Day out at Westward Ho!

Bit of a grotty day after all that lovely unexpected sun recently, we had decided to go to Westward Ho!, well known as the only place with punctuation as part of it's name. We realised that we'd never been there, despite living here for 7 years and having visited the West Country loads of times on holiday.
It's a nice Victorian village, with a broad sandy beach, it has a pebble ridge behind the beach which is probably part of the sea defences. There are plans to 'do up' the village a bit with a nice revamped green behind the beach, nice modern seating and lots of glamorous sea front apartments.
Being awkward types we walked along the pebbly, rather' bouldery', bit on the left hand side of the beach, which becomes ridges of slatey rocks leading out to sea. There's a nice tidal swimming pool in the rocks, where we watched a black Labrador having a lovely swim!
After lunch in a nice little cafe we walked along the prom towards Abbotsham Cliffs, very windy but rather a nice walk.
At the end of the village, standing alone on the edge of the cliffs, is a terribly sad old house, it looks Edwardian or late Victorian, and is completely neglected and falling to bits, lots of lovely stained glass all getting vandalised by stone throwers. It's all marked as private keep out and there appears to be a camera in one of the windows! What a waste of a lovely building, there's rusty scaffolding on it in places so maybe someone is trying to bring it back to life.

Walking back along a concrete covered pipe I discovered that this is a fabulous source of Anomia Cepa shells, otherwise known as Jingle shells, they are a variety of small clam which live attached to the shells of other sea creatures or to rocks, even to each other if no other surface presents! This means that their shapes vary considerably,so much so that they were called Anomia, meaning nameless, as they look so different from each other. I've found a few on my local beach at Ilfracombe but we found loads at Westward Ho!, they seem to have a thicker shell than the ones I've found before but they have great colours and are really iridescent both on the outside and inside.

Here's today's hoard soaking in soapy water to get the sea off them! Aren't they pretty!

I have two pieces of jewellery made with these shells so far

More beading and an amazing artwork

It's about time I posted something new here, I haven't got much further with the willow pattern piece, I'm actually going through a really awful time at the moment and the effort required to work on my jewellery seems to be beyond me most of the time. In fact I'm going to put this piece aside for a bit and make some simple smaller pieces for a little craft fair at the library where I work in November.
anyway here's where it's got to at the moment.

Willow pattern piece a little further on

I've deliberately photographed it on the beading mat to show the messy chaos that is my workspace. All the pieces are securely held in place with the beaded mounts now, I may give the largest piece one more row, I'm not sure.
I've already started the background around the tiny teardrop shaped piece at the top, it's ok but I'll probably stick to mostly white for the rest of the background, with a few little bits of blue here and there.


On another subject entirely, I was feeling particularly miserable this morning, so to cheer myself up, and get out of the house, as it was a  sunny day I decided to go down and visit Ilfracombe's newest resident. She is a 67 foot high statue called Verity, I expect most people will have seen something about her on the news recently. Damien Hirst has loaned her to the town for 20 years. She stands looking out to sea on the harbour, holding a sword aloft and carrying scales in her other hand.

Here's a couple of shots I took with my little camera today. From landward she is a fairly ordinary pregnant nude, from seaward she is something of an anatomy lesson. I happen to think she is rather wonderful.