Today is suddenly September; the year has clicked smoothly into another gear, my lovely family have all returned to their distant homes, the Bank Holiday crowds have left until next season, somewhere in North Yorkshire the swallows will be gathering on the wires above my old home and I'm here, alone again, drinking green tea in the last house on the mountain.My daughter took these pictures on an idyllic evening walk around Crummock Water on Sunday evening. I'd never been to that side of the Lake and it felt so magical to be looking at a familiar view from a different angle and most of all to be sharing it with people I love. We made tea with the Kelly Kettle and ate a hastily prepared picnic of homemade cheese focaccia and peach cake while Terrible Grasmoor lit up pink in the sunset. There is something about the living in the Lake District that makes you want to be out exploring in a way I never really felt before. The North York Moors were "Home" and the landscape was beautiful but I was always quite happy mostly admiring it from the garden. Now what is it about wanting to get to the top, for no other reason than to look back down? Each Fell now labeled with the memory of the day it was climbed, the summit picnics and the names listed like a poem... Silver How, Helm Crag, Fleetwith Pike, Maiden Moor....So, I have TWO exhibitions coming up and the table is covered with half finished things, labels, prints to be stitched, cellophane to battle with, price lists to write and as well as this I'm being whisked away on a train to Italy in a few days! The surprise trip was perfectly timed to celebrate (or distract me) since it will soon be  a year since my evil neighbour stopped me in the supermarket to tell me I was losing my home. Its odd to think that this time last year I was planting autumn onions and garlic, picking the last strawberries and watching the swallows gather for the final time, with no idea what was about to happen... I suppose this is what life is and why you have to make the most of every moment, good and bad.Anyway, this is one of the images I'm using to make some new cushions with the help of lovely Emma from Temporary Measure while the one below is a framed piece that will be at The Great Print Exhibition at the Rheged Centre near Penrith   until November. Meanwhile Cumbria Printmakers C-Art Exhibition opens at Dalemain House, near Ullswater on September 12th. My work will be there but sadly I'll be away so please go if you can and let me know how it looks. There are loads of amazing printmakers taking part, all with links to Cumbria and I just hope my work stands up along side theirs and I don't feel too much like an imposter !Well, it's almost time to go to bed. Tomorrow I'm doing my morning at the Calvert Trust Riding Centre, getting my weekly pony fix and feeling inspired by the wonderful work they do there. Its going to be a busy few days but hopefully there'll be time to look at the sky a bit and daydream.Reading:-  not enough!    Listening To :-  Underworld and REM and the fan  on my computer going in to overload when I try to do anything on Photoshop

The rain has just returned, hammering at the moss covered roof and leaking noisily from the broken gutter. Earlier, it was the picture perfect summers day and  I wandered up the valley, in the steamy August heat that has been so rare lately, playing at being a bear foraging for berries, growling at annoying sheep and dying my hands and knees purple with juice. Bilberry, Bleaberry... what do you call them where you are? There is something very primitive and comforting about gathering wild food and filling the store cupboards like a squirrel or a Moomin...  I'd already made 8 jars of red gooseberry jelly in the morning after discovering that I'd gone to work by mistake.The  day started like this... morning sunshine making the inside of the black painted front door hot to the touch as I dashed out to work with my carefully packed lunch, rarely brushed hair and a day of selling wonderful art to lovely people ahead of me. Only I hadn't read the calendar and had forgotten that I'm working on Sunday instead, silly me, I could have stayed in bed. I put all the lights on anyway and collected my newly framed work for C-Art which had been left in the gallery and headed back to the hills - at least I was up and about early and it was a ridiculously perfect day ... as I drove back I thought, as I often do, how it is SO pretty here it feels unreal, like a fairy tale.After the gooseberry jelly was safely in its jars I took myself to the garden of the  house next door (which I pretend is mine when they are away) with a straw hat and a pile of things to make into nests. Some tiny bronze birds had come in to the gallery last week and I just thought they needed nests. I also just wanted to make something methodical because it stops me thinking too much. So there I sat, with a buzzard crying overhead and the mountains all around me and people rushing past looking hot, with heavy rucksacks saying "ooh isn't it lovely, you are lucky" and feeling guilty for being lucky and also edgy because I've felt like this before about a place and look how that turned out.Nest building is a lot harder than it looks and the birds were probably laughing at me but tomorrow I'm going to put the bronze wren in one and that will make it worth while. So, all the time I was picking bilberries and breathing in the smell of heather and bracken and warm mud and mountain air I was thinking about how to write it down so that you could get a sense of how lovely it all was. I came back and began to cook supper, feeling content in the way that you only can in summer when its warm enough to pad around in bare feet and a scruffy sundress, with the windows open... and then...the horrible sound of banging and squawking and panic and feathers and in the chicken house the mean old stoat. My favourite little chick was killed and Mr Stoat is so fearless that I know he will be back. I'm quite tough- I had to complete the job to make sure she was dead, you do these things in the countryside, I try not to be sentimental but I'm sad and I find the smallest thing hits me hard these days. I won't trap the stoat, it was here first and probably has young to feed. Maybe I can fence him out, but anyway, thats how the day ended.  Sometimes I feel a bit like this ...Now I'm off to bed to read a little bit and try not to dwell on the possibility that I may be suffering from the Jam Makers Curse ( I remember life taking a sharp turn for the worse after a certain batch of Plum Jam back in the Joe Cornish Gallery days AND there was the Apple and Bramble Jelly that failed to save me from eviction !) I don't even eat that much jam, I prefer Marmite :)Reading :- "Haweswater" by Sarah Hall    Listening to :- "Stolen Car" Beth Orton and RAIN

More time has flown by; faster than I have been able to write it all down, blurring one day in to another. Six months have passed since I came to live in the mountains; months marked by the changing colours of the fells- monochrome snow scenes melting to become Bracken slopes of  Caput Mortuum and now dark lush Hooker's Green with bright Magenta spikes of Foxglove... oh and the more or less constant rain. August feels a bit too jungly for me, the Bracken could hide anything and the patch outside the big window has become heavily shaded by Sycamore and carpeted with Enchanter's Nightshade (which is apparently used in binding spells to keep precious things close).Nothing stays still for very long here, except the sleeping dragons in Newlands Valley- the fells themselves. The hills are full of people rushing about doing energetic things in lycra but always, even in the busiest season, there is the magic of being able to flop down on the mossy grass at the top and look at the view as if you're the first to have ever seen it.In the past two weeks we've been on two lovely adventures... up Eagle Crag and then the strangely named Wandope .I don't seem to be getting any better at the uphill bits... after about an hour my legs finally warm up and stop aching just in time for my feet to start complaining. I really admire people who can run about doing things like the Bob Graham Round  (they often come pounding past here in the dark with minutes to spare as this is the last mountain on the round) but I'm still fundamentally a tortoise and prefer to dawdle along admiring the flowers, sniffing the sappy pine cones, filling my pockets with Bog Myrtle, making wands out of rushes and only making it to the top because of the promise of sandwiches.  And before you think this has turned into a blog about hiking, here is what I've been up to for most of the week, when Rupert isn't here to leave a trail of crumbs up steep mountain paths. I'm trying to get work together for the Dalemain House exhibition so I was pleased when a woman admired my work in the gallery the other week. Not realising it was mine, she asked about the technique and came in again a few days later, with a framer, who offered to frame a piece for free to see what I thought. He made a lovely job of it and chose a frame I would never have picked for myself; now I just have to save up to get some more done and hope that the gamble pays off because obviously I need to sell them to justify the whole endeavour. Working in galleries certainly gives you an insight into what sells, if not the ability or desire to produce it. On several occasions it's been obvious that the customer is really looking for an investment rather than buying for love and its not just the artist's name that matters but the medium they use. Why is it that oils are seen as superior to watercolours or a ceramic sculpture more highly valued than say, a needle felted one? I've been stitching into the recent cyanotype prints I've made since moving here. The work represents ideas of home and security, impermanence and the need for shelter- from nests to ivory towers; stitching into the paper represents domesticity and also safety and healing... holding things together with stitches. There ... do I sound all arty and conceptual?! Meanwhile some new greetings cards arrived and a piece of fabric from Spoonflower,to make purses ... (this one was a birthday gift for Ruth who has been very kind to me since I admired her trousers for not being beige walking trousers when she came in to the gallery one day. She runs this guest house which you might want to stay in if you visit Keswick)  Now it's time to have a last cup of tea before bed and make sure the place looks tidy and loved because the landlord is coming round in the morning to discuss the howling gales that blow up your trouser legs in the kitchen... I need to be in the right frame of mind and not the angry defensive bundle of resentment I have become due to my last landlord's jackboot tactics. I will leave you with this view of Borrowdale, lying on my tummy on a flat rock in the sun...well away from the edge, higher than a helicopter and amazed by the ridiculous beauty of it all.READING: The Slow Mountain Company Blog which is pretty wonderful and "Flora Britanica" by Richard MabeyLISTENING TO: "No Light , No Light" Florence and the Machine