London Town With Elspeth

This week I went into London with my sister Elspeth, who is home from university for Easter. we decided as we both had a day off work to go on an adventure. We hadn't really planned the day, just thought we would wing it. Our first stop was the Hayward Gallery to see textiles pieces by Sheila Hicks. The piece I was most interested in was where she had taken colours from a photograph of a Japanese Landscape and used these coloured threads to make 3D textiles pieces. We weren't allowed to take any pictures but i managed to sneak one of a couple of thread puffs.

After the Hayward gallery we had our packed lunch of a bulgur wheat salad on the south bank, and we found a beautiful spot where we were surrounded by flowers.

Tate Britain was our next stop to see the winning pieces by Paul Bell from the BBC show The Big Painting Challenge. Up close his painting of the harbour was beautiful, the movement of the water and the colours in the sky are amazing. 

I love going to the Tate Britain just to look at their ceiling...

and the floors.

We then went to Trafalgar Square and visited the National Gallery. We headed for the section of paintings between the 1700's and the 1900's, where we saw Turners paintings, who has to be my favourite painter ever! I just adore the emotion, light and colours within his paintings. Also anything with a sea in it i'm bound to love. 

When we left the gallery there were loads of people doing their performances in Trafalgar square but the one that caught my eye was a man sitting quietly on the floor making rings. He had a sign that said "free rings for everyone to be happy." Me and Elspeth stopped and had a rummage through the rings until we found a couple we liked. Once you had chosen the guy could make them bigger to fit your fingers, unfortunately when he saw how chubby my fingers were he decided to make me a completely new ring to fit in the same beads as the one I had picked. It was amazing watching him, and how fast he was able to make them. We dropped a couple of pounds into his tip pot and were about to leave when he insisted that he wanted to make me one as a gift and didn't want anything in return. He is one of the sweetest street performers I have seen and will definitely look out for him next time I'm in town. To finish off the day we headed to the shop for a bit of late night shopping, which is always fun.