Leisure and Pleasure

This was the theme (I hope, memory is like a sieve!) of this years Floral Art Competition at my parents local show. Mum entered 7 classes, and did very well. She's gained another couple of pieces of silver ware to polish, one for the most original use of colour, and one for the most points gained in the overall competition, she won 2 of her classes.

Last time I posted some pictures of her arrangements you were all really nice and left some lovely comments, she does read here so I'd love for her to hear that other people besides her daughter think she's wonderful!
I've uploaded all the pictures on to Flickr so they can be nice and big, if you click on the pictures it will take you to a version you can see larger.
This first one is in the category called Another Opening of Another Show and Mum chose to represent the Lord of the Rings, I have posted about this before but we have a large collection of animal skulls.

This one is World Wide Web, and unfortunately the only picture was taken with a shaky hand!

I can't quite remember the name of the class but it does represent Ballet.

This is a miniature class (it measures 25cm across) and again I've forgotten the class title!



This is the entry in the Fantasy class, which was a hanging exhibit to be viewed from all sides,


This is another class name I've forgotten and it's also a little wobbly! It represents a day at the beach.


This final one is in a class called Sporting Life where in true style Mum decided to represent Ice Climbing, we don't do those boring "safe" sports!


Finally, some Nether Garment progress, I have done the first leg, and started the second one, maybe I'll have 2 legs by the time the tour hits Paris!

On the green band I've put a 50p piece (approximately 3cm across) to give some scale.

A day out...

We (my Mum, dad and I) went for a good old fashioned day out today, and for once the British weather decided to be obliging, certainly not wall to wall sunshine and blue skies, but sunny enough to make me regret forgetting the sun cream, my back and shoulders feel a little warm!
We went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and it was fabulous, some of the sculpture was not my thing, but some of it was amazing. I was particularly taken with some by an artist called Sophie Ryder. she uses a figure of a hare alot in all her sculptures. But she also does wire "drawings" which are amazing, I only have photos of one of these as the others were indoors so I couldn't take photos. I really recomend you take a look at her website.

For me one of the best things about her work was the sense of fun, when she made the original sculpture to be cast in bronze she embedded scrap objects in it, and they just made me smile!


How many household objects can you spot in this hand?




Recognise him?



The trees were also very beautiful, this was the biggest Beech tree any of us have ever seen.

This was the wire drawing I was talking about, so unbelievably clever.


The park also has sculptures by many other artists including Henry Moore.

We wished we'd managed to see the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition as I love his work. There are still a few permanent pieces there, but none of the more natural pieces that I love so much.
The cafe is fabulous, and it's free to get in you just pay car parking of £4. We spent all day there and still didn't managed to see everything. If you want a day out then I really recommend it.

Books

It's not something I write alot about on here but I love to read, I'm the person who has shelves of books, and has read every book on those shelves several time. One of my saddle bags on the horse riding holiday was pretty much full of books!

IComLeavWe has started again, this is the new version of NaComLeavMo, and far more manageable, as you only leave comments for 1 week out of every month, already I've added a new blog to my feed reader. Again like last time I've found myself becoming more energised about my own blogging, I've been stuck in a rut recently with nothing to write about. One of the posts I've commented on today had a post up about the Top 100 books according to The BIg Read, apparently the average adult has only read 6 books off the list.
Without further ado here is what I've read, please feel free to copy this list let me know what you've read and make recommendations about any other good books. Ones in bold are ones I've read, sometimes I've added comments about a book.


1.Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible 
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Everybody should read this, particularly the last book of the trilogy)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (seriously, this is a great read??? I read to relax and escape, not to make my brain work hard working out what the hell the meaning of the words actually are)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I've listened to the radio plays, which I think is as good as)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (this is not a great read, there are so many better books than this)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I had to study this for English GCSE, I now hate this book with a passion)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan 
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (Tried to read this and hated it so gave up)
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 
58. A Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (A short History of Nearly Everything is much better)
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (Again he has better books than this, I loved Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny Champion of the World far more)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think I manage to up the average from 6 quite nicely. I have noticed that I was far more well read as a child though. As I've got older I find I'm drawn to books that are easy to read and don't make my head hurt after a day at work but I'm fine with that. 

Just to add because I was asked about them a Nether Garment photo, they're coming along well, I hope to get the first leg done by tomorrow, I'm off to knit night again tonight where I can get alot done.