Pencil sketches of basic vine, plumes and leaves

The fair pulled out of Hexham on Tuesday with half the cake stall still standing, so you'll forgive me for sending this from a bed-and-breakfast in Carlisle with the wrong sort of ink on my cuff. Mr Pardoe has me on the ghost rides now. Three days I spent lettering the crimson bunting, and then he handed me a pencil and a board of pale card and said, draw me a vine that keeps going. He doesn't say please, and I've stopped expecting it.

So I drew the plain one first, the way he likes it, one curl stacked on the next like a spring that's forgotten what it was for. Then the plumes, which were harder, because every feather has to look as if the wind has just finished with it. Pardoe went over them with his thumb, smudging the shading onto the edges where the paper had gone soft from the damp, and said that's the trick, leave the wet in. The leaves I did last, out on the step of the caravan with the generator thudding behind me, and I got them wrong twice before the third one leaned the right way.

He pinned the sheet to the wall above the dart board and said it would do for the new hands. I stood there longer than I should have, looking at the three panels side by side, bare line becoming feather becoming leaf. Nobody had told me a thing could grow just by being repeated.

Write back and tell me what the Whitley girls are saying about the Ferris wheel. Tell me if the sun has got to Dad's shed. I'll be in Kendal by Friday, pencil behind my ear.

Your loving sister, Ruth