Woolly and Wild

Woolfest is over for another year.
By the time I got there on Saturday afternoon there were only six of my brooches left.
 I added three pendants to them so this is all I could photograph.

They were on the IFA stand and you can see the lovely hanging made by Lesley King to the left. She uses prefelts and makes amazing patterns. Her felt for this piece is on scrim and contains silk fibres and has a lovely sheen to it. Her website is here
You can see my vessels and 'The Bag' here.
Someone almost bought 'The Bag' but decided to be economical!
I told her there would never be another but it was no good...

So its still available.
Here's the opposite side of the IFA stand. as you can probably deduce the theme was vessels!

The  hanging at the back is by Fiona who has a flickr set here.
I met another Fiona, lovely Fiona Dix who has a great blog called Love Fibre. She used to live a lot nearer to me and I didn't meet her then and now she lives about as far North as you can get and I met her yesterday!

We are dog sitting at the moment so Indi had to come with us. I think she enjoyed a few eyeball to eyeballs with sheep like this Herdwick.

She was a bit hot and demonstrated this on the way home when we stopped for a while on the shores of Bassenthwaite.

I wanted to join her I can tell you . It was idyllic and hot and peaceful. I won't break into song but indeed 'the fish were jumpin' , no cotton though!
Further on I saw a heron, and then a bird of prey gliding by and at this point we remembered that this is one of the few Osprey breeding places in the country and I think it was an Osprey. How lucky I was to see it.
Naturally we were quite tired when we got home so we slobbed out watching TV and I was was engrossed in facebook scrabble when suddenly my husband said 'Look out..there's a bat in room.

Indeed there was. It flew around for about two minutes, landed briefly on the curtains and we opened the doors and it flew out.
 How exciting.(I just told my Mum and she's horrified!)
Then my husband did his favourite TV thing ..flicking through the channels and stopped on a film called 'Phantoms' about some horrible giant moth like creatures that fly in through the window and eat your face off.....

I was glad I hadn't seen it earlier.

Driving back through the Lake District yesterday we couldn't help notice how low the water levels were in the lakes, particularly the one which supplies the drinking water for the Manchester area, Thirlmere. There are
islands were there were never islands and metres of dry exposed rock around the edges.
Quite worrying.
It really has been a dry June for which at the moment I am very grateful. A downpour or two would be welcome I suppose.
Its such a great time of year.
I took our canine visitor a short walk the other night and as I walked past the front of our house I noticed the remnants of a rose bush which I thought had been taken out during some work out next door neighbours had done. The branch was in danger of being trampled by the general public and it had lots of buds so I cut it off and put the buds in water. They opened into the most delicate and fragrant flowers and I want to identify the variety so I can get another. The flowers are  small and white (no not edelweiss) with a peachy hint and the gorgeous scent of geranium. Here's a picture.

I'll finish with a picture of some flowers I bought for a friend .
I had just been reading about paeonies on Alice's blog and there they were at the growers so I had to have some. I can't aspire to her turn of phrase and beautiful writing, but I can stick a few flowers in a vase!
I bought bunches of Sweet William , Blue Scabious, deep pink Virginia stock and pale pink paeonies. I added Ladies Mantle and yellow Loosestrife from my own garden.
Mmmm.