Found in the fields

Quite an arty day, with coffee and cake thrown in. What's not to like?

Yesterday's sunshine had gone AWOL again this morning, so instead of a walk I settled down to make a batch of paper using iron-rich clay and thistledown to provide colour and texture to my old bank statements. My image shows the first paper I attempted a few days ago, which is coloured with lapsang-souchong and textured with the seeds of wood small-reed. I've also made a gently bluish paper, coloured and textured with dewberry and blue fleabane seeds.

At lunchtime Sarah and Ben collected me in her car and we drove to Peterborough Museum, where we met up with Lizzy. We'd arranged to meet up to visit Carry Akroyd's 'Found in the Fields' exhibition.  I love her artwork, and the mix of lithographs, lino-cut prints and serigraphs was visually stunning. The first gallery was devoted to works inspired by the works of John Clare with extracts of many of his poems reproduced alongside the prints, which gave an added dimension to the exhibition.

We couldn't leave the museum without coffee and cake, and ended up sitting in the cafe and chatting for well over an hour and a half - for most of that time we were the only customers. We arrived home and were surprised to see that Chris and Pete were back from Cambridge - they'd gone down to do fieldwork, but the promised afternoon sun never arrived, so after a couple of hours catching very little they decided to cut their losses. So, more coffee and chat in the garden before we all went our separate ways.