Here comes The Great Yule Yeti, with her fur all snowy white…!
My big, fluffy yeti friend is very happy to be flying high on The Dirigible Balloon! It’s a fantastic place full of kids poetry and an absolute joy to explore.
I hope you love The Great Yule Yeti – she can be awfully shy but is the kindest creature to know! And yes, she makes her own laughter bombs!
Some Yule Yeti facts:
She has super night vision
Peppermint is her favourite flavour
She hums her favourite Christmas songs VERY LOUDLY all year round
She has a massive snow globe collection
Her fluffy feet are extremely ticklish
If you think you’ve been visited by The Great Yule Yeti in Christmas’s past or just want to say hello to a lovable yeti, do say hi in the comments or on social media!
I was so pleased to have a second story out in the world when I Sing For No Man featured on the brilliant Paragraph Planet on 4th November 2021. It was another very happy day for me!
Paragraph Planet publish a paragraph every single day that is exactly 75 words. They have been going since November 2008, each tiny story is unique – I’m never sure what delight is going to pop up each day on my Twitter feed!
I’m delighted to have a short story in the wonderful e-zine The Haar! It sits alongside some amazing and beautiful work, I couldn’t be more pleased!
Take a look through the The Roots Issue – full of poems, photography, fiction and non-fiction, an interview and a film.
There you’ll find my short story: Whisperings by Ellen Forkin. (Keep on scrolling to find it!) It was a tricky story to pin down, inspired by lots of snippets of folklore, but in the end I let the whisperings tell their own tale…
As part of the celebrations of the centenary of George Mackay Brown, The GMB Fellowship are asking for contributions of writing inspired by the famous Orkney writer’s work.
I decided to take part and add a little twist of folklore into my story…
Prose, poetry and photos on the George Mackay Brown Fellowship website
My piece was inspired by a section of George Mackay Brown’s poem ‘The Scottish Bestiary’. In these poems he focuses on 5 animals: Moth, Lobster, Whale, Eagle – but it was the Raven that really captured my imagination.
I discovered GMB upon moving to Orkney. It was around the same time I remember hearing the tales of Vikings using ravens to find land when sailing. It was only when I opened my big GMB poetry book after hearing about this project that I discovered he had written about this fascinating detail.
The big, lovely book where I found the collection of poems ‘The Scottish Bestiary’ by GMB
I have loved corvids of all variety for a long time, and know a little of their ways, as a semi-wild rook is a part of my big animal family. So Corbie, whilst not a raven, features a little in my story.
Have a look at the other pieces of writing people have created here. Click on the title of the piece to see the prose and poems inspired by George Mackay Brown. It’s really exciting to see how some of these pieces will be interpreted into music.
I think it’s an amazing project and I’m pleased to now be a small part of it.
Check out the GMB fellowship website to see how else they’re celebrating the centenary of this incredible writer.
I tried some new art materials recently and I became very excitable on social media and in real life too. There was much squeaking and an actual 3 second happy dance. The goal was to make my art more M.E. friendly and I think I’m slowly achieving that – yay!
A few of you may know, I have quite a severe chronic illness, and have been ill since the age of six. (I wasn’t well before then but six is the official age I was diagnosed.) M.E. makes everything from walking, talking to digesting food difficult. I’m extremely tired all the time. But I make art and I write. Which is hopefully why you’re here!
So I thought I’d talk about my shiny new materials and quite why I’m so excited.
Traditional dipping pens and Windsor and Newton Black Indian Ink
Firstly the fountain pen. And ink.
I use Windsor and Newton Black Indian Ink over my pencil sketch. This ink, when dried, doesn’t bleed when wet. I can paint straight on top of it, colouring with paint all those tiny goblin details. It’s even mermaid tear proof – a substance magically wetter than water. I’ve yet to find a black pen that is completely waterproof – I’ve tried a lot of them and have lost many a drawing to a mermaids weepy critique. For years, I’ve used a traditional nibbed pen dipped in the Black Indian Ink.
Dipping pens are wonderful, don’t get me wrong. As I draw, I think of them being used by everyone from Beatrix Potter to Quentin Blake. But my hand shakes and the fine nib picks up every little squiggle. Also, jerky fingers causes dreaded ink splats! It’s a delightful way to draw when it works and it’s still taking me time to accept it doesn’t work for me.
The company Cult Pens answered by inky woes and recommended a fountain pen with an ink converter. This pumps your chosen ink into the fountain pen. Trupp-Trink the goblin insisted I picked a dashing orange pen – I gave it a go and it works. Viola! Minimal shakes, no ink splats, and I can even draw from the comfort of the sofa with my feet up.
Tip: This kind of ink wears down the fountain pens faster than cartridges so don’t splash out on an expensive pen – cheap and cheerful work best here!
My new fountain pen with ink converter and waterproof ink
Now the paints. For a couple of years I’ve been using gouache in small paint tubes. Sprites find this hilarious and squeezed the paints onto their teeth like toothpaste! These paints are lovely and need less layers than watercolours because they’re more opaque. But they’re hard for me to squeeze with my weak fingers and tend to dry up and clot quickly.
I spotted artists on social media using a shiny new set of special watercolour paints and I was instantly intrigued – and maybe a tiny bit jealous! After doing my research, I decided these were the paints for me. Kuretake Gansai Tambi paints can be used as thickly as gouache or thinly as traditional watercolours – it just depends on how much water you add. So less energy layering paintings and a palette easily accessible to weak fingers. Plus – look at those colours! They’re forcing me to be just a bit brighter than I’m used to which is no bad thing.
The only trouble is sprites are still a little addicted to paint so are now licking my palette and waggling their brightly coloured tongues in my face. Turquoise and purple tongues are in vogue in the sprite world, apparently.
Daler Rowney gouache tube paints
I’ve only made these changes recently but already they’re having a big impact on my creative life. Nothing is easy with M.E. and, as enjoyable as it is, art takes a big toll on my health. So anything to minimise that is a pretty big deal.
I hope you continue to enjoy my artwork and the faeries that occupy my world. Do give me a follow on Facebook at Ellen Forkin Art and Instagram and Twitter too!
And if you’re an artist, do watch out for those sprites, you’ll find tiny smudges of paint in the oddest of places…
Kuretake Gansai Tambi paint palette and other art materials
Prunella finds joy in the small things of life. Coffee and doughnuts, apples and peanut butter, flowers and herbs, pebbles and seaglass, jumpers and tartan check trousers! She flies the flag for them all. Literally.
Prunella flying her flag for coffee!
Prunella has hundreds of little flags. Probably thousands. Puppies. Peonies. Enamel pins. Rainbows and sunsets. Scratchy pencils and clicky pens. Colourful candles in sparkly candlesticks. She’s got a flag for them all. Prunella is passionate. Which is why I love her so much. But who is she?
Prunella’s a monster who has been told she looks like a pig disguised as a Highland Coo. Seeing as she champions both intelligent pigs and cute Highlanders, Prunella wasn’t the least bit offended. She says her spirit animal is a haggis.
Coffee. She loves coffee. Prunella drinks it black, but sometimes enjoys snuffling up a cappuccino with her snout. She has her own special take-away cup, and a dozen little coffee-cup cozies to match her jumper. All the coffee does make her whirlwind of positivity. She would be annoying if it wasn’t for her enthusiastic oink!
Prunella loves all things bookish!
Prunella has an exuberant Scottish accent that even the most Scottish Scot can have difficulty understanding. She adores dictionaries and uses lots of weird and random words with a few Scottish classics thrown in. Here’s a few of her favourites:
Peedie – small
Swagde – to relax after a big, big meal
Pumple-footed – accident prone, a bit clumsy
Shoogle – shake, move to side to side, wiggle
Polyphloisboisterous – noisy
Despite reading many a long dictionary, Prunella’s spelling is…. interesting. But she usually gets her message across. She also enjoys everything bookish, including Scottish poetry, cook books, rom coms, notebooks, tartan noir and will carefully read any vintage manual to a Singer sewing machine.
The lists could go on and on. (Yes, she likes writing lists.) Prunella has shared with me so many tiny passions I can’t possibly fit them in one blog post. Instead, each and every day, she’ll continue to fly the flag for the small joy she’s loving that day. I think we could learn a lot from Prunella. Even if we can’t always catch exactly what she’s saying…
Shh! Don’t startle this shy creature. For though this wee wild unicorn tiptoes through the wilderness as quietly as can be, it too can be fierce and feisty.
With cloven hooves, a wiggly beard and long lush lion’s tail, this is far from your domesticated unicorn. A beautifully rare beast of Scotland, these unicorns love to roam forests, nibble flowers and occasionally give chase to a hairy haggis!
An illustration of a wild unicorn foal
A very few well guarded wild unicorns do roam the islands of Orkney…
I was lucky to spot this foal, just on the cusp of adulthood, silently sipping from a loch. Perhaps for safety, or simply for the magic of it, wild unicorns are most active at dawn and dusk. The latter is known locally as grimleens, and is truly an enchanted time of day for humans and faeries alike.
Grimleens: Orcadian dialect for twilight, dusk, the magical moment between day and night.
Head to where the four-leaf clover springs up from the ground, where there’s a soft tinkling in the breeze, where rainbows bloom in the sky…
And if you are quiet, patient and granted a large dose of luck, you may be able to spot a wild unicorn too!
Please note: Do not follow directions from local trows, they’ll send you on a wild unicorn race. This usually involves the dizzying heights of Hoy, a boggart attack at Birsay and a possible drowning in Stenness loch. It’s not fun.
“Don’t eat me!” wailed the goat. (Well, at least that’s what I thought that bleating meant.)
“But I caught you with my special spoon,” the giantess pouted. It was indeed a special spoon. It had a particularly fusty mould to add flavour and a hook for catching dinner. A dinner like Ty the Peedie Goat.
The Giantess and the Goat
The giantess was called Gerdila. As well as on the spoon, she loved growing fungus in her grey-green hair and green-brown clothes. But the moudilest place of all was Gerdila’s squelchy fungus tongue.
Gerdila the Giantess didn’t like her dinner to be too wriggly. So Gerdila simply blew putrid breath on her prey. One foul puff of her fungus tongue killed most things instantly. She mainly ate sheep and cows – but avoided Highland Coo’s because they are too ‘flooff-full’.
Ty the Peedie Goat was next. (Gerdila stomped right past the alpacas as they are far too floof-full as well.) She hooked Ty round the neck with her special mouldy spoon and plucked him from the herd. The other goats watched wide-eyed and open-mouthed… All except for Chumley who carried on chewing the cud whilst watching a nearby cloud that looked like a fluffy bale of hay. Or so he imagined.
‘Peedie’: Orcadian dialect for small, little.
Ty, perched on his bottom, flopped a little as if already half dead. He bleated pitifully. Gerdila smiled a stinking smile and then blew…. Boooooooooof! Rancid air filled the sky, with little whiffs drifting down to the ground. The stink made the alpacas gag and spit. Ty lay deathly still in a cloud of stench.
“No!” I yelled, bursting out the door, tears streaming. No one heard, as I hopped to get my wellies on.
Ty burped. A giant, gurgly burp right from the depths of one of his many stomachs. We watched it bloat his belly then travel up his neck and finally erupt from his pink, fuzzy lips.
“Ew!” Gerdila the Giantess pouted. “That’s disgusting. And why aren’t you dead?”
“He’s a goat,” I answered, wiping my running nose on my sleeve. “He may be cute and cuddly and small but don’t let that fool you: goat’s breath is the most disgusting thing ever. Even more foul and fetid than yours – no offence.” She eyed me funnily and I started to back away to the safety of the house once more. I cursed for having brushed my teeth that morning.
“And I now you’re beaten,” Ty bleated joyfully. “I banish you from the farm!”
(At least, that’s what I think he said.)
And that is the story of how Ty the Peedie Goat out-stank Gerdila the Giantess. And he brags, and brags, and brags about it to this day.
Neddle is a cheerful chappy. He loves long, meandering walks with his rambling stick. Whilst he’s holding his rambling stick, Neddle tends to talk on and on and on about feathers, mushrooms and the different types of duck-quacks.
Neddle taking a break with his rambling stick
Despite Neddle’s love of nature – and ducks – he absolutely loathes puddles. He can often be spotted yelling at one as he tiptoes past. Lochs are just ‘big ole puddles’ and are not to be trusted. As are ladybirds. They’re sneaky, apparently.
So if you’re out and about, walking in the countryside, lingering in a wood, hiking up a hill, be sure to say hello to all the little Neddles out there. Just don’t mention the weather, Neddle will point out every cloud in sight and explain it’s unique qualities in high detail. And as we know in Scotland, there’s a lot of clouds.
Ellen's Wonderfuss Faeries 