oops!

Got carried away with work today. Finally I have some ideas to work with! Annoyingly, they came at about 11.30pm last night when I was about to turn the lights off :-/


So I'll leave you this week with a lovely shop - MetroRetro.
Have a good weekend all. Enjoy Hallowe'en!

Drawn - adulthood 15

I'm having a kind of existential panic here...

life drawing

We had a different model this week. It was quite difficult to get her proportions right.

score! London bus blinds

For a while now, we've been seeing vintage London bus destination blinds on style shoots and in trendy interiors shops, but they often come at a great price. Even on eBay the blinds with multiple destinations often sell for several hundred pounds - far too much for miserly old me, scraping my pennies together.


Interior designer Abigail Ahern, used them in her sister's apartment to nice, graphic effect.


Get the look, mounted and framed, from Pedlars, £2500.


Or have a hunt around places like eBay or Etsy. Here is one on Etsy, Recent Settlers. This blind will set you back $197.50 plus shipping from the US.


Also find them at Retrophenia and Colporter amongst others. This one is £695 from Retrophenia.

Where am I going with this post? On Saturday we ventured up the M6 to ferret around for junk at Bygone Times, three warehouses stuffed full of vintage and antique goodies. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the stuff was quite affordable - nothing like the prices that the same items would fetch in London. What did we come home with? Some sheet music for the piano and... you guessed it! This:


How much did we pay (she gloats)? A princely sum of £10. It's genuine - you can see the names typed on the linen back which the bus driver would read as he wound the blinds around. When I sent the husband to look for the price tag I never imagined it would be so cheap. I nearly died. It looks better in the flesh, and once I've taken off that horrible plastic bar at the bottom it will be even better. How much will it cost to frame it? The mind boggles...

dining tables

I was discussing dining tables with the husband this morning (as one does) and realized that I don't really know what I want. When I'm imagining furnishing a spacious kitchen-diner sometimes I lean towards a battered old wooden country style table and at other times I lean towards something more industrial and stark. I have been pootling around the internet having a look and here are a few I found.


Vintage rubber-topped metal table made by Art Metal, £350 starting price on eBay.



Industrial canteen table, £1395, Pigeon Vintage. I love this thing. Why? I think it's the contrast provided by the black legs. Sigh... so expensive!


Fermier zinc-topped table from Lavender & Sage, £616.25. Shame about the bars across the bottom: they would seriously annoy me if I were to use it as a dining table!


Labtop dining table, £950+vat, Trainspotters.

a few nice things

This industrial lamp on eBay.


These are rather fun. I would have Brick Lane because I like eating and I've eaten a lot there :-) More here.


These Elsie Dodds alphabet cushions from here or (cheaper) here.


This French zinc topped table from eBay. Dammit! I need a house!

Drawn - adulthood 14

Drawn - adulthood 13

Feeling a bit frazzled as usual...

stuff...

I seem to have stopped writing about things other than my drawings and work. I can't seem to do a bit of both. If I've posted a drawing onto the blog I feel like my work is done and I forget to talk about the other things in my life. Not that you are interested in those other things, but I kind of think of this place as a diary, so that maybe I can look back later on and know what I was doing and thinking at different times.

Here are a few random things I've been thinking about:

A sudden and overwhelming craving for bitter melon.

Smile for London sounds like a lot of fun.

I've not been to an auction for AGES and I miss it.

Beautiful Welsh products from Damson and Slate.

This is one of the artists in my life drawing group.

How amazing is this film? I saw it at Annecy animation festival a couple of years back and it still blows me away and I don't know why.

I have also been investigating lots of very boring things like government grants for loft insulation, the efficiency of woodburning stoves, what to do with asbestos roofing... yeah. It's all fun and games here.

life drawing

A selection of drawings from this morning. I have been drawing with conté crayons too but I haven't liked anything I've produced with those, so they remain hidden.

Drawn - adulthood 12

As I get older, I have come to realize that most of us are singing from the bullshit hymnsheet - it makes life easier :-)

the weekend

We had a marvellous weekend involving more house-hunting (hopefully our last trip!), walking and eating. On Sunday we walked up to the ruins of Dinas Bran, perched high above the town of Llangollen. Our photos in no way do this place any justice - it was stunning up there, with immense views of the Dee Valley in one direction, and of England in the other. I think my poor camera just doesn't capture the sheer depth of the landscape.


After that, we went and gorged ourselves at the International Food Festival in Llangollen. I think I drank a little too much wild bramble liqueur amongst other things. I hope you had a good weekend too! I'll be back later with a drawing.

Drawn - insecurities 04

I'm on a bit of a downer about my work at the moment - I'm struggling to find the motivation to do anything at all. It doesn't help that the internet seems to be awash with creative people producing amazing work, who always seem to be inspired and driven. I'm sure it's not the case for most of these artists - they probably struggle just as much as I do to feel like they are good enough, or that what they are doing is somehow 'worthwhile', and I am sure they wonder, just like I do, whether other people have noticed how rubbish they are sometimes.

Drawn - insecurities 03

Another weekend gem from my mother. OK, I've exaggerated a bit, and I upset her by saying that she'd spent my whole life feeding me full of insecurities (she believes that it's for our own good). It's a difficult one, when you want the best for your kids (don't slouch, cut your hair so you don't look like a cavewoman, don't eat too much pork fat...), but sometimes it gets a bit much. I love my mum like I love nobody else, she's amazing. But she IS bonkers.

Drawn - adulthood 11

Back to adulthood for now... I swear, this is an almost word-for-word transcript of a conversation we had when I went home last week.

life drawing

This morning in Ruthin... I am slowly getting into the swing of things, but this is only my second week after five years of not going to life classes. It is difficult and strange, but I am loving it, and the people I am meeting there too.

the weekend

Did you have a good weekend? I went to my parents' house in Birmingham and watched my dad cook - now I am armed with two more of his amazing recipes (well, guideline recipes - he's very approximate but always seems to get it right). I can now make something approximating Chinese barbecued spare ribs and five-spice braised pork belly - it's making me hungry sitting here and writing this. There is nothing quite like the taste of food that you have grown up with. We also went walking in the beautiful Clent Hills and shopping in town. God, I love shopping! It's a good thing I don't live too near a city any more, or I would be bankrupt. No photos, I'm afraid. I did get some inspiration for a couple more drawings this week, though. See you tomorrow!

pattern

I just changed my Twitter home page background to this pattern of insecure and unstable characters. You can save it to your computer and use it as a headache-inducing desktop background if you like!

Sorry I've been a bit rubbish this week. My motivation levels are at an all time low. I will be away from now until Monday, so have a good weekend all.

Drawn - insecurities 02

When I was a little girl, I went to a school where we had to wear boaters as part of our school uniform in summer. I remember going to buy a new boater with my mum, but we couldn't get one because they had to order a bigger one than those they had in stock. I became convinced that my head was bigger than normal. To tell the truth, I rather liked the idea that my head was large. I now think that it's not particularly large, just a funny shape - it has corners in just the wrong place for hard hats.

the weekend

Hello all. How was your weekend? Mine was pretty lazy - a bit of baking, a bit of antiques hunting and an unhealthy amount of time bothering sea anemones on the beach. We went to the North Wales Antiques Fair in Anglesey on Sunday where I saw an episode of Bargain Hunt being filmed (I won't talk too long about how I squawked 'hello!' at an unimpressed Tim Wonnacott, but let's just say I was a bit embarrassed afterwards), and I obtained a lovely vintage Welsh wool blanket for our bed. Then, since the rain had stopped, we went to the beach at Aberffraw for a picnic lunch and rockpooling.



Now it's Monday and I can't be arsed with anything.

Drawn - insecurities 01

OK, here's the next theme: insecurities.

I've hated the little pocket of fat that I've carried in the area below my belly button ever since a friend at school (she will remain unnamed) came up to me in gym class whilst I was cringing against a wall in a leotard and casually reached out and tickled it, saying something like 'little belly!'. No matter how slim I get, there is always a little wobble there.

But everyone has friends who make them feel bad every now and then, right?

What are your insecurities? Let me know in your comments and I'll draw them if I can :-)

Have a great weekend, all.