easily distracted by shiny things…
Posted in culture, dolls, exhibitions, sewing on Jul 19th, 2010
Here I am, in the Science Museum, with my Stitched Self! Which, in fact, looks nothing like me. But a few months ago the resemblance would have been uncanny, I promise. Just in case you can’t spot my Mini-Me, here’s a close-up: I’m not sure what’s happened to my hair, or why my scarf’s all over my [...]
Posted in culture, photos, re-enactment on Jul 18th, 2010
A couple of weekends ago we went to see the Fairfax Battalion putting on a Civil War re-enactment at Mapledurham. As always, I took a bunch of photos. We spent a long time chatting to the barber-surgeon, and I was surprised to find out about some of the more delicate operations that could be done [...]
Posted in culture, exhibitions, inspiration, nature, photos on Jul 16th, 2010
This is the Natural History Museum in London. Quite a typical view – looking over the central hall from the giant sequoia tree, over the top of the big dinosaur skeleton, to the statue of Darwin on the main staircase. Usually people are so busy looking at the dinosaur that it simply doesn’t occur to [...]
Posted in culture, exhibitions, inspiration, writing on Apr 29th, 2010
Hopefully you can all see this embedded video of the finches at the Barbican in London – an installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. We went on a little trip yesterday evening, and had an absolutely magical time watching and listening to a room full of little birds and musical instruments. The video is of a previous [...]
Posted in culture on Aug 28th, 2009
I’ve just spent a large chunk of this afternoon transferring all my blog feeds out of my email account and into Google Reader. Now I have 82 blogs with 601 posts to catch up on, which could take a while! However, this much better than looking at my Inbox and seeing 2097 messages, and not [...]
Posted in culture, inspiration, writing on May 31st, 2009
Image © Tom Hunter I was reading the Big Issue yesterday, and suddenly did a double-take when I saw this picture. It’s from the “Travellers” series by Tom Hunter, who has several current exhibitions in London and around Europe. When I was at University I harboured a sort of a romantic notion that I would somehow land [...]
So, we’re in a global recession. A couple of months ago I had a surprising number of orders cancelled, all at once. Most of them were for party dresses that people simply couldn’t afford to pay for any more. Never mind that the dresses were going to be hand made from beautiful fabrics, one of [...]
Posted in culture, inspiration, shopping, writing on Mar 31st, 2009
This week I am in love with the seemingly random interconnectedness* of things. The other day I joined Twitter. Havi Brooks sent many people my way with her tweet (thank you!), one of whom was Randomling. She turned out to be the housemate of Miss Alice, who’d put me on to both Havi and Twitter [...]
Posted in culture, inspiration, writing on Mar 26th, 2009
Yesterday I met a duck, and today I learned how to Tweet. The duck in question is not the fancy Mandarin pictured above. It’s Selma, able assistant to Havi Brooks. Miss Alice realised that I was in serious need of some help with “destuckification”, and sent me a link to Havi’s website, The Fluent Self. [...]
Posted in culture, inspiration on Jan 9th, 2009
I was browsing through the BBC iPlayer this afternoon, looking for something to watch in the background whilst doing a spot of hand sewing. I hadn’t realised what a lot I was missing! The title above is a quote from a wonderful 1950s programme about fashion history. The series is called Men, Women and [...]