A bear with a jar full of stars, a valley full of chiffon mist, celestial blue skies; if only life could always be filled with such magic and beauty. I feet like retreating into my inner land of make believe this week and potentially that may be the safest place.It's been the most unbelievably atmospheric Autumn here in the Lake District so far. Clouds and mists rise and fall, flowing down the valleys and draping themselves over the tops like gossamer bridal veils - forgive the flowery language but you can see why all those poets got carried away with it around here. Sunday's walk was a perfect example ... beginning in sun dappled forests smelling of pine and mushrooms and earth (Shinrin-yoku), enduring a slog up a boggy hillside in thick fog (navigation practice, hmmm) to emerge on an eerily lit summit where an almost biblical revelation occurred as the mist slid away in stages to reveal layer upon layer of heartbreakingly gorgeous landscape.I hear it's been like that above a certain height all week but for one reason or another I have been unable to reach up to the sunlight through the fog.I had been due to start my new job at the Museum yesterday. As I said in my last post it had meant that at last I would be earning enough to justify my existence on the planet but not only that; I was hoping it would mean meeting more people over here, drawing me out of what has become an increasingly hermit like existence. I also really liked the Museum. I got an email on Saturday asking me to "pop in on Monday for a chat".I had been offered the job on the merit of my interview and the carefully prepared presentation on " The Benefits of Working with Volunteers", the gallery in Keswick provided a good reference and I had all the dates on the calendar and my shoes polished for day one. Only I did a stupid thing. I trusted in honesty and good intentions.I'd given Joe Cornish ( the photographer not the comedian ) as a referee, believing in my naivety that, despite all the difficulties in the cafe towards the end of my time there, I'd loved my work organising the creative workshops and that I had done a good job, been a dedicated and effective member of staff and that Joe himself was a man of integrity and an artistic soul (as his website claims). I was very wrong. Joe was too busy packing for a trip to write anything so his partner suggested they ask the gallery. Joni (who had cried when I left and apologised for her mismanagement of the situation) wrote a reference that made me sound like a lovable village idiot who could just about make a cappuccino but was unlikely to manage anything too taxing involving any "attention to detail", numeracy, organisation or reliability... and thus I was sent away humiliated and shell shocked, the job offer withdrawn. I am indeed an idiot, I expect people to act fairly and compassionately and they don't. The past is a hole thinly covered with branches on a sunlit path and inside the hole there are spikes and mud and monsters.I also found out that Joe is again running his exclusive residential workshops from the lovely North York Moors surroundings of ....wait for it.... Snilesworth Lodge, shooting estate and home of the delightful and kind Toby Horton, UKIP landowner. I felt like I'd been beaten up.I've moaned at you and it's a massive turn off but sometimes things need saying and the cat wasn't really being very responsive. In other news I've been printing mugs and lurking about in my pyjamas in next door's porch trying to photograph them ( the mugs not the pyjamas) in the morning light, I've been listening to Elbow and trying to play my mandolin and getting trapped in corners by spitting alpacas... not all at the same time though. I won't always be moaning so please come back soon, thank you for listening. xReading :-"Nature Cure" - Richard Mabey  Listening To:- Real Life (Angel) -  Elbow  

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!)

Somewhere in those mountains, in the scenty , cyclamen carpeted pine forests of Trentino, there are bears; real bears. The European Brown Bears, Arctos Ursus, whose numbers are growing thanks to a reintroduction programme in the area, were (having probably been warned by the Red Squirrels of Newlands Valley)) hiding when we visited the Dolomites last week. Knowing there may be a bear watching from behind a tree certainly puts a different complexion on a post pizza stroll along the side of a turquoise river, surrounded by blinding white, spikey limestone mountains. I wish I'd seen one, but knowing my luck I'd have been eaten, all my bear pictures would become priceless due to the notoriety and irony but it would be too late to help pay the rent or buy logs!So I won't bore you with too many holiday snaps, just to say it was beautiful and all the things Italy is meant to be. Not a bad reintroduction to holiday making after 23 years. We travelled by train, all the way from Penrith in Cumbria to Desenzano in Italy and then got a free bus ride to Arco (it was late, and in my new baggy pink dress I must have looked like a small tired, rather elderly, pregnant lady so the bus driver took pity... must work on my posture...must eat less pizza.)Arco is a magical town with a castle on a rock and every lycra clad cyclist, runner, climber and windsurfer in the world rushing about in the heat, doing something extreme. I soon discovered the best thing to do was send Rupert off to do things on rocks while I sat in the Arboretum with my new friends the turtles; while the huge green dragonflies flew figures of eight around me catching mosquitos ( I am a magnet for mosquitos and for the entire two weeks I looked and felt as though I had chicken pox).So here are some highlights... swimming in Lake Garda, discovering you can get cappuccino half way up mountains, managing to climb a small limestone thing and not cry, the paintings on houses, the scent of Osmanthus, a thunder storm in Turin... oh and a French woman with two small and wonderful children, on the train, who drew pictures and played sweetly with no tears or iPads for 6 whole hours. Low points... being eaten alive by insects, being rubbish at speaking Italian,  being too scared, hot and itchy to climb/walk more... and a dark haired girl on the train to Verona with slow, fat tears falling silently.And so we left the lakes and mountains of Italy behind and returned to our own.While I was away my work had been in two exhibitions and although I was disappointed not to have sold any originals at C-Art at Dalemain, I did sell quite a few cards (enough to cover the cost of printing at least) and all my leaflets had gone which was encouraging. I was told that there had been a lot of interest but that maybe my prices were too high compared to other's work. I can understand this as my prints are not editions but unique monoprints with time consuming hand stitching; so the price (between £130-£170 for a framed piece) reflects that, and I now know I need to keep the prices consistent with what a gallery would charge including their commission ( between 30-50%), tempting as it is to lower prices in order to sell at exhibitions (something I only realised after working in commercial galleries). So, it looks like I'll just have to keep fingers crossed for sales at The Great Print Exhibition at Rheged, which runs until November.The shop at Rheged also has cards and new cushions (with hand embroidery) that Emma from Temporary Measure printed for me as payment for Alpaca sitting. Emma is now almost royalty in the craft/design/illustration world as,  during the Top Drawer Trade Show, she got an order from a little place called Harrods. I'm going to have to wear a hat next time I visit and polish my shoes.,, but it couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Well done Emma and all at Temporary Measure.And so, upon my return, I packed up a thick cheese sandwich and headed up to the top of Catbells to lie on my back in the September sunshine to watch the combed out clouds, almost dizzy with the love of the place and the soft colours of the late summer fells and the smell of approaching Autumn.Reading: "Sky Burial" by Xinran ( I finished "Haweswater" on the train home and  Rupert insisted I read this. I've finished it in two days and yes, ok, it is amazing Rupert) The book is about Tibet and it was a weird and amazing coincidence to be told by my  landlord that the Dalai Lama once visited this place and blessed the garden.Listening To: "The 8.55 to Bhagdad" by Andrew Eames, on the radio in the bath and "Figure 8" by Ellie Goulding at work