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.

the doll diaries

I don't know too many people who keep diaries, or maybe I do know them I just don't know they keep diaries, hmm. Myself, I'm no Brigid Jones but I do like to have a notebook at my disposal. They're handy for writing lists of things to do, snippits of information for which scraps of paper would probably suffice but would inherently be impossible to find at the time when they're needed, or recounting stories or yeah rambling out thoughts and ideas and hopes and dreams. I also tend to turn mine into mini-scrap books, pritt-sticking in bits and bobs that I find interesting, which when accumulated sometimes lead to inspiration.... and see me sewing the afternoon away into a Russian Doll.

kate by corinne

the wonders of a wander

IT WASN'T RAINING TODAY! To celebrate I went for a walk and brought my camera:

pop goes the weasel

I don't believe I've even mentioned Tavi Gevinson here before and I shall refrain from doing so again today. I will however point all my fingers at this magnificent jumper^^^featured on the cover of POP magazine. It's more fun than a clown making balloon animals; it's like a colourful science project of the solar system; it's Ashish 2009.

Unfortunately I find all designs (with the exception of aforementioned awesome jumper) to be horribly hideous, but I took inspiration from these pompoms and two of my favourite things - raw vegetables and knitting. Between which there is a perfectly logical connection, right?

It began with beetroot-stained fingertips and ended with digging out a ball of bright pink wool from my box that I bought about two weeks ago after thinking I liked the colour pink after this issue of ID magazine. So anyway I started knitting and then I had some soup and a new hat. The end.

Narelle Dore