My top 10 posts of 2024

It was easier to collate the information for this post this year - way easier than it was for me last year, and of course I’d been putting it off based on my last experience. There’s a big life lesson there isn’t there - something about eating a frog and all that.

Anyway, I like to take a look at which posts from the previous year have been the most popular and while I’m at it I also take a look at the posts that have been around for a while and still get looked at, and I like to share that each year. Yes, it’s nerdy, but anyway.

Starting with my most popular posts from 2024, I was pleasantly surprised to see the post which topped the list:

1 A walk from Kinoulton to Hickling and back again

It was a great walk though! And I guess we’re not the only ones looking for walks to explore our beautiful countryside. Sadly the pub we had lunch in on that visit has now shut, but the tea rooms remain open - and are just reopening following their January break. They do a great sausage cob, so we’ll definitely be heading back that way.

2 Gardeners' World Live 2024: Win a pair of tickets for Sunday 16 June, plus discount code (Ad)

I was proud to partner with Gardeners World again to host this great giveaway. It’s always great to go along and see the show too - though this year our journey from Nottingham was vastly different to the intercity from Euston, but the show was as good as always.

3 Book Review: The Ultimate Sewing Machine Mastery by Katie Matthews (Ad)

This remains really useful book, so if you’re a sewer (of any level) do pop over and take a look. I think all sewers can learn something from it.

4 Gelli printing using stencils and shapes

I must do more of this. It was great fun and while I use the prints I did in the class I’ve yet to tackle this at home - and yes, I really did print that many!

5 Industrial open shelving in our pantry and utility room

I still love these and they make me smile every single day. Seriously. And what’s more everything’s pretty much still in the same place, and even better MOH knows where to find things, and where to put things back!

6 Getting organised with pegboards in my craft room

What’s not to love with a bit of organisation? These really are fab pegboards and still in use in my craft room cupboard. They’re so nice that you don’t need to hide them in a cupboard, but for me, I wanted to maximise the space I had there. I’ve more tweaks coming for my craft room, as it’s true you really learn about a space the more you use it.

7 Hamid Zenati at the Nottingham Contemporary

This was a great exhibition - and local too, so a good find for us. I’m still in awe of the patterns and the size of the exhibits, and this is a great reminder for me to check what else is on locally. I’m so pleased that I don’t have to go to London for exhibitions, though they do have some fab ones, there’s often something close by as well.

8 The Fontana Garden (Ad)

This was a very striking garden at Gardeners’ World Live from the 2023 show, and rightly was the image that made it into most of the press stories from the show. It was a fab garden, and no doubt the pictures were helped by the blue skies, but don’t let that detract from the design, there’s much more to it than that. And in case you’re wondering why at 2023 garden made the 2024 list, I didn’t share it here until then as one of my posts which ran alongside the ticket competition post (which is on the list above).

9 Admiring Carolyn Forster's quilts at the Newark Quilt Show

Amazing quilts and my first visit to my local quilt show - and a quilt show I’ve been back to this January too. I’ve many photos to share from this year’s show which are very different to these. I think my heart really is with the scrappy quilts, and all their charm though.

10 Getting started with Gelli Plate printing

A new to me craft, and the post I shared after my first class - it really is addictive in the Pringles sort of way, in that once you start the Gelli printing you really can’t stop! I need to set aside an afternoon (or longer) to do this again!

It’s interesting to see which posts appear on the list, and there’s some of my favourite bits of 2024 there too. As I said the number one post was a pleasant surprise, but I guess people are always looking for a good walk.

So onto the second list

This list is posts created at any time by viewed in 2024, the year in brackets is the year it was originally posted - and this list is often very similar to the previous year, although often the order changes somewhat - and it has this year too. There’s a couple of new entries, including my number one post from the list above and another surprise at number six.

1. Filling our gabion baskets (2017)

2. In the Orangery at Belton House (2022)

3. My IKEA hack: HOL storage table to laundry basket (2015)

4. Planting a strawberry border (2016)

5. Sean Murray's Great Chelsea Garden Challenge (2017)

6. Bagels, cream cheese & jam (2023)

7. Tintagel Castle and 148 steps for starters... (2015)

8. Storing logs in our gabion baskets (2017)

9. Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard (2018)

10. A walk from Kinoulton to Hickling and back again (2024)

So not always what I expected but each of them are great posts, and it probably means I should spend some time on these to make sure they’re as good as they can be!

Thanks for being here again over the past year, and bearing with me with this post which you know appeals to my inner nerd. I already can’t wait to see what 2025 brings!

I’ve added the *AD tag to this post as it contains links to posts which were declared as ads when they were published on my blog.

Hamid Zenati at the Nottingham Contemporary

While there are plenty of exhibitions in London - one of which we’ve been to recently, there’s also plenty of exhibitions and ‘culture’ outside of the capital, and that’s something we’re still exploring. Since we’ve lived in Nottinghamshire though, I think we’ve been to more concerts and such, which given we practically lived on the O2’s doorstep in Greenwich is pretty odd! I think here we’re actively looking for things to explore as we build our new lives, but all of that is made so much easier by the institutions here putting on such great programmes.

Anyway, while my car was in for its service and MOT we decided to catch the bus into Nottingham and spend the day there. We weren’t sure which bus exactly, but the garage pointed us in the right direction and on both journeys we had to run for the bus, so that was a bonus too.

I’d spotted the Two Steps at a Time exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary in a magazine and had added the exhibition dates to my calendar, so that was just the prompt I needed to sort out something a little different. I also signed us up to the ‘Wednesday Walkthrough’ session where we were led through more details about the artist by an art expert, at this session Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz an artist, curator and PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.

After completing the more usual tasks of shopping and checking out items for potential future online purchases, and then grabbing a coffee we set off to find the Nottingham Contemporary. It’s a fairly brutalist piece of architecture, and one we hadn’t seen before - however when we arrived we realised we’d probably been less than a few hundred feet away from it on most of our visits to the city. Even better was we’re getting our bearings and knew this just by looking at our surroundings - it’s great when that happens and you start to find your way around a new place naturally isn’t it?

NOTTINGHAM CONTEMPORARY

I knew nothing of the artist before we booked our spaces, but learnt from the website blurb that Hamid Zenati (b 1944 Algeria; d 2022 Germany) was a self-taught and prolific artist working across many surfaces including textiles, fashion and ceramics and more.

This exhibition is the second-ever showing of his nearly sixty year career and the first in the UK - and from the images on the website I knew we were in for a feast of colour.

It was great to hear more about the artist, and the talk was busy with up to thirty people also attending, which the organisers clearly welcomed. I’ll not share much more about the artist or the talk, but we enjoyed both - I’ve realised lately that I’m very much a visual person (it’s not really a surprise tbh), so I’ll leave you (mostly anyway) to enjoy my favourite pictures.

The gallery with the textiles was my favourite of the two spaces. They were hung at varying levels from the super high space and that also provided movement, and being able to get up so close was unexpected, as was being able to walk through (literally) the pieces - though of course people were respecting them and ducking to avoid any contact.

The piece at the centre top of the image above is I think my favourite piece of the exhibition. I’m not sure if that’s because it captured your attention as soon as you walked in through its height or its colours, but it’s the one I kept coming back to - and there were plenty in here that I liked.

The boldness of the pieces was amazing, and perhaps this is attributed to being self taught and not needing to follow the rules, or perhaps it’s just what it is and what needed to come out! He didn’t document much of his work at all, so there’s no sure way of knowing - which again means you can make up your own mind, as can I.

The one below was close to being my favourite, for the colours. I can imagine that making a lovely summer dress! Which isn’t as mad or sacrilegious as it sounds, as the gallery staff were wearing his designs. I’m not sure how they felt about it, but it was a fab touch to bring the art to life.

I’ll share one final textile, this one had me captivated during the first part of the talk. It was in my direct eye line and I found myself wondering if they were whales or just fish. They could be either I guess.

This last picture is the one the MOH was most taken with. It’s in the second gallery where there’s more ceramics and even more textiles, though smaller ones which are laid out on plinths. It too follows the ‘fill the space’ approach which isn’t something I’m against. I too love the bold colours, and would happily have a pair of matching, or at least complementary, vases like this on our half-stair landing - though I’d be worried about them bouncing down the stairs unaided.

It’s great to find exhibitions such as this locally, I’m glad I spotted it and that we were able to go and enjoy it - I’m sure we’ll be back to the Nottingham Contemporary, and I’m pretty sure there’s much more in Nottingham and around for us to discover.

The Fontana Garden

* I was invited to the press preview for and provided with a pair of tickets to Gardeners’ World Live so I’m marking posts from the show as 'Ad’ - as usual my views and opinions are very much my own. Be sure to check out all of my posts from the show.

This garden is pretty special, and for a number of reasons. Firstly it’s incredibly striking - though I think the blue skies and warm temperatures helped, but also because it was sponsored by 92 year old Derek Bishop whose lifetime ambition has been to be park of a show garden, but mostly because after the show this garden will live on and was gifted to Cornwall Hospice Care. It was designed by Kim Parish with that in mind, and I’m sure it will be a fantastic space for patients, their families and the hospice staff.

The garden uses clever design to incorporate seating and dining areas, making use of the shaded area beneath its main focus, as well as a water feature which I’m sure will be calming both while it was at the show and in its future location. The planting features alliums heavily, along with tree ferns - there’s something about how they sway in the breeze that’s also calming isn’t there.

It’s funny though looking at these pictures a year on and the structures are not that dissimilar to our new garden - well, except that our garden structures are the garage and trellis around the heat pump, but the ribbed cladding and dark colour is similar-ish!

We clearly don’t have the planting, but again this post is a good reminder to be bold and to use plants we love - that’ll be ferns and alliums on my plant wish list then!

The Fontana Garden is a gorgeous garden though isn’t it?

* With thanks to Gardeners’ World for inviting me to Gardeners’ World Live, it was as fabulous as ever!