Rose for FlowerFriday

 

The Miracle of a Single Flower

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly...........our whole life would change.(Buddha)

On Their Way

It's Flower Friday on the Blipfoto site and it was lucky that I decided to go and search out what I could find in the garden first thing this morning while it was still dry. It has been soaking wet outside ever since. I did find a rosebud that most definitely won't make it into flower but it wasn't a particularly interesting picture. So a bit of digital playing came to my rescue. I took the picture of the departing steam and sail ships out of a book called The Technical Educator: an encyclopaedia of technical education. Vol. II (I only have this volume). It has no publication date but was given to it's owner, a certain William Ferrier, back in 1897 so safe to say it's copyright free. I have quite of few of such vintage volumes that I use for collage purposes, both real and digital.  I played with contrasts, layers and some other settings (I do tend to get carried away once I have my Photoshop open) and ended up with the above version. Everything in the picture is on it's way out!

May I Introduce

Mme Alfred Carriere, a beautiful noisette rose.

Madame Carriere was the wife of Alfred Carriere who was editor in chief of a horticultural magazine in the lare 19 Century in France. Sadly we don't know what her name was. Although a lady would never reveal her age, the rose dates back to 1879.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Garden Journal

 

Delphiniums

Ox-eye daisies

Masquerade rose

 

Posted with Blogsy

Pictures from the Garden

 A day of sunshine and clouds and during a sunshine moment I went outside to record how the garden is getting on. This rose looks beautiful against the white of the wall, and the green of the ivy. Sadly I have no name for her. She came from a garden plant sale without a label. She has a beautiful tea scent and although not a prolific flowerer the flowers that appear are large and gorgeous with a hint of orange against the pink.

Rosa Rubrifolia

And finally the plumes of the astilbe are now towering over the courtyard, almost lighting it up like lanterns.

It appears that the Blipfoto site is itself suffering from a blip and at the moment it is impossible to upload pictures there. Hopefully it's some server problem and it will be sorted out shortly.

Meet Sally

O my luve is like a red, red rose

 

In honour of Robert Burns who was born on the 25th January 1759.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Peace

 

Posted with Blogsy

A late rose

 

I had a wonderful day meeting with a friend who is renting a romantic cottage in the woods. It even had roses still in flower. We talked art, stitching and quilting as well as enjoying a lovely lunch in a nearby bookshop. Such a treat all round. Do I need to say that yes, I did buy a book?!

Here are some more pictures of the romantic surroundings.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Thank You!

It's over and done with. The 52 Journals exhibition has come to an end. I had it all prepared. I was going to photograph the closed door of the exhibition room but as it turned out too much loveliness was going on and in the end my camera stayed in my bag. Instead I had many visitors this morning,received a large bouquet of flowers and  4 more pieces were sold. John and I went for lunch with some of those visitors afterwards and had a wonderful time. . It was a marvellous end to what has been an amazing 6 weeks. 

With the pictures from my bouquet I want to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who came to the show, bought pieces and cards (would you believe I sold the very last card this morning!), left wonderful messages in my Visitors Book, and gave me lovely feed-back on my work. Also a massive thanks to the Museum Staff for first of all putting on the exhibition and then helping me in all kinds of ways. I was made to feel very much at home in their Museum and Gallery.

Thanks too to everyone who asked when the next exhibition will be on. Give me at least a few years, please! But I will be hard at work on making more art very soon and I can't wait!

If you want to see a bit of the show again, you can! Thanks to my sweet and adorable friend Lenna who came over specially from Florida to see both the exhibition and me there is a video show of the show and me giving a talk about it to a group from Dumfries. You can find it here:


We will be taking all the pieces down on Monday but for the moment I'm just so over the moon with how it went and I didn't want to wait to say that THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart!

Autumn Equinox

It's the Autumn Equinox today. Amazing than that the rose Zephirine Drouhin is on her second flowering this year which is something that doesn't often happen here in the Scottish Borders.

The sunflowers however are very much on their last legs although looking very lovely even so.

I spend the morning at the 52 Journals exhibition here in Peebles and that too is now past the half way stage. Only two more weeks to go before it finishes. The last day will be Saturday 4th October. It was busy this morning which is always great for the atmosphere in the gallery. I took some pictures of one of the walls and also managed to take an unexpected selfie while taking a photograph of the display case featuring some of the inspirational photographs that served as starting points for some of the journal quilts.

I will be at the show all day tomorrow after taking 2 of my larger quilts to Ingliston, near Edinburgh Airport, where they will be on display during the Scottish Quilt Championships this coming weekend from Friday to Sunday. That show will be open from 10 - 4.30 every day apart from Sunday when it closes at 4. At that time I will collect my quilts again. I'm getting to know the road to and from the airport rather well! Hopefully the traffic will be kind to me so that I'm able to get to Peebles tomorrow at around the time the gallery opens at 10.30. We shall have to see.

On the phone front there hasn't been much change. Yet another engineer is expected on Thursday and in the meantime both the phone and the wifi through it come and go, sometimes when we have incoming or outgoing calls and sometimes without any identifiable reason. Fingers crossed that pretty soon someone will get to the bottom of what is wrong. It's never great for such upheavals to happen but it's particular bad timing when you're trying to publicize an exhibition on various websites. Thanks goodness for the satellite connection!