So close, yet so far away...

The last couple of days of my course at West Dean went well. On Saturday the sun came out and we spent the morning on an assignment at Weald & Downland Open Air Museum. It's the kind of thing I have done a hundred times before for radio, but this time I had to reeducate my brain to look for pictures and not listen for audio. So the main interview became a "general view" photo and vox pops became close up pictures - simple! 

By the end of the weekend I honestly felt like there couldn't have been a better course personally designed for me and where I am right now. Given that the timing worked out so well for our trip down south and that it was the first time they had run it, I was pretty lucky!

However, flying back to Scotland on Sunday was not straight-forward. After first discovering my driving license had flown 24 hours ahead of me (in Jim's wallet) I then lost my boarding pass in departures and finally endured an hour delay to the flight with absolutely no information (though not as bad as Jim & Theo's 7 hour delay the day before!) It was almost as if fate was trying to stop me going back...

And guess what? After all that time learning how to sell photos of a news story, the very next day my home village hit the headlines with torrential rain and flooding! Can you imagine how frustrating that was? Have a look at my mum's Flickr photostream to get an idea of what I missed out on!

So back in Scotland I'm now on the lookout for a good photo story. Preferably one that fits around childcare and isn't too far away - Not too much to ask surely?!

In which I get my brain working again...

We're down south this week. Visiting family, attending a wedding, and (for me) doing a course. The first two were the reasons we booked the flights, and then by chance I spotted the photography course at a local college, which happened to not only bridge my old and new skills, but also fitted the dates we were in the area.

So I am back learning for three days! The course is being run at the beautiful West Dean college, which for my overseas readers, is probably every cliche of an English college you can possibly imagine.  It's a beautiful historic building in the Sussex countryside, with formal gardens and rolling hills full of sheep.

 source

There are four other students on my course and it's run by an excellent tutor with 25 years experience of press photography. It is a VERY steep learning curve, with very talented fellow photographers and a mind-boggling amount of crucial information about the way papers work (who knew that one newspaper has strict rules about the way women dress, and another bans photos of people on sofas?)

Included in our agenda today, we had 10 minutes to do a portrait session of a fellow student for a news piece. I became completely distracted by the building and came out of it with a photo that was more about a nice door than the person I was photographing. I think this is what living in a military quarter, with absolutely no architectural features does to you!

Tomorrow I return for the second day and (weather permitting) a field trip to the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum. Already I feel like I'm going to need to lie down for a week to absorb everything I've learned - fat chance of that!

Nine months and counting...

Theo is now three-quarters of the way through his first year of life and crawling! One Tuesday morning about three weeks ago he suddenly worked out how to shuffle his legs forwards and he was off. We now spend most of our days pulling him away from the broadband router, the fake coals in the fire, the stack of cookery books in the kitchen or the cord of the iron. Why is it that with all the experience and money behind the big toy brands, no one has yet invented something that is more alluring than the forbidden things in a house?

Although the summer has generally been disappointing so far, there have been a few warm days to get him out in the garden, an experience which has met with mixed results! He's still extremely unsure about the feel of grass on his skin and left on a rug will remain marooned until someone returns to save him!

With a new way to burn off energy he's appetite seems endless. As his menu expands, we even tried him on a recipe containing lamb's liver (much to Jim's horror!) and he seemed to love it. Bouncing up and down in the high chair, murmuring sounds of appreciation!

Talking of high chairs, as I mentioned a while ago, around Christmas I took on the task of repainting our inherited Tripp Trapp high chair. It very rapidly turned into one of those things I wish I had never started! I bought two types of paint (spray and regular) and two types of sandpaper and spent most of the winter trying to get a proper finish on it, and failed. So Jim came home from Afghanistan and took over, he bought an electric sander, undid all my work and then varnished it. Four months, a lot of money and effort later (and with the addition of a £50 play tray and £30 harness) we ended up with a chair that looked identical to the one we had when we started - Gah!

All of this was even more frustrating when we saw the high chair my mother bought for him to keep at their house, which cost £15 from Ikea! The moral to this story is if you are ever in need of a high chair, and are near an Ikea, simply do not bother even considering anything other than the Antilop Chair, I cannot fault it!

Wedding gift cushion

Wedding season is upon us, and I'm sure I'm not the only one swamped by invitations over the next couple of months. I know most bridal couples these days prefer gift vouchers, but I almost always deviate from the list and do so for several reasons. Firstly if you can do homemade it helps bring the cost down slightly (cost so far of attending one wedding this year with flights, hotel, car hire etc. is nearly £1000!!) and secondly my absolute favourite part of a wedding is picking (or making) a gift, and without that opportunity I actually get quite grumpy.

So there you go, first wedding of the year is the weekend after next and I knew I wanted to part-make and part-buy the present. The purchase part was easy, I got them something we had when we were married which has been an enormous success, it's a 25 year Christmas journal that you get out every year and write in. Ours has only been going for 5 years, but it's fascinating reading it every year.

The homemade part was trickier. Alongside a bought present, a quilt was going to be too much, so I had a vague idea of making a cushion. I saw this on Flickr which got me thinking about some sort of cushion personalised to the couple, but I wanted something subtle. So after a lot of thinking and not much sewing I eventually came up with this...

Originally I was just going to have the surname, but in a rare moment of creative input, my husband suggested adding their initials, and he was so right! The letters are appliqued, the red ones which are felt are attached with a straight stitch  and the white lettering (which is cotton) is sewn with blanket stitch. I would have liked to have used the same grey linen fabric on the back but I didn't have enough and I have no idea where I bought it from (!) so the back is made from the felt used on the front, I just hope it wears ok...

I added a layer of batting to the appliqued front and quilted around the large letters then lined it. I think if I do it again I'll skip the quilting stage, it looks good, but it's unnecessary extra work and just made the whole cushion a bit bulky.

Anyway, this is one rare project that turned out so much better than I was expecting. I love it and I just hope the bride and groom feel the same!

Hello summer!

It feels like we have been waiting FOREVER for summer this year, but finally it arrived yesterday and despite being five hours north of the border, we were the warmest spot in Scotland - wow!

When the sun came out again today, I decided to dig the Silver Cross pram out and take it to the Post Office (where it always gets a warm reception!) Theo was last in it when he was a couple of months old, so I wasn't sure what he'd make of it now he's sitting up, and whether he'd try and climb out. I needn't have worried, he loved it!

Not only was he up high enough to see everything that was going on, but he also had 360 degree views of the world.

When we got home I took him into the back garden, and parked the pram next to our fence where he was at just the right height to join in with a chat with my neighbours and keep an eye on what their children were up to.

Having spent most of the weekend in the house trying to keep him away from the broadband router or the fake coals in our gas fire, it turned out to be a very simple and easy way to keep him entertained, so here's hoping the warm weather continues tomorrow...

What's been keeping me...

I've been pretty bad at posting over the last few weeks and that's mostly been because of a little project I've been beavering away on. Now that most of the initial work has been done, I thought I'd let you in on it.

But first an explanation. A year ago I went on maternity leave from my job in radio, and then in February this year (partly influenced by the 3,000 miles that now stood between my new home and my old job!) I resigned.

Since then there's been a lot of thinking about what comes next. Do I want to work? If so how much? What options are practical given that with the Army, we change location every two years, and that being far from family, childcare can sometimes be difficult.

I spent many months thinking about sewing/quilting related options, I did a (pretty disastrous) craft fair and even bought a semi-industrial sewing machine (it looks beautiful, but I've still not used it) and eventually concluded sewing is a lot of hard work that rarely pays what it deserves. Finally I started to dare to think about doing the one career I have always fancied and come very close to doing many times, and I realised not only was it what I wanted to do, but it was also the only practical thing for me to do.

Sooooo... I am cautiously and nervously stepping into the world of natural light family photography. It is something I am passionate about, that combines the creative and the technical in a way that my previous career also did.

I have so much to learn, but I am reading, experimenting and educating myself all the time. There are many wonderful photographers out there and it is their beautiful photos that inspire me everyday.

If you'd like to support me and are on facebook, I'd really appreciate a like on my page. In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed seeing these early photos as much as I enjoyed taking them, and I hope (really hope) they'll be more to show you soon...

Theo at 8 months

With Theo's eight month birthday he reaches a milestone - I'm pleased to say he can at last sit up... although he still wobbles and crashes sometimes.

He is embracing solids with great enthusiasm, it really astonishes me how much he can eat. I'm sure there are many grown adults how eat less for breakfast than he does! His favourite meals at the moment are spinach pasta (an Annabel Karmel recipe known as "Popeye Pasta") and Courgette Gratin - both smell great when they are being cooked! We have just ordered a new freezer for our garage to create more space for a rotating stock of little boxes of Theo food (and quite a lot of homebaked bread.) He eats a banana a day too and will make a grab at almost anything that anyone else is having. Apparently this is pretty typical of boys? I only have experience of this chap, so know no different...

Having been getting out and about a bit more since Jim has been home it has also struck me that not every baby smiles and giggles their way through the day. Again it is only what I'm used to, and I just assumed every baby was like that, but Theo really rarely stops laughing - what a funny boy he is! Or maybe he just thinks his parents are really hilarious!?

The arrival of some belated Christmas presents has also seen an influx of new toys in the house and he is exhibiting excellent taste! His favourites are a wooden bear charm from Germany (a gift when he was born that clips onto his clothes) some soft fabric cubes my sister made, and a handmade sock monkey we bought in Canada. All of which sound quite strange, but crucially they are all handmade! The plastic toys make great noises, but are apparently not quite as alluring at the moment - That's my boy!

And finally he is still sleeping well. He wakes up around 7am, has a morning nap at about 10am, a couple of hours at lunchtime and in bed by 6:30pm. He even slept through most of our most recent flight to Inverness. It was flight number six for him, just over an hour long between England and Scotland, but as you can see he's very laid back about air travel these days - He even reached out and helped himself to an infant seatbelt as we boarded!

So with all that sleeping you'd think mummy would be updating her blog a bit more? Oh dear, where do the days go?