Maternal Felting Explosion*

The hat is my triumph. The jacket now outgrown. Dressing him up like a crazy gnome? only just begun.

magical bean [and crazybrows]

I love how tactile felt is and wet-felting seems suited to my slapdash method of try it and see. Careful measurements don't work anyway (at least for me) and tinkering is king.  Plus, it's cheap.

I saw these baskets on Design*Sponge:

for $95?!

and I think I might have to have a go.

top photo: my iphone, bottom photo Alder & Co

*the name of my future jam band

Fishcakes and Baby Hickeys

So far this week I have:

- triumphantly made my first ever fishcakes - thank you Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the River Cottage Baby & Toddler Cookbook (otherwise known as Remedial Cookery for New Parents Who Realise Their Child Should Probably Not Live On Toast) - AND hoummus, from a recipe emailed to me by a stranger. SO good.

hoummus. the fishcakes were gone

- got a hickey. or four. on my arm. from my BABY. (Did everyone else know about this?! I had no idea this was even a thing. Like baby boners. That was weird too.)

weird, weird

- actually *read* half of this week's New Yorker. Wait. I'm lying: actually read one and a half long articles. Plus the Goings On About Town - which I always look at despite being on quite the wrong continent to make a reservation. And most of the cartoons.

At what point in a New Yorker subscription does one stop feeling guilty at a new issue arriving before the previous one has been opened? Must read more. Not on the iPad.

- taken Mister G on an excursion to the British Museum

and

- drawn creepy pictures of a sleeping baby

the caption reads 'my hand has forgotten how to draw'

So, a mixed bag.

We are off to Sicily tomorrow for some house cleaning.

Bring on the granita...

An unfound door: soft landing

This passage

this cushion

embroidery by me

and this one too

forest by Fine Little Day

all photos by my phone and uploaded via copygr.am

Felted Sloth

The rabbit pin is cute

but the sloe eyes of the sloth are better

all photos from Little Teeth Marks

We So Cultural - British Museum Edition

I took Mister G to the British Museum for the first time yesterday afternoon. Or, the first time since he was born - we actually went to see the Grayson Perry exhibit on his due date last year (before watching Alien for the first time. in HD. that was a good day). I took full advantage of special treatment, skipping the queue and carrying around a complimentary folding stool to park my swaying mass (and ass) on.

Great Court

I love the British Museum. I used to go there as a hungover student to draw things and whenever I'm at a loose end in Bloomsbury I go. Even just to walk through from the Senate House side to Museum Street. In fact the Great Court is, secretly, probably my favourite part -- the internal square centred on the old, round Reading Room, enclosed by a massive, curved, glass and steel canopy. The light is so good. 

Great Court, stone lion

I also love the pillars outside.  

exterior pillars

And the fact that no matter how many times I have been I never feel like I've seen anything. 

I love the grand scale of it. I find it calming somehow.

love the colours of these ceramics (from Iraq and Iran, 6th century BC - 6th century AD)

We didn't get past the ground floor yesterday. Mister G was happy enough in the Enlightenment Gallery and the Egyptians but drew the line at the Greek & Roman sculpture (such populists the Egyptians. Everyone loves a big sarcophagus.) 

marble statue of Aphrodite at her bath (Roman, 2nd century AD)

I found out that it is very difficult to draw with a baby on your hip. Grabby hands. Although for the few minutes I tried I did feel like kind of a multitasking badass (like that time at the 6 week check where I nursed him whilst having my bloods taken.)

reconstructed Greek temple facade

Fun fun. I might need to head back tomorrow.

all photos from my iphone

Commenting on the internet is HARD

I seem to veer wildly between fawning-exclamation-mark-user and gnomic-foul-mouth.

Rimbaud illustration by Hugo Guinness

I swear I strike a better balance in real life. At the very least I manage to avoid using emoticons in legal documents.

OR maybe the internet simply distils the truth, and I just AM both an unironic-enthusiast AND a hipster-gnome.

HA.

Clusters fade and disappear

bluebells on the heath. from my iphone

Roger Ebert on death:

That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.

via Explore

I expect this is sad. But it feels right to me. We live on in the memories of those we've touched and, as time passes, fade away.  It's right that we diminish. Humanity lies in our fleeting nature (or, dying gives us size*). What's the alternative, anyway?

Immortality? Yeah. Notsomuch, thanks.

*don't blame me - Doctor Who was on the iplayer while I was eating lunch

Quails' egg Easter

We received a delicious Easter egg from PA's parents - Rococo loveliness in its blue and white illustrated packaging

coffee and chocolate for breakfast. what?

but the best part was the accompanying clutch of praline filled quails eggs

the sole survivor

which echoed perfectly the quails egg and spinach filled homemade ravioli for Easter lunch

and all together makes me think of the gold lined real quails egg necklaces by Stephanie Simek

available from Catbird

Sweet.

all photos, save the last, from my iphone

9 months in 9 seconds

My absolute favourite thing

LOVE

(and it totally makes that sound when the baby pops out. Yep.)

Blue Grey

Love these beautiful photos by Samm Blake (on Once Wed last summer.)

The softness of light. Like a painting.

the tulle overlay on the bridesmaids skirts

and the high ceilings. I love high ceilings.*

*I swear they give your brain space to breathe

Wedding Seizure

If I were of a mind to plan my wedding inspired by an art installation (which has to be more reasonable than one planned on the theme of an Anthropologie catalogue? apparently that's a thing?), I could have some fun with Roger Hiorns' Seizure:

photo by Nick Cobbing via Artangel

Maggie Gyllenhaal's Stella McCartney would be a great wedding dress. (When we got engaged I secretly wanted to get married in this dress but couldn't find it anywhere... although it is more of a deco evening cocktails number than an afternoon marriage/christening college garden ceilidh. I suppose.)

via the ever awesome fuggirls

photo by Rory Lindsay via Artangel

These would be a beautiful, different, wedding or engagement band:

Polly Wales via Catbird

With a Pamela Love necklace

Pamela Love from Bona Drag

Pamela Love from Bona Drag

Or something from my new obsession, Adina Mills

Adina Mills Designhouse

In terms of shoes, there are a heap of sparkly blue heels around - and a lot are pretty ugly. Something to do with that whole 'something blue' thing means there are a lot of 'wedding shoes'... which tend to be a lot prissier than i can handle. Or, you know, just ugly. Some are awesome but super high - and that's just not my thing. (but if it were? Miu Miu.)

Wouldn't you rather wear these?

Jimmy Choo

Or some DIY badassedness like these?? 

DIYd by Original Seed

In fact:

BRIDE in lite white Converse GROOM in the Choos? (I'm kind of done with the groom-in-converse)

Unfortunately however, I'm not having a wedding on the theme of an art installation - so I guess this doesn't count as 'wedding planning' on the tally of productive internet time.

Pale blue dot

This would make a killer wedding reading, right?

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. 

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

And Carl Sagan had a beautiful love story of his own - check out Radiolab's retelling.  

Blue crystal seizure

A council flat in Elephant and Castle transformed into a blue crystal grotto of copper sulphate, by the artist Roger Hiorns

I first saw this when stalking the Facebook photos of the man who would become the future husband

We didn't know it then, but had a feeling

these pictures still give me that feeling

. Transformative. And a bit disconcerting.

pictures from Artangel

A stone, a leaf

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.   

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost!   

Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.  

Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel (1929)

a favourite passage