Sunlight on windows and water

THE SUNSHINE has been glorious these last few days and Tui and I have been out delighting in it. Down the lane a bit and round the corner is the place where our horsebox is parked, and there we've been spending our days toasting our noses and getting sawdust-sweaty working on our home on wheels. We've been up rickety ladders adding the first Very Exciting Thing to the lovely Bedford ~ a round window that hobbits would be proud of! It's a swiveling-opening delight which we put four quarters of glass into and now it lets lovely sunlight into the bedroom-quarters to be. And since there are no hobbits about, we're being very proud of it ourselves!
And then after a cup of coffee on the tailgate I leave Tui to the sanding and climb down the steep hill to the stream below to sit and paint while the swallows swoop happily past almost skimming the surface of the water and an interested mother sheep and her two stripey-legged lambkins visit me closeby.
Yesterday I fell asleep in the heat of the afternoon and woke with my head in the oil paints!
So today I ventured down there with a pencil and sketchpad instead to draw imagined interiors for our home-to-be. And when I wasn't drawing, I sat by that cold Scottish splashing rushing stream in the hot May sun and read a frosty arctic tale of hot air balloons and bears in Philip Pullman's newest book Once Upon a Time in the North, featuring lovely little wood engravings by John Lawrence.

A box of beads on a foggy day

YESTERDAY'S FOGGY misty moisty morning brought an interesting box all the way from Utah.. and inside I found this - a delightful box of handmade beads, sent to me by an admirer of my paintings ~ Sharon Bourke, who makes these lampwork beads and gives them to friends and strangers and leaves them in nooks and crannies on walks to be happened upon by passersby.
A delightful treasure-trove to arrive on our doorstep on this grey day. The beads are made by heating coloured glass rods in a flame and wrapping the molten glass round a steel rod to make the hole. Centrifugal force keeps the beads spherical and mysterious chemical reactions between the different colours produce the one-off jewel-like results.
She enclosed a quote too:

"Beads are gypsies: glittering, magical, and primitive hitchhikers. You slow down to take a look, and they attach themselves to your soul."

Carolyn Manzi, Bead Power.

We have had some sunny days too though, enough for Tui to clamber up on the horsebox and begin work proper on wooding our new home. This front section was covered with metal and is now expertly bedecked with Honduran Pitch Pine. It will soon boast a lovely round window (unearthed on ebay) in the middle, but at the moment it has no glass in it!

Meanwhile I have been busy with the mystery painting.. which I am very happy with still, despite some struggles involving painting green glass ... anyhow it is almost done and those of you expecting a little surprise in the post'll be receiving something soonish. The dastardly hard drive people are making me wait even longer while they source parts from America apparently...
I am still expecting the worst.
Ho hum... time to light the fire.

Some turtles have nice shells

WHEELED HOMES stir something in me, something that is perhaps a mixture of delight in memory, in the imagery of wheels and in all things nomadic. My first birthday was spent in this lovely old Bedford removal van, changed by my parents into a travelling home which we took across Europe and to the snows of southern Bavaria where they worked as woodcarvers. And these memories, so fond and vivid have always stayed with me. (Yes that's a little Rima in the doorway)

Since then I have painted wheels on houses and wheels on people, wheels on creatures and wheels on teapots ... I think perhaps one day my legs might curl up into a circle and grow spokes.


There is something beautiful in the turning gypsy wheel and the colourful skeleton of a wooden home that can move itself to another place, all the while taking with it kettles and beds and fire and books and family and stories.

I have just found a most delightful book which houses a treasury of housetrucks - a sort of American cousin of the gypsy caravan, written by Roger Beck who himself built four of these strange and outrageously beautiful vehicles. There is a ridiculousness to these housetrucks which I love ~ intricate wooden shacks clutching like a tortoiseshell onto an old characterful truck, complete with shingles and little dormer windows, porches and hobbit doors. Somehow I think that this sort of thing would attract the wrong kind of attention nowadays in the UK; it seems that the wilder countries with more open space like New Zealand and America have been places where these kinds of vehicles could exist.
The book Some Turtles Have Nice Shells can be bought directly from Roger Beck's website, and I wholeheartedly recommend its 191 treasurechest-pages, full with pictures of housetrucks' and buses' rustic outsides and cosy ins.

And if you like this then also try ...
Rolling Homes: Handmade Houses on Wheels by Jane Lidz and
Freewheeling Homes (The House that Jack Built Series) by David Pearson.

We have lately been nipping out in between snow and rain to begin the transformation of our lovely Bedford TK. So far we've managed to rip out the innards to make a blank wooden canvas to build our ideas on. After a few months of hammering and sawing and sewing and dreaming, we hope to have made our very own horsebox home on wheels which will carry us and our chattels to nooks and crannies and festivals and forests far and near.

A nOrsebox!

FRIENDS, take a look at our new home ... a true house on wheels! A 1976 Bedford TK Horsebox, bought purely with earnings from picture sales. So thank yous to all those people who supported us by buying pictures before Christmas and thank yous to the lovely people who sold us our new home and who didn't really want to part with it.

Once it is kitted out with stove and bookshelves and nicknacks and pictures and pots and pans and hanging things and carpets and teapots and paintbrushes and laptops and instruments and brooms and pillows and plants and ...
Well ... then we'll be off on the wander for a while with our work and spend days parked in Scandinavian forests.