Kirkcudbright Arts and Crafts Trail 2013 Part 2

Two years ago when I featured the Arts and Crafts trail these three little huts were being put up for the first time. Since then they've become somewhat iconic of the Trail. They'd spent the preceding few week outside the town welcoming visitors as they crossed over the Telford bridge but for the weekend they were back on their original site down by the harbour.

I spotted this mural in the courtyard of one of the local cafes.

How up to date can you get, this one was still being painted.

There might be 92 venues on the program but many of these venues feature several artists or crafts people, so the number of contributers must have been considerably over 100. This is certainly true for the house where Kie Stewart's paintings were exhibited. There were several exhibitors in the house and one in the garden shed as well as tea and cakes for sale in the Kitchen. Kie is best known for his paintings of our local cow, the Belted Galloway, but I like his black and white scenes best.

He's manages to sneek a couple of belties into this painting.

A local church hall housed a large number of local craftspeople and artists.

Here's a couple of paintings by Angela Lawrence of the Clience Studio.

A couple of turned plated by Brian Conchie of Dumfries.

I particularly liked this plate which had glittery bits in the paintwork.

The jewelry of Red Crow Silver seems to owe much of it's design to Pictish art.

You often see pens with wooden barrels these days but I can't say I've ever seen any made to such good quality as those made by John under the name Pens of Note. Though perhaps a long way by car, as the crow flies he's only a few miles away across the Solway Firth in Cumbria.

This fountain pen is made from a piece of Eucalyptus burr.

Not all are made from wood, this pen is fashioned from the core of a corn on the cob.

He had a few examples of wood with him, this piece of spalted beech looked particularly interesting.

Local provisions barter operative and Lounge Punk Hero ,Richard Ipaint, is also a dab hand with the paint brush. In this years offerings he has finished his paintbrush dabbing a little before you might expect to great effect and my liking (and he sold this one).

Tucked away in a corner by the harbour, by a stroke of luck, I met this blacksmith, who was well informed about the history of his trade and spent and an interesting 10 minutes telling me about it. He had a portable forge made. He reckoned forges of this sort would have been on the go for centuries but the earliest recorded one only dates back to the 18th century.

The bellows were on a particularly fascinating mechanism, as one went down and was blowing, the other rose and was filling, in this way a constant flow of air was available to the forge.

I didn't ask his name, most negligent of me.

I'll leave you with this small woollen blackbird found in a local garden which never fails to entertain with something just a little off the wall.