Teesside views and Yorkshire inspirations

Last weekend was spent on Teesside. We decided to do a tour of the bridges over the River Tees on Saturday, among other things, starting with the A66 bridge at Stockton, then the Victoria Bridge. The Princess Diana bridge was already closed for the Riverside fireworks event on Saturday night.


The next bridge downstream is the Infinity Bridge at the university. Stunning.


The shape of the bridge is based on the infinity symbol, although it is very difficult to get the whole of the curve into one shot from nearby - and the camera lens tends to put a slight bend onto the image too.



The Infinity Bridge (footbridge) at the university was also due for closure later that afternoon (hmm, that doesn't look like a proper legal temporary closure notice to me).


The cables suggest variable straight line grids for quilting...


Two sunset views through the bridge -

Glyn's photo of the same scene -


After crossing the Tees Barrage, we skipped the Newport Bridge (planning to come back that way) and headed straight for the Transporter Bridge. I didn't know that the Transporter closes early on Saturdays, which was a bit of a disappointment, or that there's a visitors' centre there now. So I think we'll redo the whole expedition another time, perhaps adding the old bridge at Yarm as the starting point.


Glyn's photo upriver (my camera wouldn't take this without the flash and got unwanted reflections off the hi vis panels on the righthand boat) - love the sunset reflections in the warehouse windows on the north bank.


On Sunday we went to a craft fair at Richmond Station. The venue is a very interesting reuse of the old railway station.


There were many stalls with a good selection of local, hand-made items, so I did some Christmas shopping. The specialist food and beer also went down well. There were some gorgeous hand dyed yarns from Ash Creativity.


These skeins were inspired by nature. The yarn labels themselves are temptingly worded. From left - 'BEECH LEAVES - The rich colours of an autumn day in a beech wood, depicted in merino and manx loughtan wool', 'GOlden colours of hazy autumn days in lovely soft merino' and 'Tints of autumn colours in lovely, soft 100% merino'. Beautifully observed colour inspirations I think.


These will go very well with some natural cream handspun wool, Jacob's (very dark brown), Manx (mid brown) and Welsh Black (dark brown) acquired in Great Ayton on Saturday. Roseberry Crafts (Facebook page link) are currently in premises under the Captain Cook Museum but are planning to move. When I visited in August, I got some hand dyed merino in two different colourways, and have used them for hats (I'll blog the patterns sometime soon), plus a few turned pieces in interesting woods made in Great Ayton by Nigel Coates and some deep blue ceramic dishes with spiral decorations. The gallery shop also features photographs by Lee Wilson. This was our favourite print.