OMG

Three letters I don't often write, but today's adventures at a second-hand furniture shop leave me no option! I've found the most freakin' amazing vintage 1960s Ercol table for the new flat! It was more than I wanted to pay but would still be considered an absolute steal by anyone's standards. It's top is solid elm and the legs are beech and I LOVE the curviness of it! Look at the grain!

In other news (i.e not related to my buying of vintage stuff), Teresa at Art and Light will be showing some of my collages next weekend in the gallery so fingers crossed for people liking them! I'm off now to finish an essay I'm writing on Olle Eksell and Paul Rand. Both worth checking out, amazing stuff... bye for now!

Glutton for punishment

We're supposed to be moving house in less than two weeks. Which is great, I'm all for it, and I'm half packed already. Thing is, I already have quite a collection of bits and bobs that have caught my eye in charity shops over the last 7 years. You would think, that I would consider putting a stop to any frivolous buying between now and move day since it's all going to have to be bunged into a car and lugged up flights of brand new stairs. But no. I seemed to have bought a vintage child's toolkit...

I must be crazy, I have no children, I don't even believe the tools are usable, but it is just so cute! Tell me you don't love it. It so reminds me of one of the best exhibitions I've ever seen. And Jacob was as enthusiastic as I was for a change. Fiver well spent I say!

A New Favourite

At the weekend I read this little old book by Paul Gallico called "The Love of Seven Dolls" and I am now rather smitten. The cover illustration by David Knight (used as a pink line drawing for the endpapers) is just about exactly the way I wish I could draw.

As part of my degree, I'll be going to Porto in September to draw for a week. I'm so excited, apparently it's absolutely knackering, but your drawing gets much stronger in that time. If I end up with anything half as stunning as this I'll buy myself a large glass of port to celebrate! 

The book was published 1954 by Michael Joseph Publishers, incase you wondered. I imagine it's been reprinted though. I wonder if this David Knight did lots of book jackets...?

Exciting times!

Tomorrow is a big day for me and Jacob, as we're signing a lease to a new flat! It's very exciting as it'll be our first place together not sharing with housemates. I can't wait! Our moving day will be the weekend of the 2nd/3rd May so really badly timed insofar as my very final week of uni will be the following week, y'know the exact time all my coursework will still be in boxes....

Ho hum, nevermind I'm sure I'll get it sorted. In the meantime I'm packing stuff slowly but each time I seal a box, within 5 mins I realise I need something inside it! 

I managed to find a bit of spare time yesterday and made a couple more pencil cases, one of which is now listed. 

Hope you're having a nice long Easter weekend :)

Ideas so far...

I've been playing with the idea of pairing photos according to colours, themes and composition and I quite like the results so far. Collecting evidence of polite notices and signs has been fun but I think maybe combining them with images makes them work better. Can you tell I really like Martin Parr? It's so hard to photograph anything remotely English-looking without it ending up like a poor imitation of his work. Damn it.

Teeny tiny loveliness

In the last week I've been working on the collages for Teresa at Art and Light gallery and finished the 12th one last night! They look great I think, but I'm now left with off-cuts of backing card in rather awkward little shapes. So it struck me, why not make some mini collages to pop in the shop, at a convenient size of 6x8" for framing?

So here are my first couple - small, simple and rather cute - much like myself!

I'm off to a house viewing now, then away for a few days so have a great week all!

I've won an award too!

Yay! Francesca has awarded me a "Kreativ Blogger" award! Thank you! She's been careful not to sound like a diva actress at the Oscars on receiving her award but I have no such self control. Therefore, I'd like to thank the Academy, my parents (without their support none of this could be possible!) and of course God - I love you big guy.

I now have to list 7 things that I love. So here goes:

1. Waking up in the morning and cuddling the Mr - especially if I've forgotten it's a Saturday and was expecting to have to get up for work.

2. Learning new tricks. I've been practicing juggling lately after a friend taught me at uni. Those are tuition fees well spent in my view!

3. Feeling the sun on my face and the wind in my hair.

4. Driving in the country with my camera on the passenger seat and stopping whenever I spot something cool.

5. Charity shop shopping, the self-satisfaction of finding something amazing that someone didn't want anymore, something that you know you'll love for years.

6. A good book, because I genuinely believe you that you absorb everything around you and that it will somehow influence your work.

7. The joy of blogging, exploring and selling on the internet. I love you, world wide web

I'm now going to pass on the award to the following blog chums, congratulations folks!

Lucie
Belinda
Nina
Louise

Joanna
Jodie
Stephanie

New items

Couple of newbies in the shop today, see what you think. I'm really enjoying cutting out the "geometry lace" as I like to think of it, in the Spring Green collage. It takes a while but is one of those really satisfying jobs when you've got a brand new scalpel blade! I hope that doesn't make me sound too weird...

 Anyway, happy weekend all. I hope it's sunny where you are.

Uni work

Last week we had a crit for the typgraphy brief we'd been working on and this was my simplest and favourite piece of my own work, but there was some amazing stuff done by others. I thought these old record cards were lovely, especially with their faded tabs. It was weird, the day we were set the brief I came home from uni and found a stack of them on the "recycling shelf" (shelf outside my house for people's unwanted stuff - stuff which regularly ends up in my room). So that made things easy, I just added letraset letters and hey presto. Simple but does the job nicely in terms of conveying the meaning. 

I spent ages on this one, as it needed photographing from two different angles and then assembling on Photoshop. Good thing to know how to do, you just never know when a 3D image might come in handy! 

Our brief over Easter is to work on 4 images of what it means to be English. So far I'm thinking about little polite notices we put up so that one doesn't have to cause a scene. Like "No Junk mail please" or "Kindly refrain from parking in front of my garage". There are quite a few in my neighbourhood, it's posh. What do you think though, any ideas?

Pssst!

I'm working on a set of 12 new collages for Teresa at Art and Light gallery in Greenville, South Carolina. I don't want to reveal too much yet, so consider this a sneek preview. They'll be featured in the gallery from the beginning of May, I'm so excited!

Shop update

Well, after being featured on Decor8 on Tuesday my shop and blog seem to have had a few new visitors! So Hello if that's how you've found me! 

Because of this, I've been spurred into a frenzy of collage-making activity and now have some nice new additions to the shop. I hope you'll have a closer look. Can you tell I'm dying to go travelling from these three?

I must really do some uni work now as I've not done a thing all week, will show you how I get on with the typography brief as and when I finish it...

New ceramic work

I've been busying in the pottery lately, and this is what I've come up with. 

They consist of a rolled out piece of clay which is then cut and left until "leather hard". I then set to work with a sharp knife and clay needle to engrave into the surface of the tile to make little reservoirs for the glass to sit. The tiles are bisque fired and then the glass is put in and they get a glaze firing so the bits of glass melt into a lovely gloop. They're now ready to hang on the wall with one small nail. 

I shall be listing the "Home Sweet Home" one in my shop this week, but the rest I'm reluctant to sell as they're my first go. I'll be whipping up some more soon though! There's already one in progress that features fir trees and a small owl. Twit twoo!

The big "O"

Yep, Organic. 

I know what you were thinking though, and might I say this is a family show!

Ahem. Yes. So I'm working on the word "organic" for this typography project and was thinking of using this wood block in some way. I've done prints in yellow like the suns in my book to put in the etsy shop. The design measures 8" across so would be a lovely ball of sunny yellow loveliness to frame and adorn your wall. The yellow ink was still wet this morning though, so prints might be a few days still... What do you think? Reckon I'd sell a couple?

In the meantime, Belinda over at gretchenmist has tagged me in the 5 addictions game. So here goes:

1. Tea. Up to 7 cups a day with a little milk and no sugar please :)

2. Making things. I'm doing something creative every day and that's the best part of being back in education after working for a few years. You appreciate the time you have and don't always come home feeling too tired to lift a pen or set the sewing machine up. It's truly a luxury.

3. I almost daren't confess to the blogging community that I smoke, for some reason I feel like I might get a cyber slap on the wrist! But hey I'm and adult and I'm putting it out there. And it's not as if I'm not a 40-a-day gal by any means...  if it helps I'm more early SATC Carrie than Dot Cotton. Okay?

4. Eating! Well more specifically, cooking and eating. Whenever I'm feeling happy, sad, mad, bad, glad, tired, grumpy whatever - some sort of cooking cheers me up. Which is rather handy for the boyfriend who is one of those annoying skinny people who eats LOADS.

5. Hoarding. Unfortunately it's a family trait. I not only hoard the leftover bits of stuff that knock around my house because one day I'll make them into something really cool, but I also actively collect pottery from charity shops, car boot sales and occasionally ebay.

 

So there you have it, I hope you feel like you know me a bit better! I'm tagging 5 others to find out their addictions: Lucie, Francesca, Joanna, Jodie and Louise

Something beginning with "Me"

Our current brief at uni is typography-based and we have to experiment with letterforms and ways of making them convey the word they spell out. One of my words is mesmerising (I think. I may still change my mind...) and I got looking at Ishihara tests. They are for testing colour blindness but are amazingly beautiful in themselves I think. So I thought I'd spell out the word in one set of coloured dots and surround it with an opposing colour scheme like in the tests. Do you think this conveys the word though? My other main idea was to make the letters out of card so they're 3D, then photograph them from two slightly different angles and make them into an anaglyph to be viewed through red and blue specs. Whaddya think? I had already looked at Bridget Riley but sort of wanted to steer clear of spirals and swirls...

In other news, I've been featured on two gorgeous blogs in the last couple of days, firstly on Jess Gonacha's Treasuring blog and then on the beautiful Art and Light blog by Teresa Roche. Thanks so much for the kind words you two! It was very exciting to wake up to this morning!

Kettles Yard

There's a lovely exhibition up at Kettles Yard until March 15th called The Roundhouse of International Spirits. It features work by Ben Nicholson, Hans Arp, Julius Bissier amongst others who were all living and working in Switzerland during the 1960s. This image is by Ben Nicholson and is really inspirational when I think about the technique called scraffito that you use in pottery to scratch through a layer of slip to the underlying clay. I feel experiments coming on. Also, I've just applied to be a volunteer so I can help out at Kettles Yard, exciting!

Happy weekend

Just a quick post to say I hope you're all doing something nice in the sunshine! Things just look so beautiful when it starts getting sunny again, I forget how important daylight is sometimes, to my work and to my general mood. Also, I've been really enjoying Heather Smith Jones and Alicia Alferman's Noticing Project lately so did a pair of my own. I love pink and orange together.

Hello Sunshine!

Today the sun came out! It was glorious here in Cambridge and so I whipped out my new pack of sun-print paper to have a play with. It's great stuff, you expose it like a photogram for a couple of minutes and then develop the paper in tap water for a minute and let it dry. Easy peasy. And although some have been more successful than others, the blue is just so yummy I almost don't care if things are out of focus. Wouldn't that last one make the best river in a paper collage? Hmm.....

The olden days

I was just rooting around in one of many boxes of stuff in my room, looking for old postcards, and found some old work. These were from a couple of roughly constructed scrapbooks that I made (5 whole years ago!) when I was on my Foundation year. That time was pretty exciting for me creatively speaking. I had set up a darkroom at home and had just got into finding old books in charity shops. I was making little flickbooks with graph paper and moving dots too. My tastes in stuff haven't changed all that much since then I don't think which is interesting but it's nice to see where certain ideas started that I feel I've picked up again since I've been doing my degree. I guess the gap in my education hasn't made all that much of a difference.

What a crock

Without being too melodramatic, this week has been the worst ever.

Well for me anyway. We have this project where we're to draw strangers, or half-strangers and develop their characters through drawing them in different contexts, like them at home (or how we might imagine their home to be). It's soooo hard I'm really tearing my hair out with it. I've made my life difficult by choosing a guy with facial hair and glasses, neither of which it turns out I can draw any better than a child could! So I'm pretty stuffed. 

If anybody fancies doing it for me and me taking all the credit in class on Tuesday please step forward... otherwise have a good weekend :)

Piet Grobler

The South African illustrator gave a talk about his work at uni a couple of days ago and I've just been looking at his work online. During the talk he showed us a video I think he said his brother helped him make of his book Het vogeltjies ABC  (Little bird's ABC) and it was so funny and charming! Piet uses inks and watercolours to get a beautiful lightness in his work, just perfect for the children's books he makes. Here is a tiny snippet for you to enjoy, there seemed to be a bit of theme of farting, pooping and burping birds, so it wasn't too cutesy!