House-Elf Doings 

 Ruskin’s Seat in Brantwood Gardens.

You get to the different areas along paths like this up the hillside.

This photo was my fav of the day with a friendly peacock butterfly on a hydrangea.

 Wooden hand sculptures were scattered in the woodland.

Ruskin’s Pool

We had a map to make sure we didn’t miss any of the important areas within the 250 acres.

In the lower gardens near the lake there were a lot more flowers.

 I was looking forward to seeing the herb garden the most.

Sadly I was too late in the year to see it in abundant flower.

There were some useful notes though on how the herbs were used. The beds were created according to use.

 Looking up at Brantwood.

Beautiful colours of very late August.

Guess who popped over?

Yes the gorgeous Gondala! 

Ruskin created this harbour. You can see Gondala’s jetty in the background.

This area for a boat is to the left of the harbour. I wonder if Ruskin planned to have a boat house here.

Click to read.

 Ruskin’s boat

 Ruskin’s carriage

Ruskin rowing. You would neber guess that blue from the pic. 

I think this is Ruskin’s cousin’s family and their sail boat.

The boats moored in the harbour.

The view of the lake hasn’t changed a bit thanks to the National Trust. The Peter Rabbit books by Beatrix Potter helped fund it. 

These cottages are available to rent for holidays here.

But we for now will go past the coach house to the Jumping Jenny Cafe and have a much earned cup of tea and slice of cake. 

Talking of cake- Daughter had a 20th Un-Birthday. Her real birthday isn’t until October when she is at uni, so we gave her a little home-party

 With the opening of things like Zombie Killing T shirt, killer heels (killing more like- well I never!!!) and leggings. Watch out any zombies in Portsmouth!

We delivered her to uni and had guests over the weekend.   I am now catching up with the rest of you.

These lavender bags were a quick make for a friend in hospital. I thought they would help her relax and give her nose a break from the disinfectant smell.

Make 3 one each an inch smaller than the last square, then wrap together in a double bow. You then tie the single ends together to make a big loop which can hang on a hospital bed or in a wardrobe.

 I have some future projects ready to hand sew on the slab.

I showed you the wet felting project and How-To last time. Above you can see I combined a bit of needle felting to a Nono Felted sample to make these lollipop flowers.

I can imagine using this technique to create textured scarves in the future. For needle felting you just need a needle, base and some roving. You place the fibre where you want it and push the needle in. The needle is full of little barbs like a tanged arrow head so it drags the fibres into the background cloth.  There are some good video links here.

 I’ve only to look out of the window to feel that it is Autumn.

This is what my final sample of wet felting turned out like. 

 I needle felted veins of the big leaves and used Perle 5 embroidery thread on top. The leaves were rolled and pinned while wet, so they would have a curled shape.

Green yellow and brown blended roving made the shapes of the smaller needle felted leaves. Again I used perle 5 to embroider veins on them. 

 The back has a hanging loop.

 The centres of the orange cut aways were wet felted in green. I tried to make them look a little like the stumps of sawn off branches.

Leaf close up.

These 3 wet felting samples- Jellyfish (in last blog post) Nono Felting and the Autumn wallhanging are my challenge for my 2nd Craft Olympic Thimble. If anyone has done a thimble challenge but I haven’t linked it in my sidebar, can you please let me know.

The guidelines for the Craft Olympics are here at the bottom of the post

Lastly a final sneak peek of a finished Christmas present. 

More Christmas sneak peeks of another present next time.