the doorways of a dreary day

Kinvara visited : part one.

keeping them warm and cosy

The fourth pair of mittens I've knitted this winter! Perhaps I should list "industrious" as a characteristic on my C.V. maybe then somebody would hire me. (are you looking for new staff? I'm very employable...) These ones were for Catherine, who likes scarves from charity shops, playing chess and drinking tea.

This week I also knitted a present for my mother, who likes drinking coffee.

London calling

When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk

How time flies with the wings of an eagle. Little does it feel like almost one year since I was in Paris hanging around outside fashion shows, amidst swarms of bloggers and the like. If you like, you can read my blog post from the time of PFW 2011 here.

. . . . .

I'm still digesting what's happening in London this week, but paraphrasing Vivenne Westwood it would appear that fashion is on the down and we're on a one-way ticket to Craptown where we all live as boring conformist ill-clothed clones of our neighbours. She believes people have never been so badly dressed due largely to the way in which fashion has become so disposable. It's throw-away nature has lead everybody to dressing in the same way, and she even goes as far as to admitting to not really liking some of the items in her own collection.

For now the few photos that interested me from street-style photographer Tommy Ton in NY last week (thanks to Style.com) You can peruse them all here if you so wish

birds of a feather

Sometimes I wonder how they haven't got bored of each other after 25 years together.

♥ ♥ ♥

With all the recent talk of lovebirds I was inspired to make a few of my own. I sewed a few brooches and have since been sewing many as I'm thinking of starting up a shop on Esty. What do you think of the idea?

the lady and the tramp

I was taken out for dinner last night by my sister. Awwww. She's working a real job now and earning real money and when she was hired she made a promise to buy me dinner one day. That day finally arrived and we went down the road to The Oslo for it was Monday night and they have a 2 for 1 special (still thinking like a student).

love is in the air

The Hallmark holiday of Valentine's Day will soon be upon us. Sigh. While some of you out there will be busy making dinner reservations and buying red roses, others will be planning their lonely chocolate fest and renting out dvds of Titanic / Brigit Jones / The Notebook / something a little more tasteful... Anyway, I changed the window display at work today (fashioning my very own lovebirds out of clothes pegs - necessity, the mother of invention)and decorated the entire inside of the shop with handmade lovehearts. It's horribly over the top but to my surprise Chen liked it. Chen's the manager. And she's pretty cool. Always happy and full of energy and enthusiasm. And if the way a person dresses on the outside really does reflect the sort of person they are on the inside, then her bright colours are a well-suited representation. A few weeks ago she went to Ikea and bought lengths of fabric and a couple of cushions on the cheap. She asked me a favour on my sewing machine and I ran up these covers for her. Look at me, making a house a home using my crafting skills. Kirstie Allsopp had better watch out!

what is this? eh? eh?!

January is OVER! Finished! Kapoooosh! Gone until next miserable year! Good riddance I say to the most miserable of the twelve, good bye and god bless. Now if we can all rewind our minds back to a time when January was but a vague notion of a month to come and we were all wondering why it wasn't colder and trying to get in the festive spirit of things, there was a television programme running on Channel 4 called Kirstie's Homemade Christmas. A huge farce of a show where she really really really really really enthusiastically turned her hand to some craft or other under the watchful eye of a pro in each field, really really really enthusiastically exclaiming the whole time how satisfying and exhilarating and amazing the process was and how she was really really really inspired and so on and so forth. I think the aim of the series was to give ideas to those of us sitting at home of how to be creative and resourceful with our spare time and inspire us to make some of the best home-made Christmas presents ever. Unfortunately for the most-part her artistic endeavours were not so easily accessible to the average Joe Soap like our good selves. I mean yeah I'd love to give my mum some glass baubles blown from my own two lungs or fill the stockings of friends with sweet candy canes thrown by my own arms, but when am I going to afford to enroll on a glass-blowing course or fly to NYC to visit the oldest sweet shop in the world (never to mind having thought of doing so 16weeks beforehand) Absurd! Utterly preposterous!

There was, however, an exception.

Episode Salt Dough.

She finally found a craft worthwhile, and what did she do? Stood back and let a schoolroom full of children make a mess to show us just how easy it really is. Sold. She had me wanting the salt dough, wanting the gloopy buckets of slop, wanting the wobbly-edged, very home-made-looking, end products. Which, one month later, I got.

February has begun with my finding a newfound passion in ceramics or, eh, "ceramics"...It's a real Art Attack feeling, albeit at a snail's pace of what she lead us to believe when showing us the children shoving their decorations in the microwave, whamming on a bit of poster paint and hey presto. We took two days to make, bake and glaze ours, and with one bag of salt, one bag of flour and one cup of water, this is what we got up to:

day in, day out.

Having two days off from work in a row is a special treat and so guess how I made the most of the occasion on day one? By doing asbsolutely nothing. Nothing but guiltlessly lazing around the house, eating crappy food, watching tv and dozing on the couch. Then day two it was time to play catch up with friends. A planned day of photography became sidetracked by plans to go hiking so we instead we bought some second hand clothes and had tea and coffee before people rushed off to catch a bus to the mountains. Afternoons in nice coffee shops are, well, really nice. (and I'm usually one to avoid the use of this four letter word). We had a nice crossword competition to the sound of Amadou and Mariam with nice tasty food and a nice cup of white tea served by a very nice waiter. Nice day off all round indeed.