Wayland's Smithy

Wayland's Smithy is a Neolithic long barrow in Oxfordshire near the White Horse of Uffington.  Wayland was supposedly a smith (blacksmith) Germanic god.  Handy to have in the days of horses, presumably.  I guess his modern equivalent would be a motor mechanic god!

Legend had it that if your horse lost its shoe and you left a silver coin at the site, in the morning your horse would be reshod.  Presumably the franchise for that was passed down through the generations!  With a renewed interest in things Druidical and whatnot over the last 150 years or so, apparently some people leave votive offerings there once more.

The day I visited Wayland's Smithy, a hot summers day in, I think, 1990, it was occupied by a group of layabouts drinking beer.  It retained some of its magical feel, however.  The whole area is said to be riddled with ley lines.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

8 Things Thursday

8 photos taken on our summer holiday in January, in and around Golden Beach on the Ninety Mile Beach in Victoria. It was pleasantly warm then, not too hot but lovely, quite a contrast to this week which has been wet and cold!

8 Things Thursday

8 photos from my 1989 honeymoon in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. All taken on actual film and scanned into the computer - the colours suggest 20 year old film, don't they!!

Continuing Catch-up Photos

I'm really glad my children still enjoy dressing up, they have so much fun with it!

Baby Bear is studying Year 11 Drama this year. This was semester one's performance. They had to work in groups and do a sketch based on an archetype of some sort - fairy tale, myth, etc. Her group used a story about Buddhist monks. She played various incarnations of weirdo - lost, on drugs, rejected by society, etc - and one of the monks tried to help her while the other one was dismissive of her problems. Her performance was, of course, brilliant. In fact her portrayal of someone on drugs was rather scarily realistic and even her drama teacher though so! Don't you love the 1960s air hostess uniform? She picked various costumes from the drama costume department which had obviously been stocked from dubious op shops.

And this is another proud moment. Baby Bear singing a solo (admittedly a very brief one) in Hamer Hall. She was part of a choir of secondary school students from around the Eastern region of Melbourne, all hand-picked to perform in a concert called As Time Goes By. She also played the flute in an orchestra. It was a wonderful performance all round and it was a great experience for them all to perform in one of Australia's premier concert halls. We were extrememly proud parents, if all rather tired by the end as it went on till 11pm on a school night! And yes, jeans was the outfit the choir were told to wear, they were singing songs from musicals like Rent (which is what she is singing in the photo) and it was considered appropriate. She wore proper black for the orchestral performance.

And finally a picture that is both sad and hopeful. Taken a few months after Black Saturday (7th February for non-Victorians) in Gippsland, it shows something of the appalling bushfire damage that occured, but also tree ferns growing back as a sign that life always returns in some form.

Lovely Lichen!

Here is the next set of bush texture photos I took. I love lichen!

All pictures are clickable to view in greater detail. The same goes for the previous texture photo post, the photos look muchbetter in close-up than they do smaller. (Two posts ago).

Texture Photos

Regular readers (all three of you!) may remember that I enjoy taking texture photos in the bush. Here is the start of a series that I took while in Beaufort over Easter. The top one didn't work out properly, it was blurry, so I used Sharpen in Picasa until it got that brush-stroke look to it. There will be more photos to come over the next couple of days. The bush is so beautiful!

X is for Xanthorrhoeaceae

I bring you Xanthorrhoeaceae - otherwise known as the grass tree, or in an earlier, less politically correct era, black boys. They are quite a common plant around many areas in Australia (and Xanthorrhoeaceae is a genus, so there are other types). It is prolific in the Brisbane Ranges, which are nowhere near Brisbane but are quite near Geelong, where my mother lives, so sometimes we come home that way when we have visited her. I have always liked their slightly improbably shape and their contrast of texture - the fine grass and the big spikey thing growing out of it. In bushfires the spikey thing (can't remember the botanical name here, but it has the flowers growing on it - the pistil, perhaps?) explodes in the heat, with exciting consequences. 

L is for Lichen

I am SO far behind on my ABC Along!

Lichen pictures from the weekend. I want to do a series of small embroideries inspired by lichens, I think. 

Texture

This is a series of photos taken between Wangatta and Beechworth on Friday. I am very interested in using natural textures as inspirations for textile pieces, and so George and I gathered some photos while we were away to use as future reference points.

More on our trip later on in the week. 

Playing with Picasa 2

This is the four photos that went into the spooky montage.

I feel a desire to play with photo software coming on!!! 

D is for Dolman

Another Jersey photo from the same holiday. This is a dolman, an Iron Age burial site. Jersey had a number of fantastic dolmans and other standing stones - I love visiting these and it is something that Australia rather sadly lacks! Nothing beats the feeling of walking along that path and standing under the stones - unless it is going underground to see them, which I was able to do in some of the other sites. (Which got interesting as I was six months pregnant at the time!) 

D is for Daffodils

This field full of daffodils is in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. I took this photo when we there on holiday in 1993. I loved the effect of the whole field full of them with the clouds and the castle in the background. 

An area of the Brisbane Ranges that was burnt out last year. The eucalyptus trees need fire to regenerate and are showing lots of new growth. These are grass trees, also known (most unPC!) as Black Boys. They need fire to regenerate too - they apparently go up like petrol bombs!