Batty for Samhain

Happy Halloween / Samhain!

To celebrate this time of year, I've got some lovely batty friends to share with you.

This is an amigurumi bat I made with some special effects thrown in:

Here he is without effects. He's quite cute actually.

Halloween has developed into a very different thing from its original purpose. It wasn't always about ghosts and witches, or even "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" :) Originally called Samhain, it was a festival to celebrate the end of the year. Over two thousand years ago during the Iron Age, this was their New Year, a time to celebrate the end of the old, the beginning of the new and the onset of winter.

They used to have bonfires and feasts. It was also a time when the veil between the worlds became very thin, so the spirits of the Otherworld could come into our world and people could easily accidentally wander into the Otherworld never to be seen again.

It wasn't about being scary or frightening people, though the spirits coming through may have been something to guard against, but it was about a celebration of the turning of the year, the cycles of nature and probably for the harvest they'd had. That would have included apples, of course, which became used, as Samhain developed, in the tradition of apple bobbing - one old thing that still survives. Turnips were carved, not pumpkins, to give light in the darkness and to ward off evil beings in the centuries that followed, especially when Christianity became widespread.

So, although I've made a bat and drawn and painted another, I sometimes wish we could go back to the earlier, nature-based celebration rather than the monster and skeleton stuff of today. But, in the end, it's a bit of fun before the darkness of winter.

Have a spooky day! :)

Photos of Summer

Now that Autumn has arrived, I thought I'd post a few more of the photos I took of flowers, plants etc during the Summer. One last look at their beauty before the different colours of the Autumn and Winter set in. 

This is a photo of rain drops on aquilegia leaves with the sun shining through them, creating sparkling light and shadow.

Here is a tulip with its gorgeous cream and crimson stripes. 

This is one of my regular visitors: a woodpigeon, snuggling down on a branch against a cold breeze. 

 

I intend to use all of these photos in one way or another in my textile work and painting, either through drawing them and turning them into textile art or paintings or by taking influence from their colours, shapes, petals, leaves, feathers, etc. 

Whatever I make, I'll be posting it here so you can see the process and transition from one thing to another. I hope you'll like it. 

Nessie the second.

Remember the Nessie I crocheted for the Loch Ness Knit Fest? Well, I loved him so much I had to make another one for myself that I could keep. This one is a different colour but the same shape and size.

It didn't take that long to make him and I finished him yesterday evening.

Here he is posing on a stone.

Here he is peeping through the leaves, trying to hide just like the one in Loch Ness does.   :) 

I can see myself having to dig a pond for him to use as his own little loch.  ;)