By Stephie, on Saturday 1st January, 2011 at 23:58 pm
If I can type quickly enough, I should just about get this posted before the 7th day of Christmas!! You remember this – the Fairisle hat with flaps that I made for Kim this Christmas?
 The reindeers are off for a walk! I think I promised you a picture of him wearing it, if he’d put it on his head!
 Kim and his daddy on Boxing Day This is the first time he wore it, on a Boxing Day walk along the cliffs from Porthtowan to Chapel Porth. He’s worn it every time he’s been out since. I am a happy mummy! There’s nothing like the pleasure you get from seeing people enjoy something you’ve made especially for them; it’s a real buzz and makes all the effort so worthwhile  What did you make that someone else will love? (‘A mess’ is not the right answer!)
 Porthtowan
By Stephie, on Friday 1st October, 2010 at 00:16 am
 Gorgeous Garmin The Garmin FR60 is gorgeous – and this one’s all mine, mwa, ha, ha, ha, haaa! In case you were wondering, it’s a sports watch with a heart rate monitor. I’ve had some birthday money floating around for a while now and rather than just let it get subsumed in the family budget I thought I should spend it on myself. That feels a bit unnatural, but I think that’s why I was given it! And I found the watch for a snip on Amazon, so why not
I think it might be just the right time for a bit of help with the motivation and this little gadget has got me all excited. I’m not known for my gadget fondness, most of the time I just can’t be bothered; things that are meant to save you time usually end up costing more than you bargained for. I don’t even own a microwave, I mean what would I do with it – heat up my cold coffee? And as for mobile phones, yes I’d love an iphone, but I’ve got less money than sense and a four year old Sony that works just fine thanks very much. So it feels almost unnatural getting excited over something that just measures my heart rate when I go for a run…
But it’s what you can do with the information that counts. You can set your minimum and maximum heart rate and divide them into 5 (or more) ‘zones’ (I used the Karvenon formula to do this). It’s pretty straight forward to work out (even I could do it!) and once you’ve got your minimum and maximum (mhr) you can just enter those into a table on Garmin Connect and it divides them up into zones for you – saving you all the number headaches. I like! The zones will be shown as 50 – 60% of your mhr (zone 1), 60 – 70% of your mhr (zone 2), etc. This means that if you’re following a training programme like me, one that tells you to run at an easy pace for 8 miles say, you’ll know you need to be running in zone 2, or if you’re told to run at a ‘challenging’ pace (aka ‘go kill yourself Stephie’), you should be running in zone 5 (but not if you want to live, obviously). You’d think that you can do all this without a sports watch, after all if you can hardly breath you know you’re working hard, right? Yep true, but since I’ve been using the watch I’ve realised that that method just isn’t so accurate, and I’ve found that I should’ve been working harder than I was, ha, ha! It seems to me that I’d been slowing down a bit because I was tired, but since I’ve used the heart rate monitor I know that my heart can easily cope and that it’s actually my legs that are getting tired. Weight training it is then. Damn watch!
The other thing I love about this watch is that you can set it to beep when you’re running below or above the zone/s you’ve decided to run in and you can set an alarm for the period of time you want to run for too. You can also set up interval sessions – you know, run hard for 5 minutes and then easy for 2 kind of thing. Then of course you can upload all your lovely data to Garmin connect, and I’m glad to say, to Map My Run too, woohooo! And all that just with the heart rate monitor. Now I’m saving up for the foot pod to go with it, then I’ll know how far I’ve run, how many calories I’ve burnt, and oooh, so much more.
Bored yet? Thought you might be, so here’s some piccies I took the first time I used it. I went for a walk along the coast from Chapel Porth to Porthtowan, which is a tad hilly let me tell you!
 Moody skies towards Porthtowan  The lovely Porthtowan itself  Blue Bar Well you know me, a walk wouldn’t be a walk if there wasn’t a cup of coffee involved somewhere along the way! Ta, ta for now. Back soon.
Love Stephie x
By Stephie, on Friday 3rd September, 2010 at 01:18 am
I saw the grand
 The Palladian mansion Holkham Hall and the dilapidated.
 Quayside workshop The idyllic
 A peacful morning in Old Hunstanton and the bleak.
 Flat, flat, flat! And I know where my heart lies.
I spent several hours one afternoon walking along the North Norfolk Coast Path. It’s a long distance path along windswept shores and I picked a section going west between Holkham and Brancaster. It was just about 10 and a half miles. The first stretch was through miles of sand dunes, which can change shape overnight in strong winds. Walking through the dunes you don’t see much except sky and the blue sea thistle. And the odd naked man. As you approach Burnham Overy the dunes fall away behind you and you find yourself walking along the top of the raised sea defences. The land is flat here; there are no majestic cliffs to break the skyline and all you see are salt marshes stretching for miles. This part of the coast is famous for it’s bird watching. Egrets, gulls, swans and curlews were two a penny, but I didn’t see anything more unusual. (Note to self: take a pair of binoculars next time.) In places, you walk along narrow board walks across the marsh with towering grasses on the seaward side and neatly clipped gardens on the other. Walkers were rude. At home everyone says hello, but here I’d step off the path to let people pass and not receive so much as a nod in thanks. So I found myself singing a sarcastic “thank you” at the top of my voice as I stepped back on to the boards. Nothing. Not a murmur. Heads down, eyes fixed they trudged along like a defeated army. These people, I thought, were as grey as the leaden skies.
I find it hard to describe my feelings about this landscape. It was wonderful, elemental, but so bleak and exposed. So, so different from home. There was nowhere to shelter, nowhere to sit and take in the sky without also taking a battering from the winds. It felt desolate, and at times the desolation felt like it would go on forever. I would love to be there at dawn. I can imagine the mist rising from the marshes in a watery light and the silence being broken by the dawn chorus. I’d sit there on the grassy path atop the sea defences, wrapped up in a blanket and a thick woollen scarf, breathing the sharp air. My eyes would be closed and I’d be listening intently to the curlews. I’d ignore any passer by that broke my reverie with a “good morning” and I wouldn’t care if they too thought me as grey as the leaden skies.
A 10.5 mile walk between Holkham and Brancaster
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Holkham Hall
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Hunstanton
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Hope enjoyed the photo albums. Back soon.
Love Stephie x
By Stephie, on Saturday 7th August, 2010 at 10:05 am
Fancy a train journey? Do what we did last week and ride up to Lanhydrock House, when you get to Bodmin Parkway station (you can take a steam train journey from here) there’s the most beautiful level walk up to an old and quirky looking house. You can imagine yourself in a grand carriage rolling sedately up the long drive, or you can do what Kim does and nag to go in the modern day equivalent: the golf buggy! The lazy toad didn’t get his way and I forced him to walk! He had to walk yesterday too when we went to Trelissick Garden, which is only a few miles from home. To spare you from my rabbiting on, here’s a few photos from Trelissick.
 Panoramic views of the River Fal  A quick watercolour sketch of the River Fal. Kim would probably disagree with the word 'quick'!  Spot the strange flower in the grass!  A standing stone to mark the turning of the millennium  Colour in the flower borders. I enjoyed taking my watercolours out with me, must remember to take them next time. You never know I might even get better at it! I used to be really good with watercolours (get me!), but I’m a bit out of practice. It’s still my favourite painting medium though
Right, I’m off now – got some things to list for From the Loft, my Etsy shop! May have a bowl of porridge first though.
See you later
love Stephie x
By Stephie, on Thursday 3rd June, 2010 at 22:05 pm
across a field of bullocks for they are large and white and scary and WILL run after you. Note to self: 2nd bullock from left can run very fast, even skip. Cross this field off your training routes until all signs of bullocks have disappeared. Completely vanished. (Making loud noises and trying to make yourself look bigger does nothing to deter the buggers.)
 Bullocks across my path, whoooooa!
By Stephie, on Sunday 23rd May, 2010 at 11:42 am
I’ve enjoyed myself this last week, though it’s been at the expense of cleaning the house  I don’t care about that though, I mean would you? Just look at the fantastic colours I came across when I was walking around a local reservoir with my friend Janie.
 Perfect! Can you get more bucolic than this?! Argal Reservoir is one of those lakes dotted with fisherman sitting patiently, and people walking their dogs. It’s probably only about 2 miles round so you often get families walking there at weekends. I prefer it when it’s more quiet, ha, ha!
 Scenes like this take my breath away.  Unfurling ferns glow in the shade  and the green, green moss slowly spreads. I’m thinking about making a small quilt using these colours as inspiration. I absolutely love blue and green together and used to use it all the time in my oil paintings (years ago) – emerald and cerulean blue, nothing beats it!
I’ve been enjoying looking at colour a lot this week and these anemones were no exception. I bought them at the roadside and they’ve been brightening up my kitchen for almost a week now. I also finally got the key cupboard up on the wall – I repainted it in January!
 Simple pleasures.  Simple colour. We’ve had fantastic warm and sunny weather here for the past few days and I think it’s finally got me motivated enough to go out for a run. I did 6 miles on Friday, but I need to do a lot more regular running if I’m going to enter a half marathon in October. That was IF! If I do it, I’ll probably try and raise money for the mental health charity Mind. In the mean time I need to sort out a training schedule. If I find more hedgerows like this on my routes that shouldn’t be too much of a problem 
 A riot of spring colour! I hope you’re not too disappointed that I haven’t brought you any pictures of things I’ve been making this week; that’s because they’re not finished yet, but hopefully they will be by the end of the day, so come back soon to see! If you want to see a lovely bit of hand quilting right this minute though take a trip over to Jo Avery’s blog to see her spiderweb quilt that she finished this week, it’s l o v e r l y!!
Time for another run now, and then some pottering and more making. So I’ll see you soon my lovelies.
Love Stephie x
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I'm running a 28 mile marathon in memory of Josie this February. Come and find out why.
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