Lake District Julip Live 2019

While my dolls have definitely taken over as my main hobby, I still absolutely love going to Julip shows as they're always great fun and its one of the few times a year I get to hang out with groups of likeminded rubber pony people.

This year, Magda was off at a very inconveniently timed family wedding, so it was just Heather and I making the journey south to the Lake District. We'd booked the same guesthouse we stayed at last year in the seaside town of Morecambe, as it was really nice and very convenient in all respects. For a change we made it down without issue, not getting lost once, and managed to book in early so we had time to wander about Morecambe. Unfortunately our room was right at the very top so lugging multiple boxes of ponies upstairs wasn't exactly fun!

It was a glorious day, cool yet sunny - a far cry from the boiling hot experience of last year!

Lake District Julip Live 2018!

As will have been pretty obvious for anyone who's read my blog for a long time, I haven't posted much Julip stuff in a while.

This isn't entirely by choice, but rather that my muse has wandered and affixed itself to my 1/6th scale dolls rather strongly. I still love my little rubber ponies to death, I'm just not really in the mood to do anything with them other than admire them on my shelf right now. On one hand this is incredibly depressing as they've been such a huge part of my creative life for so long, not making tack and stable stuff feels really weird, but on the other, I've still got lots of plans for the future which I fully intend to carry out at some point, so it's not like I've lost interest completely or anything. I still definitely want to make a new stable set as the old wooden ones took up waaaaay too much space and I'd like something a little more custom. I'd also really like to get back into my photostories as I really miss them and I had loads of drama that never actually made it into story form...

Anyway, I digress; you didn't come here to read about my chronic procrastination, did you?

(I mean if you did you're certainly in the right place but that's besides the point...)

Regardless of whether or not I'm in 'the Julip zone', I'm never going to miss out on going to shows and the annual Lake District Live hosted by Stacey and her mum is honestly one of my favourite shows to go to. As with all Julip shows, by it's very nature it's chilled out and great fun, with a really friendly atmosphere. I've been going with my friends Heather and Magda for the last couple of years which has only added to the great holiday roadtrip feel of the whole thing. We usually find a B&B to stay in near the show hall, but this time ended up in lovely Morecambe at the Trevelyan Guesthouse.

Lake District Live 2017

As with the same show last year, I travelled down to the Lakes with my friend (and new owner of Magpie Models) Heather, though this time we had an extra travelling companion in Magda, who I'd seen last a few weeks prior at the RHS. She didn't currently have any Julips, but we assured her from personal experience that she'd manage to acquire at least one in the spares. :P

The journey was good, save for that one time the sat-nav directed us around the world's smallest roundabout! (which was literally a clump of grass in a very narrow country lane!) We were staying somewhere different from our usual room at the George Washington pub, this time we'd be at the Arnside Independent Hostel  overlooking the estuarine Morecambe Bay.

We arrived in good time; so good in fact that we were far too early to book in, so we went for a wander instead.

Lake District Live 2016!

I had great plans to make many dioramas and setups for this show, but in all honesty...I forgot about it until literally the week before!

Luckily I had enough bits and pieces from previous setups and photostories to bring so I was able to do more scene classes than I'd originally thought!

Anyway, every good show report starts at the beginning, so here we go!