Seale Hayne Outing

Seale Hayne used to be an agricultural college, and since it closed, the beautiful buildings have been taken over by Dame Hannah Rogers School for children with disabilities, and a variety of other uses too – it is quite a centre for the arts these days, and also they have a very nice cafe there.

My hubby asked if I’d like to go out today, and he drove me up there. We wandered around the beautiful buildings and visited the art gallery and various other nooks and crannies, and ended up in the cafe having tea and home made cake – delicious!

Here are some of the photos of our day. (The full set is in my Photobucket album here.)

This is the main entrance into the courtyard. I love the rounded stone arches and mullioned windows throughout the building.

Inside the main building we found a corridor with some very interesting wall lights – I am noticing Zentangles everywhere these days! This is one of four different designs:

Wandering outside again, we found some animal enclosures; they have chickens and ducks, rabbits, goats and sheep. Here are some of the ducks.

Lovely hygienic habits ducks have, don’t they!!

They had several seats dotted around the grounds, made out of enormous pieces of driftwood, which I found most intriguing.

There are several interesting archways linking various parts of the building.

Back inside again, we found this display of masks in one corridor.

Nearby was a small vintage-style sewing room

I certainly agree with that sentiment!

Then on to the Art Gallery. Gorgeous stuff in here!

Here are some small canvases embellished with what looked like small polymer clay tiles, and tiny beads. I fell in love with these!

This was a display of incredible free-form pewter vessels which had obviously been poured in molten form over a bowl.

They reminded me of some similar objects that a mixed-media artist friend of mine made (we own one) – she used hand-made paper formed from dyed silk tops. This is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time, and have various ideas, which do not include molten metal, though! I particularly like the one lined with gold.

There were several fabric clocks on display, including this one:

Really funky and fun!

More art to inspire my zentangling:

We then discovered a quilting department, with a shop selling loads of beautiful fabrics and equipment, and a quilting workshop beyond with a display of quilts. I am not into quilting myself, but always enjoy the fruits of other people’s labours! Look at these gorgeous fabrics…

and threads…

They also had an intriguing thing they called a “jelly roll” – seemingly a collection of strips of fabric which had been rolled together to form this beautiful object.

The trouble is, I would never want to use it! I’d have to have one for use, and one for stroking – like my gorgeous Tattered Time paper stack!

After we’d had our tea, we left, and stopped on the drive so that I could photograph this incredible structure we’d spotted on the way in – a display of huge butterflies all made of CDs!!

The backs were all silver, of course. People are so imaginative… I’m always wondering what to do with old CDs!

On our way home, my hubby stopped the car so I could take some photos of the lambs in a field – there were lots of them, and they were all skipping about and playing, and leaping in the air with all four feet off the ground! I love to see this.

There were wild flowers everywhere – the daffodils are still out, and there were lots of primroses, and the May blossom is starting already. I adore the spring, and it was so nice to be able to have an outing and enjoy it all, even though the sun wasn’t shining and it was rather grey.

Altogether a lovely day, thanks to my wonderful hubby.