Please have a look in at my blog and bring your cup of tea in a week's time: next week I shall be posting some heartbreakingly beautiful photo's of new lambs and calves I took at my friend Elizabeth's farm, and I shall have news of the Hontion Textiles Fair ( that's on Tuesday 2nd May.) The news will probably be that I have spent a ridiculous amount of money completely out of proportion to my income on old pieces of beautiful fabric, which I shall lovingly wash and iron, and then put in the airing cupboard to await a "project". I predict that it will be too precious ever to use in a "project": much like all the other piles of precious stuff in there. And in the various carrier bags of various antiquity stashed around the house....... ha ha

Until next week!

Love

The Innkeepers Wife, x