Planet Ruby Starrs

I'm getting a bit lax with blog posts - partly because we are having a very lazy and quiet time at the moment and really I'm just enjoying some peace and some long awaited family time. (contradictory to say the least) most of my days are spent in the garden and its very calming - although we do live quite near a big road and on odd occasions it can be noisy but I think I'm just getting used to it as background noise now - I've been very spoilt living in very rural locations and the price we pay to be near a community and shop is more traffic. The garden is proving to be quite amazing though and it is a complete joy to watch it unfold as the summer progresses.  It was one of the main reasons we bought this house - we don't have time to start a garden from scratch and this is a wonderful established space which we can work up to being how we like it.  The previous owner was a talented designer and has thoughtfully laid it out in an interesting way and is has been real

My bubble this week grew to include my daughter and her two children - It was lovely to spend some time with them at last and be able to include my grand children back into my home and garden.   I think they enjoyed the break away from their small enclosed life in a wee house in Leeds and a change of scenery.  We did the usual baking, drawing, den building and expanded our repertoire with some gardening and a walk down the lane to look at the horses and chickens - and we held our family quiz night dressed up as drag queens - always an entertaining evening and we like to think we all learn some thing even if its something we should already know.... Although of course we have Dr Fred giving us hard science questions  - Dr Fred made an excellent drag queen with a green beard and turquoise wig dressed in bright red kimono  it worked for him he won this weeks quiz!!

The sunny days disappeared for a while so Dr Fred and I took advantage of not being able to lounge about the garden and decided to decorate our bedroom.   When we moved into this house we were a bit overwhelmed by the amount of anaglypta wallpaper we would have to tackle - and also a bit worried about what we might find under the paper - this house was built about 1880 so the walls might just be a bit rough in places and that might be why the anaglypta paper is up in the first place.  However we stripped the living room and were relieved to discover really sound plastering on all the walls and that in fact the paper was so heavily painted a lot of it came off like cardboard - winner!!!! It was still a tedious job though and we didn't feel in any hurry to start another room - until last week... upstairs was slightly different - not so much paint on the paper so it took a little bit more effort to remove it but thankfully the walls were in good nick so a couple of days stripping and

Idle hands make cushion covers for the garden furniture - plus some experimental back rests... now just need someone to come and sit on them....Actually this project started out as 'operation fabric destash' but as always I ended up making stuff out of the bits I might have got rid of....

Its a bit of a MEH day today.... rainy and chilly compared to yesterday so I have sat around in my jim jams - listened to a lot of music and I am reading Grayson Perry by Jacky Klein - which I am enjoying immensely - wishing I had read it a bit earlier as it is full of inspiration for my last uni module if maybe a little risque in places for what I was looking at.   I have been following the Grayson Perry Art Club on channel 4 - more by chance than management as we got out of the habit of real TV not having it for years and more tuned into watching streamed channels which means I never took any notice of what was on 'real time'.    Anyway I found it an interesting mix of art, community, comedy , some surprising guests and Mr and Mrs Perry who are very entertaining.    I'm always worried that people who catch the lime light like Grayson will get overdone so to speak but he is compulsive viewing and his book is great - he hold some similar ideas to slamitinrubystarrs - 'w