New year, new house

First of all the very best wishes to everybody for the year ahead and I hope it is a peaceful and creatively plentiful one for all of us, wherever we are.

And to celebrate the atart of a new year, what else but the completion of my new house? 2012 is definitely going to be the year of Charles Dickens, it being the bicentenary of his birth and already, here in the UK we have had, in the past few days, a TV adaptation of Great Expectations and a radio rendering of A Tale of Two Cities.

As it happens both books were written at Gad's Hill Place.

As you see, I strayed from that original intention of including lots of garden ... the memories of the shawl and that wonderful quilt exhibition at the V&A last year kind of took over. I loved those old bedcovers appliqued with little domestic shapes which held significance for the embroiderer and the embroiderer's family. Like this one, made around 1850 and donated by the West Kent Federation of Women's Institutes to the museum.

So I have put in hearts to indicate Dickens's love for his garden (certainly not, by 1856 when he purchased the property, his love for his long-suffering and mentally abused wife which by then amounted to pathological hatred). There are quill pens and books, teapots, cats and dogs (which were a particular feature of the successive Dickens homes) and glasses of port.

And here, as promised, is a photo of my beautiful cashmere Paisley shawl which dates from around the same time, bought by me in a junk shop for about 5 shillings (yes, it was THAT long ago) in a Croydon junk shop when I was an art student and a gang of us would comb the surrounding junk and charity shops during lunch hour.

In the good old days when real bargains and very old stuff could be bought for a song.

A farmhouse finished and a cottage beginning ...

Finished this on Wednesday, an image which I shall use for local cards.

And am now busy sorting out possibilities cutting-wise for Dove Cottage and trying to decide on a season. Summer or winter? When I visited as a child I remember it was raining cats and dogs in the height of summer. Wet slate and the smell of earth and damp and the sound of windscreen wipers. 

On the whole, and going on my dim and distant memories I think I might go for watery muted colours so these are the pieces I have found so far. One more box and a pile of fresh magazines to go through. 

I will try very hard to be good and not get side-tracked by the November 2007 edition of Good Housekeeping.

Here is my preliminary swatch (with cat's tail accidentally included).

As you see, continuing my sheep roll, I am thinking of including a passing herd. Not settled about that yet though.

We shall see.

Off to read a spot of Wordsworth to get me into the mood.

Newstead Abbey with a ghoul and ghost garnish

All of a sudden it is coming together.

I was getting a bit worried that this would be the first writer's house I would have to give up on but I really applied myself to the scissors and drawing board yesterday and got the architectural bit largely sorted. 

Then went through my "maybe" pile of cuttings I had set aside, found something that jumped out at me for clouds and once I framed the bottom with some National Geo underwater vegetation from no idea what part of the planet it all clicked into place. 

Nothing is certain yet, of course. Not till it gets aerolsoled or Pritted down. 

I like the flying skulls, an idea lifted from a doodle in my book which originally came (I think) from a Fuseli engraving. 

Amusingly Gothick.

I want to camp it up a la Byron.

He was such a poser.