...and here is the news

Detail of my Nightingales and Other Voices exhibit at Snape Maltings recently

Here is Gordon Burns, a common sight at 6pm on Look Northwest in my Liverpudlian youth. He looks stern, because the Pebbly news is late.

My announcement of the results of the Flowery Hats giveaway is horribly belated. Sorry. 

The winner is *drumroll* the lovely, beautifully iced BakeBakeGirl (also a member of the TwitKnit club). You have won a silver cornflower necklace. CONGRATULATIONS. 

I held my first ever exhibition with Angela Harding at Snape Maltings on 5th & 6th April. It was wonderful, tiring, exciting, inspiring and I'm still slightly overawed. I displayed my work as a sort of Victorian collector's cabinet or tiny museum of songbirds (silver, not stuffed). Angela's oil paintings can be seen on the wall. My favourite, Walberswick Still Life, in the middle, sold during the exhibition.

A huge thankyou to Angela, Nikki and Alesha at Snape and everyone who came along and helped to tweet about it.

I held a workshop at the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens a month or so ago. We imprinted silver clay with needles from the Sequoias (Giant redwoods) that grow on the pine walk - they were the subject of study by John Stevens Henslow, Darwin's mentor and friend and the founder of the garden. He used them to demonstrate diversity amongst groups of similar organisms. We also made prints of primrose leaves (bottom left in the mosaic above). Darwin was fascinated by primroses and their (ahem) reproductive parts. Click here if, like me, you enjoy a spot of plant nerdery. 

We also made casts of antique buttons (top right), an ammonite (bottom right) and the detail of a hare on the lid of an antique Nepalese votive box (top left).

There are plans for me to hold fossil-themed workshops at the Sedgwick Museum in 2015, where I drew hundreds of fossils with my fountain pen just over a year ago. I'm v excited about this.

Yesterday Littlest and I found a ladybird. We called her Scarlett and made her a house in a tupperware (with lots of airholes in the clingfilm roof ). Scarlett is pictured above in Littlest's drawing. I picked several leaves from my roses to provide a three course meal for her (aphids, sigh). She tucked into them with glee. This morning Littlest announced that Scarlett had 'done some strange yellow poos.' On close examination I realised they were ladybird eggs! I am to be a ladybird midwife. I hope to be like Chummy (Camilla Fortescue Cholmondeley-Brown) - filled with common sense and Woolton Pie.

We have placed the box carefully next to said roses so that when they hatch into little dragon-ish larvae they'll have aphid snacks galore. We are considering crocheting microscopic hats for them.

It is Easter. More on this story later. (Exquisite pale teal eggs by Celia's v clever hens)