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

Happy 2020!  Here is the view from half way down the fell I struggled up on New Years Eve, fuelled by my gingerbread polar bears and coffee from a surprise coffee van - I'm getting slower but its always worth it for views like this.Well, It seems as though the only way to break the silence on this blog and make a fresh start as I enter my 12th year of occasional writing, is to admit that I was defeated when I started writing this post back in November. I ground to a halt, bogged down in a quagmire of half thought thoughts.This is what I wrote ... "...I'm writing this by the stove with a hot water bottle up my jumper and a pile of buttered toast with blueberry jam next to me (well, in me now if I'm honest). It's dark outside, frosty cold and moonlit and I can hear an owl calling - a good night for hunting.What happens if I don't write regularly is that things get jumbled up and all the internal monologs that made sense when I was walking up the valley or wide awake in the middle of the night are forgotten. You'll have to take my word for it that they were fascinating and really worth writing down and not at all like this paragraph of waffle. I do regret not making at least one post a month though, because more and more this blog has become my personal record of the past 11 years. At a recent art fair a customer commented (flatteringly) that one of my bear drawings looked similar to another very well known artist's bears and it was a relief to be able to trawl back through old blog posts to confirm, to myself, that it had been drawn before I'd seen her work, although inspired by some of the same sources.At another event a woman picked up a print which I told her was from a piece I'd done at college "Oh it's lovely, don't you wish you could do something that good now? " (people say the funniest and rudest things without meaning to) It's good to be able to look back and see that, with a few exceptions, the things I make now are 100% better than those I was making in November 2009, even if the person making them is a bit more rounded and worn around the edges.What's brought on all this looking back ? Well on Twitter last week I saw a post pointing out that there were only a few weeks left of this decade! That fact is fairly obvious and shouldn't make any difference to anything but it came as a bit of a shock to someone who can still remember the last days of the 70's quite clearly and somehow can't quite believe how quickly the past ten years, in particular, have been and gone. The question posed by the tweet I saw was, what have you achieved/learned in this decade and what are your hopes for the next? In some ways both these questions terrify me as I am prone to focusing on my fears and failures as well as feeling that, like John Cleese in Clockwise "I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand." Besides, many achievements also contain the bitter taste of Something Overcome and those things are hard to look back on, even when heavily sugared by success. But in a decade of big changes for me there are definitely some small achievements to celebrate and as for hopes... "And there I was, stuck, on what should have been the easiest question, what are your hopes and dreams? Well what are they? What are yours as you stride into the year?So, much of what silences me and makes me sometimes fear writing from the heart in this, "public" space is the pressure to be positive and upbeat at all times, or risk damaging my business, and the very British habit of reserve which means even my most candid posts are heavily censored to avoid being too much of a bleeding heart. What I spent hours mulling over, forgetting to write, turned out not to be my hopes ( I hope for a garden and a pony of course, doesn't everyone?) but my fears - for the planet, for the world my children will inherit, for our country under this government  and of course my own selfish fears (how many greetings cards = 1 weeks rent and should I be making more "stuff" in this world of stuff?).Anyway it's the New Year now, we're all full of optimism and shiny new intentions aren't we? I've  invested in a fancy new planner from the Makers Yearbook to organise and motivate myself, it's bound to lead to wild success and world domination - gardens and ponies for everyone! I have to set daily/monthly tasks and one of today's is "Finish that bloody blog post" (s'cuse me swearing).I've also been drawing something everyday (so far, don't hold me to it, it's only January 9th). Here is last night's effort, part of an unwritten story.My trip to Moniack Mhor continues to inspire me, I just need to knuckle down and put it all into practice even if no one reads the results except you and me. James Mayhew  and Sarah McIntyre are doing another picture books week at the centre and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'd love to go back but this year I must be sensible, and besides, the car has refused to contemplate the trip.It's nearly time to feed the stove, make a mug of tea and see what inky character emerges in this evening's session. But first, here is the cover of the poetry book I did for Gary Liggett in the Autumn. It's a signed limited edition book, handmade in Cumbria. I really enjoyed working with different media for this one (Lino cut and watercolour) and as usual it was a learning process. I'm so glad that he liked it, along with the three illustrations inside; you can see them all here along with some other illustration work.In other exciting news, I was invited to take part in The Great Print Exhibition at Rheged, in their new gallery space. Sara and I went to the opening night ( we nearly turned back because the poor old car went over a bump and its lights went dim) and I was so excited to see my work along side so many amazing printmakers from all over the country; there was even a red dot on one of mine! Being in an exhibition like that and better still, selling something, is a real confidence boost because I think when it comes down to it, the biggest creative battle I have is the dreaded Imposter Syndrome.If I don't write again very soon shout me and I'll get my act together. Also this post is dedicated to Kat Lakie, a friend of this blog, and everyone else in Australia, I'm thinking of you and hoping for cooling rain xReading : "Help the Witch" Tom Cox and "The Lost Future of Pepperharrow" Natasha Pulley (out in March )