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

Well Autumn has arrived and I'm getting ready for hibernation by cooking things with dumplings and making steamed puddings, foraging for rose hips and getting obsessive about the log stack. This is the most beautiful time in the Lake District with all the bracken, heather and woodland, dressing the fells in rich russety, foxy colours. The lanes are thickly carpeted with yellow, green and orange Persian rugs of fallen leaves. I've dragged my pudding filled self up several new mountains  in the past few weeks and there is nothing like emerging from mist onto a sun drenched summit or watching the fog roll away to reveal the golden patchwork below.As usual I've left it too long between posts and have way too much to tell you about... now I will have to skim through it all or risk sending you to sleep. The first thing that has happened is that wool has done its usual thing and snuck back in to my life as a "comfortable thing to do in the winter" after I was offered a place on a weaving workshop at the Greystoke Cycle Cafe a few weeks ago ( I may be running a cyanoype workshop there next summer). Weaving seemed like the ideal occupation for me as it is methodical and almost meditative; not mindless exactly but certainly free of the crushing self doubt and inertia that often hits me when I'm trying to be creative.... and you can get a lot done in a day. Our tutor for the day was Jan Beadle of the Wool Clip Collective which I visited a few days later to squeeze balls of wool and ask longingly about looms. Both Jan and the Wool Clip are highly recommended and I have to thank Annie from the lovely Cycle Cafe for giving me the chance to experience a workshop as a participant for the first time, it was a wonderful day.I also finally got myself over to see the Great Print Exhibition at Rheged which will be on until November 22nd. Rheged is basically a very smart service station on the A66 and houses the most amazing gallery space. It was exciting that the first thing I saw as I entered the gallery shop was a display of my cushions and cards - although I suppose it would have been more exciting if they hadn't been there, having been sold! I found my prints in very good company and left feeling happier than I had for a while. Ok, so they hadn't sold (yet) but they didn't look out of place and I didn't feel like a poor relation even though all the other work was pretty stunning.There they are, on the right of the picture below. As usual I fell in love with loads of pieces that I wish I could have bought but art is so often out of the reach of artists! I must go back and look again before it finishes.Strangely the momentary confidence boost of seeing my own work in an actual gallery and in a rather nice gallery shop hasn't lasted long. I am my own worst enemy and have been doing battle with a sulky muse this week. I think I've over worked her by flitting from looms to heat presses ( I bought one cheap from a local man who paints brilliant "old masters" and had a Gustav Klimt on his bedroom wall!), needle felting to lino printing. She has left me barely able to lift a pen so I made a decision to concentrate on knitting squares from silky soft alpaca , channelling my inner Miss Marple or Great Grandma Elizabeth, while slowly re-evaluating what I do and why.So this week I was invited to interview for some weekend cover at Keswick Museum and I'm pleased and excited to say I was offered the post, starting in November. Now with two part time jobs I'm just about able to make ends meet (thanks to family and Rupert) and it struck me ... that old question... why do I make things and try to create art? If I was well off would I still do it? Would it be different? Does it only feel worth while if it sells? All these questions that are ultimately about self esteem and the fragile/overinflated ego of a creative person! I've been sitting here pondering the subject for ages and its time to put the kettle on for comforting tea before smoke comes out of my ears. I will leave you with this question... do you value textiles and fibre art as highly as other craft forms? It's something that I've had cause to think about lately and its always been a question that bothers me...why is an object made from wool perceived as less valuable than one made of clay, its a historical conundrum.There were a lot of question marks in this post sorry! Please give me a kick up the bum if I don't write another post soon... its too easy to become a hermit here and live in a world populated by characters of my own invention... Bye for now x ( and bye from me says the squirrel.)Reading :- " A Room With a View" EM Forster and Bernat Klein- Textile Designer, Artist, Colourist by Bernat Klein and Lesley JacksonListening To :-"If Big Chief Dies" Sycamore Sykes  ( he's proper famous you know and I said I'd tell everyone to buy a copy!)