Flowers in lockdown

It has been a quiet few months for Meadowsweet. No weddings and no workshops, and to make it all worse, my webhost ceased to operate which wiped out my website overnight. But when I reflect over the last few months, I realise that I have done quite a lot with flowers, but quietly. It was my grandson's first birthday right at the start of the lockdown and I picked these April flowers from the garden as a virtual present. If you look you will see narcissi, tulips, hyacinth, muscari, wallflowers, hellebore and, best of all, snakeshead fritillary.  Here are the same flowers popped into a jam jar:

Then a couple of weeks later it was my daughter, Jessie's, birthday. So I made the best virtual birthday bouquet I possibly could from our garden flowers. I photographed the bouquet outside and inside our house.

I almost always have a small vase, jug or jam jar of flowers on our dining table, and these were the beautiful, simple flowers from one day in April.

In May I followed most of an on-line art course. I liked some of it, but not all. The best bit was making shapes with the cardboard inside part of a loo roll, potato carving and just a finger. We used water colour which makes good layers and I used an ink pen which has been sitting dormant in a drawer for years. The best things I painted were these flower pictures.

In the Spring a dear friend died. She loved bright yellow flowers and I made another virtual bouquet in remembrance of her. It makes me smile to look at the colours and to think of her vibrant, happy personality.

In my last blog I posted lots of pictures of tulips. Once they had faded, Spring had a second wind and our front garden was filled with glorious irises and alliums.

Our summer garden is now coming slowly to life and we have cosmos, flowering mint, scabious, cornflowers, hebe, lavender, sweet peas, borage, love-in-a-mist and alliums. Here is a flavour of it all.

I am expecting that we will be wearing face coverings more in the coming weeks, so I decided to make some. There are lots of patterns available and I have gone for the pleated version. I got my sewing machine out and made them out of old shirts. For myself, I used a suitably floral fabric.

I am looking forward to our lives opening up now. I hope you are all keeping healthy and safe and that you are venturing out into the world more...perhaps with some interesting face coverings that you have run up!