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Saturday 23 March 2013

OLD PICTURES AND NEW SNOW

We bought a painting by Tom McGuinness. He was a coal miner from a village near here and is famous as one of the "Pitmen Painters". I was hoping that it was an old scrapyard from round here but someone local informed us that it was definitely Cargofleet Iron Works in the background, so that made it Middlesbrough.
So off we went.
This is it with one of the gas holders gone. It still has the Dorman Long name on the coke furnace (large building to the right). They were famous for the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Tyne Bridge amongst others.
This car yard might be the actual scrapyard site!
We ventured on to Redcar to have our coffee and cake while watching the seascape.
It was really windy. They are still putting up the wind farm out to sea. By the summer it will be all that can be seen. Twenty seven windmills all up.

Love those cupcakes is crocheting a lovely blanket and it made me get out my log cabin patches and see how far I have got.......not far enough. I wanted to do enough to make a full blanket but perhaps twelve and all the borders will do! It's not exactly interesting so I started a cotton/string bag for variety.
I have quite a bit of cotton in my stash so these may become the default xmas gift. If the weather keeps on the way it is there'll be plenty of indoor time for knitting.
It's not too awful here considering how bad it is reported to be only a few miles away. We are quite sheltered at the bottom of the Dales. Further up the snow has been blown into deep drifts.
Oh for some summer this year.
Cheers Gillian

4 comments:

Lyn said...

What an interesting thing to do, go and find a place where a painting was done.
We have lots of snow here and we plan to go out, have fun staying in with your yarn stash! Xxx

love those cupcakes said...

Oh blimey, I grew up very close to those works (and others, all long gone). As kids, we used to walk past (through?) them, looking for little 'ironies', discarded pieces of the metal that was produced, which we collected. Can't think why.

Good luck with all the crafting!

Sue said...

What a great idea going to see the place that inspired the painting. It is nice to see you knitting again, and the log cabin blanket looks really nice. I hope you get some warmer weather soon. We still have some very hot weather to come over Easter, and then hopefully it will settle into autumn weather for a while.

carol said...

Not much snow but very cold here and, envious as I am of your tripping, it would be too cold yet for a camper van outing.
It amazes me how many fascinating places you have within easy reach of you. We have a lot of wilderness up here, which I like a lot but not so many signs of human habitation worth visiting.
I love the miner's art.