The Easing

This morning I sat on the floor in a square of flickering, leaf filtered, sunlight and felt the strangeness of an empty house for the first time in 7 months. The heat rushes in when I open the doors and everything feels steamy after the storm yesterday.Since I last wrote I've emerged like a nervous rabbit, into " The Easing", to work for three days a week in the bookshop; experiencing the complete reversal of the normal state of things because I was briefly the only person in the house going out to work, coming back grumpy and demanding my slippers, pipe and dinner (during lockdown I never left the valley and still haven't visited a supermarket so it's been quite stressful at times). Wearing the plastic face shield all day,  combined with my varifocals,  means that hours after getting home I still feel like I have a hat on and trippy vision that might necessitate  a trip to Barnard Castle...Today however, Rupert has gone back to work at Outward Bound and Sara is having her first day alone as a bookseller (since she moved north again we have been sharing jobs occasionally while she continues to search for her own path). Tomorrow will be a holiday cottage cleaning day for one of my neighbours so this is my time to catch up on my "real" job, the creative me, the one who gets lost in the gaps between days.August is fading Meadowseet, Heather and Bilberries, horrible Horseflies, late hay and the first signs of the bracken turning. Walking back down the valley last week I noticed the tinge of russet and felt quite overwhelmed by the relentless march of the natural world and its cycles, while for a lot of us mere humans it feels as though our lives have been put on pause. It seemed like only a few weeks ago that we'd talked about watching for Catbells turning green in the spring. I've tried not to think about it too much, but of course that means I think about it all the time - the way almost a year has passed and so much has changed. More than ever the feeling of having lost precious time but also of having gained so much and needing to process it somehow.I thought I'd done quite a lot of new work in the bright sunshine of Spring but when I looked at them again recently, because the special circular mounts had arrived, I found that I only liked one or two and then of course I started with the "honestly Kim you had all that time and all that sunshine, why didn't you create mountains of work?". At least, of the ones I have completed , I am unusually pleased with how they turned out. I like the stitching on this hare and her joyful leap over the Yarrow. Now, how to go about selling work without the shop window of art fairs and exhibitions? This blog no longer has the reach it once did and social media is a tightrope walk - if I mention things are for sale my posts are much less popular than the ones featuring rainbows or wild swimming or loaves of bread. Luckily there are bright sparks on the horizon with a possible nerve wracking secret project and an invitation to be part of a winter exhibition at Harding House in Lincoln again.One day recently members of Cumbria Printmakers had planned a socially distanced drawing trip to Holehird Gardens  but of course it rained and rained and even in Cumbria it was too much,  so instead we all agreed to draw at home and share our day via WhatsApp. I hadn't done any observational drawing for ages but I managed a page of ink and gesso and pencil,  looking out at my soggy plant pots. The thing I enjoyed most about this was taking small sections of it later and  enlarging them to use as backgrounds for other things.I'm not a painter but sometimes I think it would be fun to make big textural  canvasses like this...Instead I made a digital collage using other sketchbook images and came up with this ...I entered the Wraptious competition and a few people actually bought the design as a cushion so I think I might get some giclee prints made of it to add to my website shop. I entered 4 other designs too and voting has ended so fingers crossed, you never know.Believe it or not I spend more time thinking about writing than thinking about drawing or making things so it is worrying that I do very little of either! How on earth do people write books and have jobs or other people living with them?! In my head are some characters and some rambling stories and also some thoughts which won't quite arrange themselves into a Thing and instead there is bread to make or someone else words to read or more recently masks to make. I'm counting it as a small victory that this blog post has been completed during daylight and that I can now put the kettle on and tick this off my To Do list.Thank you so much for lending me your precious time and reading this. xReading : The Short Knife  by Elen Caldecott