Cooking, painting, doodling . . .

. . . in the second half of July.  A visit to the local farmers' market yielded the colourful caulis (tasty, too) and the yellow courgettes.  The round one, the beans, the basil and the tomatoes are all DH's work, well, with me as advisor, as in, couldn't we try a different kind of courgette this year as well as the normal ones?  We had them all for Sunday lunch on my birthday weekend.

The tomtoes are beginning to ripen and deserve a shot or two to themselves.  DD2 takes very arty pix of veg, flowers etc and I am trying to emulate her.

Well, i keep trying.

Painting at church again, on the glass wall on one side of the main church bit, looking into the hallway.  We had a Dreamday i.e. family fun day, about Bugs, Bats and Dragonflies.  See the fat black spider on its web, in the hallway, not the painting!

I really enjoyed doing that.  Not sure how it will be cleaned up eventually!

But my own work lately has been taken over by a somewhat obsessional doodling.  Look here for the source of it all, zentangles.  I'm not into the 'zen' bit, and prefer to call thm 'doodles' than 'tangles', but the claim that 'It increases focus and creativity' I find to be true for me.  I don't think the zentangle people intend it to become obsessional though!  The first has a seaside theme, because the frame turned out rather like cliffs, but the second has no special theme, just patterns.  I enjoy creating the 3D effect in some patterns.

Harvest time . .

. . . for the gooseberries.  11 lbs of jam and another 4lbs of fruit waiting.  Anyone have a nice recipe for gooseberry chutney?

Last year was a great success for courgettes.  This year they are struggling because there's been practically no rain.  Trying another kind this year to keep the usual long green ones company and this is the first one, which DH says is just a bit bigger than a cricket ball.

He says I should have taken a photo of him bowling with it.

Actually I was expecting them to be dark green, not this interesting pale textury colour.

West Country Embroiderers in July

We had a very enjoyable workshop with Lyn Prosser doing an informal kind of mola, involving layers of fabric, stitching a design and cutting back parts of it. Letters proved to be a very effective design idea. Some of us whizzed along with our machines, others worked more slowly by hand., both methods equally effective.

My bit, solo.  Not finished yet.  It uses a letter from the Tamil alphabet.