Wildwood Sofa.

The idea for this sofa has been coming together slowly. The design developing piece by piece. The back and arms are a variation suggested by the original Knole soda. There was our own visit through a wild wood to recover woodworking tools stored, appropriately for the fabric's fox theme, in an old hen house.

Particularly enjoyable was choosing how Bethan Janine's lovely Winter Forest pattern would fall - owls or fox? What about that little black hare? Delicate white mushrooms and bright berries give a magical dreamy quality to the little sofa, which is just right for curling up upon on a February evening.

Here it is awaiting its final fixings. These need to include sofa feet to make it the right height. 
Finally, the sofa complete and occupied.

Cara Says...

Blondes are not so dumb! 

This different wig certainly suits the dungarees look.

She looks lonely in the winter playground by herself but brother Shel is on his way. His workroom is waiting for him, complete with sheepskin body-warmer for those outside working days. 

These pics remind me of something we need to find next ...

'Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.'

                                                                                                        Marilyn Monroe.

Hawthorn in Flower

Julia Hathor's new Yellow Rose Cottage is just waiting to be woken up by Spring. The stone mosaic on the chimney breast is a delicately sophisticated detail suggesting the possibilities of an ancient Forest Hunting Lodge.

The exterior with its thatched roof and wood-framed windows has the painterly quality reminiscent of Helen Allingham's English country cottages. Here, you can spend time wandering or sitting by the fountain in the sweet scented garden, enjoying the bees and butterflies taking the nectar from the spikes of lupins, hollyhocks and delphiniums.

Last summer I was excited to spot giant hollyhocks again; apparently resistant to the horrible rust disease. 

Maybe we should not mention the bear?

In the foreground is a flowering white hawthorn and the RL hawthorn is flowering in earnest now. In England, Spring progresses at a walking pace, starting in the far south-west corner, steadily advancing on the North.

Making A Home in the Forest

Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things: I have, since I was three year old, conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable. 

Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It.

My use of virtual worlds involves constant and consistent attempts to reshape my house like a soft whelk that finds the one growing on its back no longer fits. This time the home is not a house alone but, thanks to Inworldz's generosity of prims and space, a house with an orchard and a garden . . . in a Forest.

During my RL week, while I was watching the Animated Shakespeare of As You Like It, the realization of just exactly why I had chosen to wrap a forest around my small new avatar became clearer. A clockwork-animated, shiny red, springy-legged ladybird expanded my plans when it flew onto Orlando's love letter, mapping out a zigzag path in iambic time to Rosalind's reading. Tiny prims or an artful sculpty will make me a caterpillar!

In the Animated Forest of Arden, designed by Valentin Olshang and directed by Alexi Karayev, an inspired band of animators and painters made sure Shakespeare's clown, Touchstone, might be plagued by viciously delicate mosquitoes and that the goat, which he kisses in error, wears a most fetching rose headpiece. Already it sounds like the worlds we know and love. 

There may be no clocks in the Forest of Arden but, as in the one I am building, there are orchards. So the shepherd, who Celia and Rosalind accost on their entry, wields a stout crook with which he obligingly hooks down juicy, crunchy, red fruit. The brims of lusty Shepherdesses' hats are laden with summer flowers. Rosalind's feathered pilgrim hat, dropped from the trees she climbs to school Orlando, goes on adventures all of its own. Whilst Orlando's determined, programmed, love letters sail downstream, fashioned into paper boats. 

The fantastic Forest fauna include deer for Jacques to sigh over, unicorns who entwine horns, and an anxious lioness to threaten and reconcile the brothers Oliver and Orlando. There is a  snail to illustrate Orlando's fault when he turns up late, "Nay, an you be so tardy, come no more in my sight: I had as lief be wooed of a snail." Heavily featured in the tree tops are a newly discovered species of monkey-baboon. For when I am a wife, explains Rosalind, I will be "more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey." The part of Rosalind is spoken by consummate artist, Sylvestra le Touzel, an actress whose stage performances I much enjoyed and admired.