Day 2 of my resolution to use this space more frequently, I hope you don't mind. Your comments and messages yesterday were so kind and uplifting, thank you.
Today was the kind of sharp, luminous day when Catbells looks like a wonky slice of carrot cake with a light dusting of icing sugar (I have to thank Rick at Faeryland, Grasmere for that observation). The patterns in the ice were echoing the bark spirals on my favourite local tree; who I have imaginatively named Tree Friend (I'm terrible at names). The good thing about Tree Friend is that even in a pandemic it is possible to give him a hug, so he's currently storing up all the hugs I can't give friends and family. This is a tree I need to draw, it has a real personality - even without emoji eyes. I'm really loving the tree drawings made by Sarah McIntyre and Phillip Reeve at the moment, they collaborate on a wonderful series of kids books about a flying Dartmoor pony called Kevin and have a long standing tree drawing thing going on.
I so wanted to crunch through the iced puddles but they were too pretty to break; even so my footsteps made it creak and groan and shatter at the edges, like the crust on a creme brûlée. Nutmeg and I had to hide in the gorse bushes for a while to avoid John the farmer with his sheepdog; he's a flighty cat and would have run in panic rather than letting me pick him up. I do worry that he will have to adapt quickly to a new, probably less remote home.

There, I've blogged two days in a row (and after 11 years I still hate the word blog), now I can celebrate that small achievement and add it to my store of positives, along with hot baths, audio books, lots of tea and plenty of toast. How are you coping?
In other news I've applied to be part of an exhibition at Rheged which is part of the Through the Locking Glass project, Cumbrian artists reflecting their experiences during lockdown. I'm still not sure when this will happen but won't it be wonderful to visit galleries again!

Through the window, in the patch of sky behind the house, I watched the swallows making travel plans this week and, despite my notorious reluctance to leave my nest, I half wished I could join them.. what it must be like to be free to swoop about with all your friends and family, gathering in flocks and murmurations!
The Leaving of the Swallows is another year marker and, like the shortening days, the russeting of bracken and ripening of berries, we remark upon it as if it has never been seen before, not so early surely, not with such colours? September has come too soon, in a year that never really started, but it feels fresh and sparkly compared to August.
As always in September, without marking X's on the calendar, I remember that other September, 6 years ago now, when I  thought I was losing everything. The shock of a sudden and unfair eviction when you are so firmly rooted in a place has long lasting effects and will always leave a scar, like the marks left by Limpets on stone.

Anyway, there is a point to raking all that up again; I promise I'm not just failing to "move on and get over it" (as well meaning people suggested at the time) - although the revenge spells I cast are slow burners . These past few weeks here in the Lakes have been SO unusual that I found myself pondering "How did I get here?".  What part of recent events was brought about by pure chance and would any of these things have happened if I hadn't lost my home and moved to Cumbria?

I've also been remembering this time last year when I was at Moniack Mhor for that unforgettable week of submersion in the world of illustration and picture books, surrounded by wonderful inspiring people, what a place...

I think I mentioned in a previous post that despite my creative inertia, self doubt and of course the pandemic,  it had been a great year for publicity ( some magazine articles and a piece in a book)  and that I'd spent quite a lot of time talking to a lovely man from the BBC. When lockdown happened of course any plans we'd half made were shelved and I must admit I was relieved because for me, just being asked was enough. Imagine my horror when Max contacted me again last month with firm dates for filming.
You might think that someone who's been baring their soul in a blog for the past 11 years would have no problem at all with being filmed for TV but that's the thing isn't it, you can hide behind the keyboard and forget that there's an audience. I started to have flashbacks to the time my brother and I made our primary school class sit through a puppet show we'd asked to do -  because we'd got Sooty and Sweep puppets for Christmas - no script, no plan and a creeping realisation aged 7 that we'd bitten off more than we could chew.

I'd been asked to talk about Anna Atkins and demonstrate cyanotype for a section on BBC Countryfile dedicated to the Grasmere and Langdale area, including  a belated celebration of Wordsworth's 250th birthday. Wordsworth's home in Grasmere, Dove Cottage, has recently reopened and a fabulous structure called the Moss Hut commissioned ( a collaboration between Somewhere-Nowhere and Charlie Whinney) to reimagine the space created by Dorothy and William in their garden, a refuge outdoors, away from the busy cottage, where they could think and create. Dorothy described it as  a ‘little circular hut lined with moss like a wren’s nest’
The new Moss Hut is certainly something special, smelling warmly of oak and nestling in a newly planted sensory garden that will only improve with age.

In the end I managed to convince myself that I was just teaching a small , socially awkward, workshop and both the presenter Joe Crowley and cameraman Chris Greenwood  were lovely - I think it's a real skill to appear genuinely interested in the people you meet and be able to make them feel comfortable. I know I will cringe if I ever watch it, my confidence in my appearance and sense of how I appear to others has suffered a lot in the past few years (this time of change for a woman can be harsh as well as liberating) and I'm definitely not someone who would court such exposure normally. 

During the filming we walked around the garden at Dove Cottage and had a quick lesson from Jane, the gardener, in identifying ferns were told the strange story of Victorian Pteridomania. I must admit, the preparation has helped to re-ignite my interest, not only in cyanotype but also in the lives of Anna Atkins and Dorothy Wordsworth, so it was an honour to take part and be able to try and connect the two through their art, science and the love of observing nature. Meanwhile, in the Lake, my friend Polly Atkin was being filmed in a wetsuit, swimming and reciting poetry, so MUCH braver than me! The episode will be shown on September 27th if you want to see how it turned out for us both!

And so the strangeness of this year and the unlikely events obviously make me think "How the hell did that happen? Would it have happened if I still lived in my haven on the moors?"
I started this blog during my degree course in 2009 so that even though I'm sure no student ever reads it these days I feel it's been important to be honest about the journey. Oddly if I were to follow the trail back I'd say the Countryfile gig owes more to this blog than my actual artwork - writing here, often being more candid than I should have been, was the connection between people who later offered support after I'd landed in Cumbria, working in the bookshop and being part of Cumbria Printmakers connected me to Grasmere so that I was eventually asked to do a workshop at Dove Cottage which I think is how Max the Researcher found me. I guess what I'm trying to say is that little connections can lead to surprising places and that the route can be a winding one with some terrible potholes. I envy people who knew what they wanted to be from A level to retirement but now, aged 53 maybe I'm on a better path.
Thanks for reading x 

Reading:  Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. 

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