Scottish woods are different as it’s Burns’ night I am catching up with my Christmas in Scotland on Christmas eve we went for a walk in Auchtermuchty (meaning upland of the pigs) about nine miles north of Glenrothes. the woods are quite extensive with lots of ups and downs to test my flatland legs. I always get left behind, taking photos, waiting for Bims to sniff incredibly elaborately, and my legs are shorter than L and S’s. I actually managed to run (uphill) to catch up, which I was rather pleased about. it’s a photogenic landscape on the edges of the wood, pasture, pig pasture too, ash trees and a field of highland ponies, happily fat and hairy out in the cold. a very hard frost overnight but in the denser parts of the pine woods it must have been warmer; there was no frost in the sunshine and with steep hills we kept quite warm ourselves after Christmas we went to Falkland for another woody walk quite a dramatic place, and cold in the shadow of the hill to the south then of course, there’s Lumbo and Spinkie den on the edge of St Andrews. (these names must be the relics of old Scots or Norse names, anglicised by map-makers.) Lumbo is just around the corner from the house and the early seventies estate it’s part of, and the burn spurls past the garden in its rocky bed. I made a blanket strip stitched and then leaf-printed and dyed in water from the burn ferns are always a good bet for contact prints and even old dead oak leaves and sycamores will give up some tannin in the presence of iron I left it a few days before unbundling it’s not an intensely dramatic textile made into another tsunobokuro bag like a small painting but I love the three-dimensional qualities and there we have today’s motif and for the time being it’s holding my precious store of knitting yarn – yak, merino and silk …. Post navigation folded woods in Januarya february diary One Comment Great photos 🙂 Reply Leave a ReplyCancel reply This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.