I don’t know about you, but in our house Christmas feels very strange and surreal.

We won’t be seeing our daughter and her partner; we still don’t know if our son will be able to come down from Glasgow. He lives in one of the areas where mass testing is being rolled out this week, so we will just have to wait and see.

In a ‘normal’ year I would be juggling the demands of various Christmas selling events. I’d also be working hard behind the scenes to ensure all my resellers were fully stocked. This year, of course, my resellers had to close during November - until this coming Wednesday! I’d be getting ready this week for what would have been the Designer Maker Market at The Queens Hall in Hexham. Very much a memory of Christmas Past!

This year, I’ve actually had time to make my own Christmas wreath for the window into our back yard. Greeting cards to friends and family in Shanghai, Cape Town and Dublin have actually been posted on time! For the first time in living memory, our grown up children have received Advent calendars (yes we still send them one) in time for the beginning of Advent!

So there are some positives emerging as we approach the Christmas festivities in whatever form they finally take. Lord knows, we need some positives don’t we! I do hope your own Christmas is a peaceful and enjoyable one, despite the circumstances we find ourselves in. Maybe, like me, you are able to savour some elements that normally go in a flash of tinsel.

Like this lovely sunset Chris took yesterday whilst walking the dog on the top of Warden Hill, the site of an Iron Age hill fort, that looks south over what he said felt like the whole of England. Meanwhile back at home, I was busy doing some clearing out of the eave spaces in the attic and looking for the Christmas decorations.

On Saturday we got up early and went for a long walk up towards Hexham Racecourse. It was a gorgeous clear frosty morning as we circumnavigated the reservoir above our house. The ducks were sunbathing off one of the fishing platforms in this lovely little nature reserve. I have to say I am still discovering parts of Hexham I’ve never seen in all my 31 years here. We’re so lucky to live where we do.

I’ve not been in the studio at all during our second lockdown primarily because I’ve been working on the back end of my website with a social media and SEO coach, Wildcurrant Marketing. She’s been keeping me very busy with lots of homework to do as I learn how to decipher my Google Analytics and learn the mysteries of keywords, hashtags and all that malarky.

However, sometimes time away from the studio allows ideas to creep into my consciousness which I am hoping to explore in the coming month or so. I intend to revisit combining collograph and monotype printmaking. In particular I want to create some collagraph plates (along similar lines to the acetate stencils I’ve been working with in monotype) that I can use repeatedly with different land and seascape compositions to build up colour and texture. What's more, I want to do this at scale and push my print size to the largest print size my press will allow. Exciting! I will let you know how it goes early next year!

In the meantime you might be interested to know that I have uploaded the four large seascapes I was working on between September and October. You can see them on the Home page and Originals page. Just follow the links to see each one individually.Have a good Christmas!