quietly creating

Barbara Wanhill

recent posts

  • The orange pen is waning

    In half an hour I will have gained an hour. This is a blessing. Because I have wasted so many hours in the hours that were September, October and now November. Between the faltering, there have been hours of extreme busyness. With work mostly, but also getting the garden ready for winter.

    The sketchbook has been mostly constant – a place to quickly record the extra long season of blooming Papaver somniferum and sweet peas (the former: unexpected, the latter: reliably expected.) The seemingly discontinued Staedtler 432 M orange ballpoint stick pen is running out of ink – I never intended to have so many orange flowers. Nevertheless, a welcome volunteer marigold bloomed just in time to gift me some seeds for next growing season and after a few years hiatus, I again had success with nasturtiums. Lastly, the ‘Bright Lights’ Cosmos creates a lovely orange stain on paper. I collected seeds from that too and look forward to adding more of this to the garden to brighten hard to grow spots.

    Below, my sketchbook entries for September to November 4:

    Sketchbook entries, September-November 2023. Pen and Ink. B. Wanhill

  • Summer sketchbook update

    A document of summer mark-making progress. Take away: it was very satisfying seeing these pages develop. Unexpected and somewhat joy-filled. How about that!

    The parameters for summer drawing were: pen, no pencil pre-plannning, botanical and from life, not photos. I began with a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Fineliner 0.1 at the beginning of July, but then soon gravitated towards a package of Staedtler Ball 432s from Staples (since redesigned and manufactured in a different country – yet to be determined whether the new ones will hold up). Any day I did not draw, I drew a small circle. Some days: a mix of the two types of pens. One day, a plastic lily stood in for something live. Lots of mistakes. I dated each set of marks. Keeping things simple and being flexible to new ways of working has continued to build my confidence as a person who draws daily.

    Sketchbook entries (click on each image to enlarge), July-August 2023. Pen and Ink. B. Wanhill

  • Mobile

    I sold my Ashford Joy this spring. For a variety of reasons, I believed I needed to move on from my interest in visually exploring spinning fibre. Previously, I had gifted one of my Turkish spindles to a lovely, masterful spinner in Europe. And, I bought more printmaking ink – which I will admit, has yet to be opened.

    This spring, as I do, I also undertook gluing 82 string mobiles together for a grade 1 painting project. When I handed them back and explained that they were mobiles, one of my students exclaimed that she knew the word “mobile” and it means “phone!”

    As my body ages and rails against taking it for granted any longer; I am looking at ways to maintain physical, mental and creative mobility throughout the day. I want to find avenues to do that without that constantly pesky tool: the mobile (phone)!

    I’ve been spinning this July on these three beautiful tools: two drop (suspended) spindles from Crafty Jaks and one from Snyder Spindles. For me, a spindle takes two hands to manoeuvre and hence there is an inability to attend to anything else with one’s hands while spinning – including fully operating a digital mobile device.

    Inspired by Diana Twiss’ advocacy for making small batch yarn, I created some hand carded mixed fibre collected from leftover wheel spun scraps, botanical dye experiments and a silk hanky I purchased from Lily & Pine years ago. (I fully understand the suspect quality of this mix. I am a Dabbler.)

    It will become a small skein of 3-ply yarn and I am spinning again for the joy of it – a way to stay physically mobile and mentally creative using small increments of time.

    Three drop spindles. The two on the left from Crafty Jaks, The one on the right from Snyder Spindles. B. Wanhill, Canon T3i. July 2023
    Turkish drop spindle with heart from Crafty Jaks. B. Wanhill, Canon T3i. July 2023
    Top-whorl drop spindle from Crafty Jaks. Bowl carved by my dad. Stone heart: gift from my mom. B. Wanhill, Canon T3i. July 2023.