A new beginning

Up until relatively recently we bred our own hens, they were all identifiable and had individual names. When Sepia, our broody hen died, we could no longer incubate fertilised eggs and so young hens were bought from Chicken George the Man with the Van. These came as clutches of identical birds and we gave them group names, the first group were the Tricias and they turned out to be a bit useless frankly, we suspect they were a table breed not a laying breed but even as a table breed they weren't up to much because they had a tendency to drop dead of obscure causes before we had caught them and wrung their necks. We did have one for Christmas and the last Tricia is still running around the place determinedly refusing to lay.

The more recent purchase was the five Scragettes. They looked as though they had just crawled out of the rubble of Aleppo, were just SO happy to be alive, made complete trash of everything, stood on the toes of your boots and were Olympic class layers. Of the five, one was distinguishable for her extreme featherlessness. She was picked on by the others but she didn't care, rain or shine she would stomp up the hill from the hen house and lay her egg in the sheep shed. A process of elimination led us to the conclusion that it was in fact she who had been reduced by buzzards to a single leg.

I bought some sturdy rope and restrung the nautically-themed Morning Glory trellis. The previous rope had been a bit too skinny and had biodegraded after three summers. The new rope took some pulling through the eyes and needed to be secured with knots to keep the tension. By the end of Monday I was happy enough with the look of the trellis but my hands were blistered and I had pulled muscles all over the place. Tuesday was definitely going to be an embroidery day and no lumber-jacking at all.

I love colours, they are my second favourite thing after people. I am confident to select colours for any situation with one exception and that is the representation of three-dimensional reality on a two dimensional plane. I totally understand that light hitting a three-dimensional object reflects colours differently and that our brains interpret those different shades as form, but I cannot get my brain to do the same in reverse so I allow myself to be led.

The icon painting classroom where our embroidery lessons take place has appallingly bad lighting. I allowed Antigone to select coloured threads for the leaf-veins and stems of my roses and I worked and worked and worked without very much enthusiasm. It was only when I saw the colours of the threads that my friend J had selected for her own, totally different piece of work, that I understood my problem, I despised the colour of my stems. They were a yellowy-green reminiscent of tinned peas whereas the leaf-veins had a slightly bluey dark forest colour. J kindly gave me a selection of her threads and today, knowing I had a bit of time to play with, I unpicked the lot. Two months work actually translates as only a few hours because I have not devoted enough time to this project but perhaps now there is a better chance that I will.