Wirksworth Art Trail

Wirksworth art trail is part of the annual Wirksworth Festival and this year on 8th September we went for a look to find out what it’s all about. I went to the art trail a number of years ago and have managed to miss it each year since through one thing or another. The art trail is set throughout the whole of the town with residents of the town making a couple of rooms of their houses or garden available for a visiting artist to set up and sell their work. There really is a great variety of artist including printers, painters, metal work, woodwork, drawings, pottery.

The map shows the area covered by the trail — at trail time the brochure has all the artists listed and marked on the map so that you can work out your route. The trail runs for 2 days and the entrance price includes both days.

I personally am really interested in the houses and gardens as well as the art displayed. Perhaps I’m just nosey.

Wirksworth Festival

wirksworth art trail 2024

We had a great time wandering through jitties (gennels, alleys, snickets- whatever your local name is for a little path between houses).

St Mary’s church has its own attractions even before you browse the artist’s work including T’Owd Man (the old man) which is an 800 year old stone carving of a lead miner.

T' Owd man

outdoor sculpture display

garden leading to artist display no 32

Local artisan food stalls

St mary's church

st mary's church wirksworth

following the trail through wirksworth

Northern Lights

Well, what a treat as last night we saw the Northern Lights from the front garden. I was already in bed when a daughter phoned and said that she had seen on the local facebook site that we should be able to see the lights from the barns. Quickly pulling on some jeans, coat, hat and wellies I was outside looking north. It wasn’t desperately spectacular but you could certainly see a pink/purple glow in the sky, but it was the photo’s we took which really highlighted it for us. Even just using a camera phone and no tripod we were able to capture some pretty impressive views. We were a bit hampered by the light pollution caused by our outside lights coming on from the sensors sensing all the movement but we were happy. I messaged our guests in the holiday cottage and they came out too. Sad to say, but I can’t arrange this for all our guests :)

Lumsdale Waterfall Walk

Last year we holidayed in Ingleton, Yorkshire during a particularly cold and wet spell and made the most of the resulting huge volume of running water by visiting many of the waterfalls. Today we thought that it was time to take a look at our local waterfall walk at Lumsdale near Matlock. It’s a lovely walk and not too long at under 3 miles and is full of history. It’s one of the local early industrial sites with the remains of a series of water powered mills. It is a protected Scheduled Monument owned and preserved by the Arkwright Society. Click here for more information on Lumsdale valley and the Arkwright Society.

It has been dismal and wet of late, but this morning it was all set with sunshine and frost. We got off early to make the most of the weather and to miss the crowds as it can get quite busy. We parked just off the A632 at Highfields school and walked down the lane towards the first pond.

Lumsdale waterfall walk

Lumsdale Middle pond

During the worst spell of covid lockdown the waterfall walk was closed. It’s now fully open but you need to walk past the first locked gate after the pond to access the big waterfall.

Info board

Chimney

Lumsdale Waterfall

There are a several steps down past the waterfall and onto the lane, but there are handrails and the steps are quite level.

Lumsdale steps

Steps take you down to the lane from the waterfall

Lumsdale Mill buildings

Information board - Lumsdale

Lumsdale factory building

We were too early for the brewery and cafe. It looks tempting enough to walk this way again!

Continue down the lane until you reach a footpath on the left. We weren’t sure of which way to go so went the wrong way, but the route we marked on the map is the way we should have gone. We retraced our steps and followed the footpath which takes you to Tansley.

Lumsdale waterfall

Lumsdale pond at Tansley

Speedwell mill

We also missed the path through the woods and instead followed the Old Coach Road into Tansley. There are some lovely houses along there, but next time we will take the path through the woods which then pops up into lower Tansley. Then you take a left out of Tansley and follow a lane that turns into a track, up and up until the views open out across the Lumsdale valley and you can see Riber castle above Matlock.

View to Riber Castle

View across Lumsdale valley to Riber castle

Ocean Breeze Patchwork Quilt 1

This quilt pattern caught my eye a year ago and with a little patience and perseverance is now my favourite quilt. I knew I wanted to make a quilt with the appearance of a drift of colours and not with traditional perfect colour symmetry. I’m also not great at planning and buying fabric to the pattern. I tend to buy fabric here and there and hope there is roughly enough to finish to the size that I eventually decide to make.

I used my sizzix cutting machine to cut all the pieces and it saved such a lot of time and of course the pieces were all perfectly cut which made accurate sewing together much easier.

This is the blocks all laid out ready to sew together. It took about 2.5 hours to lay all this out and I was relieved that we didn’t have any visits from dogs or grandchildren before I got them all stacked up in rows! To make sure that I didn’t get mixed up with the layout I stitched all the rows together and then finished it off several weeks later when I had a bit more time.

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All the blocks laid out ready to sew together.

This quilt actually grew a bit bigger and the plain fabrics were padded out with some prints, which of course was according to the original plan. Possibly. Anyway, with a bit of sewing here and there in between house moving, barn converting, starting a new job and having 2 new grandchildren I finally have it finished. I think the pandemic helped with this since apart from all the necessary stuff of life, there was a lot more time for sewing. Oh, and I also have the impetus that comes with having a new sewing machine! I have been very fortunate in being able to upgrade my steady Janome machine with a shiny new all singing all dancing Bernina 570QE machine. I love my new sewing machine……it has so many wonderful features and stitches just perfectly.

Further pictures to follow!

Sewing and crochet

I’m always making things and I’m a pretty good ‘finisher’ but not quite so good at taking photo’s of everything made. Most of the time I’m making for someone and want to give it away as soon as it is finished, hence either no photo or a bit of a snap rather than a beautifully styled web and instagram worthy composition. Ah well, it’s real life in my house. So, in no particular order here is some of my stuff.

Zip Pouch

I made many zip pouches for Christmas, this is the latest quick pouch with my favourite Bernina stitch sampler pouch in the background.

Crochet cushion panel attached to a shop bought cushion. This is the third made in this pattern and is a gift, though I’m quite liking this for myself!

Birthday Banner

I’ve made a couple of these with the names of the grandchildren as a separate banner. There are now 2 more grandchildren so I need to get cracking making some more!

New baby

‘Mini Me’s’ were the family Christmas present of a couple of years ago. New babies in the family have meant the ‘Little people’ families need to increase too. I have to say that this baby was the most fiddly thing ever!

For this family setting I needed to make a new ‘big boy’ so that ‘baby’ could represent the new baby.

Ahhhh so cute!

18 months ago I would never have dreamt that I would be making face masks but I’ve made loads and loads. Something clearly went a bit wrong with this one, so is probably not just covid proof but everything proof haha

I made this pirate outfit for a friend as a joke - who knows why, but it does look good on his grandson. As you can see it comes complete with parrot.

In the interests of actually making a blog post, I’ll stop here. I’ll be back with more later!

Local Sunrise Walks

It was beautiful this morning, all crisp and clear. I have to admit that I just pulled on my wellies, hat and coat over my pyjama’s, grabbed my camera and did a little circuit around the nearest field.

A sunrise a few days ago was just ablaze in orange and purple

Another early morning frosty walk exploring the footpaths. Definitely one of the perks of working from home during the pandemic! We found one that crossed the Midland Railway Centre.

Local industrial heritage walk

Coronavirus lockdown is with us again so we are enjoying our local walks. The fields are extremely soggy so started walking today down the lane from the barns to the village. This proved to be another unexpected hazard as we had a tree down on the lane preventing any cars to and from the barns. Fortunately the tree was cleared first thing Monday morning so not an inconvenience for long. We walked around the village for a circuit and then headed towards Butterley Reservoir. It’s a first for us to see a paddleboarder on the reservoir.

It was also a first on this little local walk to see some alpaca in a paddock where we usually see horses.

It can get very busy with walkers so decided to follow the old coach road for a while before heading on towards the Midland Railway Centre ‘Swanwick Junction’ and then skirting around the Butterley Pit Head, across the railway lines and back up the fields and home.

The coach road is at the site of the entrance to our local industrial heritage with the Butterley Works blast furnaces, canal tunnel and underground wharf listed as a scheduled monument on the Historic England register. We had to take a bit of a detour at one stile on the path as it was almost completely under water. The photo’s below show it a week earlier covered in ice and then on this walk under more water.

Our impromptu footpath detour took us past the Derbyshire Fire Station training centre where some unorthodox parking was in evidence.

After rejoining the footpath we walked past the former Butterley station house and railway cottages which form a little settlement seemingly in the middle of nowhere

Our next heritage site was the Brittain Pit head where some of my ancestors worked. The footpaths outside our barns form part of the network of paths walked by miners and workers to the mining, blast furnace and engineering sites.

After the pit head we crossed the railway tracks and back up the hill to the barns. It’s a really nice circular walk with a bit of heritage spotting along the way.

Mam Tor National Trust Walk

We decided we wanted to walk on Mam Tor during the holidays and after consulting the weather forecast decided on Tuesday. However, the best laid plans etc and we ended up changing it to Monday. I didn’t realise it was a bank holiday because, well, my brain is on holiday too, but decided to go anyway but try and get there early. We set off at 8:00 and it takes just over an hour to get there and it was cold at -1 and what was worse was that it was foggy. I am trying to only walk up hills if there is a view at the top and in fog it was going to be unlikely. Oh well, we were psyched up for it so carried on. In fact it wasn’t too bad. The fog lifted to allow some views and we started off before the multitude arrived after finding space to park in the national trust car park at Mam Nick. Even with a gps device we managed to take the wrong route but which actually turned out better because the paved path to the top of Mam Tor was icy and there was definitely fog up there. We ended up skirting around Mam Tor and apart from some very slippery sticky mud in one bit we had a nice walk. It wasn’t far, but was enough for a cold and dreary day. It was really nice to get back after lunch and have a hot bath, a hot cup of tea and come down to the log burner glowing away. The National Trust walk details and map can be found here