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

Are you there? Are you ok? Does it feel as though you're watching a film of your own life in fast forward?I've been looking through photos taken since February,  to decorate this blog post,  with a feeling of weird detachment and disbelief; how fast the year has unravelled and how momentous the world events, that make it almost impossible to gather enough sensible thoughts to write. I've resisted writing so far because almost as soon as I contemplate a quiet moment sharing the joy of the spring blossom or the scent of the Lilacs or a "thing I made",  I'm struck dumb by the fear and confusion and anger in The News that makes a blog like this seem trivial and ridiculous. Apart from Covid -19 there have been the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of Mr.C the slave trader, into the  harbour in Bristol, which has made me want to keep quiet and educate myself. I'm learning what I thought I already knew, getting confused, questioning everything, feeling very aware that despite believing myself to be "not a racist" that isn't necessarily enough. Nor is wearing a t-shirt with a slogan but this arrived today via Print Social, designed by printmaker Rachel Louise Hibbs  with 100% of the profit going to Show Racism the Red Card. So I'm looking stylish while I try to be a better human!Meanwhile here in the mountains lockdown crumbled like a sandcastle in an incoming tide and I look back at this photo of the endless blue days of spring with a strange nostalgia that belies the real fear that was keeping us all awake. Those blossoms are now hard green sloes on rampant, windblown hedgerows,  dripping with dog rose, honeysuckle and meadowsweet, promising a nice crop for gin in time for Christmas. Everything is deeply green and shady around the house, dripping rain and aphid honeydew like a rainforest. I planted loads of seeds  to feed us during the apocalypse - beans, peas, salads in pots, only to succeed in producing  a huge crop of enormous snails. I'm the queen of snail farming, I'm also vegetarian so don't suggest I eat them instead of courgette.People are back in the Lakes all of a sudden, as if its a normal summer and I'm finding it all especially unsettling as, unlike Rupert and Sara who started escaping as soon as they were allowed, I've only been out about 5 times since March (my 17 year old car finally gave up the ghost in April so I couldn't flit if I'd had anywhere to go). Now I'm having to re-engage with Outside and hopefully a smooth return to work in the bookshop.I just looked back to see when I last wrote anything and realised it was so long ago that there isn't even a mention of the pandemic! That month included two interviews for magazines and a potential feature on Countryfile which was due to be filmed in March at Rydal Mount, around the time of the Wordsworth 250th anniversary celebrations. I can't help feeling that it's entirely in keeping with my life's progress that I got what could have been my Big Break, just as the world went mad and even the news was broadcast by people in their living rooms, juggling child care, lockdown hair and dodgy internet connection. Anyway, the magazines got printed and it felt lovely and flattering and a bit unlikely.I'd have hated being on film anyway but the researcher was very nice.

Since ALL my events have now been cancelled (the last two just announced this week) it's been a scramble to try and make up for that with website sales and thinking about different ways of working. Last weekend I took part in an Online Show which replaced Crafted by Hand in Masham. It went ok and it might be the way forward, but how to do this without turning people off? Many of us will struggle financially due to the effects of this crisis and I hate doing the hard sell at the best of times.I wanted and intended to do all sorts of helpful and altruistic things with my art during lockdown but the fact is, the truth is, like a lot of  people I struggled to concentrate on anything creative, I felt guilty about living in a beautiful place with space and fresh air so I didn't even want to share photos and obviously there were personal fears and worries too. I'm taking it gently, trying to recognise that it's pretty normal that anxiety bubbles up in odd ways because none of us have ever had to deal with this kind of thing before. I'm not even sure I can remember how to drive, everything seems much too fast and noisy and crossing the street in a suddenly packed Grasmere yesterday made me want to scurry back to my nest, back to April when we drifted about from one cup of tea to the next, watching the garden begin to unfurl, writing our journals like characters in a play.Theres a new book being published next month called "Through the Locking Glass" which is about the artists and writers of Cumbria responding to lockdown. I made a cyanotype and stitch piece which was included in the book and was one of the few things I did during that time. As things began to ease I suddenly decided to have a go at something completely different ...... My daughter took me (she's my chauffeur now)  to visit a lovely friend, Janis Young, from Cumbria Printmakers who lent me an Xcut XPress . Originally designed as a hobbyist's die cutting machine it happens to work perfectly as a mini etching press. I was smitten and managed to buy myself one;  now I just need to work out how to carry on improving on the beginners luck I had when I first tried it. I'm the messiest printmaker, ink on every surface  and also my own worst critic, but sometimes I accidentally make something that I'm so pleased with it doesn't really feel as though I can have made it ( do you ever get that?)  Here is Bookshop Bear, a card design with some additional yellows splodges, from a collagraph printed on the Xcut. He wants to be part of a story but that's still in the clouds.So, there you have it, a brief round up with large gaps and omissions (the joyous birthdays, the tears and laughter, unfinished jigsaws and abandoned projects, the sleepless nights of worry, the olive branch messages sent to much missed friends that went unanswered, the realisation that Time is relentless, the survivors guilt...)I hope you are safe and warm and well and that everything will be ok.xReading: I'm in between books, dipping in and out of things, listening to Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell which is excellent and weirdly topical  and also listening to Black and British by David Olusoga which should be a set text in schools, what weren't we taught this?!