Sunday 5 October 2014

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We have just enjoyed a lovely week in Dorset, time to recharge the batteries and time for reflection.
Dorset with its famous Jurassic coastline and rolling chalk downs, its hidden villages nestling in valleys and beautiful trees. A very different landscape for us and a different pattern and sense of community and everyday life.



A visit to the sub - tropical gardens at Abbotsbury was inspiring. Leaves were falling in these first days of Autumn, I picked up a few oak and eucalyptus leaves and took them back to the cottage.





I had already enjoyed browsing the Vintage market in Bridport and bought lovely pieces of linen and cotton textiles. Time to steam the leaves in the cloth along with plants found in the hedgerow beside us. A lovely way to imprint a landscape in cloth and into my memory. Textiles carry so much meaning - the hands and skill which created them, the beliefs of a people, the colours and marks of a landscape, the reality that so often the textiles were used to clothe a body or to adorn a dwelling. Now we are back in the mountains of the far north and the winds are blowing and Autumn is well underway here. A perfect time to create a Bojagi cloth with my Dorset textiles adding stitch, my own marks onto a landscape which offered us rest and peace.