Sunday pootling

Up with the lark and into the studio! This is the New Year, after all!

It was about 6am and I felt aimless, but it was lovely to sit in the light of the new, bright lamp and "just do something" - a nice long bit of perle cotton came to hand and got stitched into the corner of the notebook page, then I started writing down words from the radio programme that was on - about boredom, very interesting (catch it on BBC iplayer in the next few days). After which I didn't much fancy listening to "On Your Farm" so turned off the radio and did a page of stream-of-(un)consciousness writing. Using different pencils as they came to hand made the writing like having a conversation with myselves  - and then there was a selection of white/grey pastels to try out -

Now, how to obliterate the writing? First, a candle rubbed over some of the words was meant to "preserve" them - but the combination of wax resist and pastel was unsuccessful -

And what next? By then the sky was getting light, and the tree gave me an idea -

Inky branches ...

The bottle of ink that came to hand was "sepia india ink" - grainy and blobby - dropped on with the dropper and smeared a little, and more added...

After covering the ink with pastel (imperfectly, but that's ok), I decided not to take more photos or use more time on this. Start afresh another day.

So good to have quiet hours and a chance to think and/or play: to pootle*, with no particular end in view.

And those stitches - later I placed a thinner piece of paper over them, quickly drew lots of straight lines with an empty ballpoint pen, then coloured it over with 6B graphite -

*Pootle (v.) - to move or travel in a leisurely manner