Nature's cathedral

I have had a lovely week. It included a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show on Thursday when the weather mostly behaved itself thankfully. My favourite garden was the Massacheusetts Garden inspired by the work of Emily Dickinson. Those applique panels at the back were gorgeous, as was the planting.

Irises had to be my flower of the show, I love them, here is the real thing, alongside the applique panel.

The great pavillion also offers some real gems, like beautiful auriculas.

As well as delicious roses, this one has got to find a home in my garden very soon. The deepest red fades to purple, it is truly delicious! I took the label so I could hunt it out!

Back at home the weather has been so much better than first anticipated over the weekend. Inspired by Chelsea, I have been busy in the greenhouse with my seedlings and in the veg patch clearing the huge number of weeds! Yesterday afternoon though, I made time for a little crafty session and first of all was testing colours of my different paints and inks ready for a mini on line art journalling course I have signed up for.

When I finished these, I realised I had quite a bit of paint and ink on my palettes and not wanting to waste them, I had a play with a page in my art journal. Now I do wonder if my art journal is quite the right place for this kind of work. I don't like my writing so rarely do freestyle writing on my pages anyway. This is what I ended up with.

I treated myself to some new masks this week, including the fern and the stained glass window. I was musing as to how I could incorporate both in the same design after laying down the background colours in my Moleskin watercolour book, when I came up with the thought of nature's cathedral. I used another birch tree mask for the trunks and another with different sized leaves for the canopy. The nice thing was while I was working on this, the sun was coming through the leaves outside the shed, making watery patterns on my page.

All the inks are Distress or Adirondack, added with sponge or brushes. The words are a little hard to see, but are added with a set of stamps that I bought second hand on E Bay from a very talented stamper (I was hoping some magic might rub off I think). They look like they are carved from stone so seemed appropriate.

I am off to pack for a few days away for work, and to see one of my special crafty friends, so I am pretty excited about that (well not the work bit obviously!).

Hope you all enjoy the rest of the lovely long weekend.

Elaine x