hello, beautiful...

No, I haven't given birth prematurely, but I have bought a super-large vintage wall chart of lobster anatomy from the lovely Junk Deluxe to indulge myself. It's currently adorning our bathroom wall because it happened to complement the wall colour, and there aren't too many walls big enough in our house to accommodate it. Needless to say, I am in love with it.

 

Like Junk Deluxe on Facebook for most recent stock updates. Wall colour: Hardwick White by Farrow and Ball. The other picture is a screen print by James Brown.

Hope you have all been well. Life is slowing down at my end - I'm counting down the days until I finish my latest project and can finally get on with preparing for the arrival of the little beast currently residing in my belly.

catching up

 

We entertained some of my dear school friends and their partners over Easter weekend at our house. We'd only had the windows completed three days before the first guests arrived, so there was some frantic tidying and dusting beforehand. Somehow we managed to get it all ready and had a lovely, relaxed few days with lots of good food and some windy walks. We climbed the hill opposite our house to pick wild garlic for a risotto I had planned to cook. The view from there was pretty amazing, especially in the changeable weather that was sweeping overhead that day. The fact that our own house made up part of the view is kind of beside the point, but it was good to see how it sits in the landscape, with the hills of the Clwydian Range marching off into the murky distance.

On Easter Sunday, despite some pretty unpromising weather forecasts, we decided to be brave and took an indulgent picnic for eight people to one of my favourite places  - Llanddwyn Island, which I've written about before. The weather turned out to be just fine, if a little windy, and the four miles of beach and shoreline walking was perfect. There is something very British, but very magical, about picnicking on a beach with clouds scudding overhead and the threat of rain in the air. I loved every minute of that weekend and feel so lucky to have such wonderful friends who were willing to travel so far to come and see us.

The following weekend, we went to see an acquaintance of mine who sells industrial vintage stuff in Manchester. He's just set up shop in a new warehouse and wanted to show me some of his latest goods. I'll write about this in a separate post, as he very generously donated some bits to me to have a play with in the house. I've been too busy with work and stuff lately to have done anything yet, but I'm really excited about dreaming up some ways of displaying and using his vintage finds.

Last week we attended our first antiques auction in over a year. This one is in Froncysyllte, near Llangollen, and was pretty quiet so there were bargains to be had. We got a 1920s oak desk for the husband's office for the princely sum of £35.40 which, once it's been tidied up, will look just spiffing. There were lots of items that we had no interest in at all: the usual parade of Staffordshire dogs etc., but it was a fun day out. Plus, like our old auction haunt at Willingham, they do a splendid bacon sarnie. What's not to like?

What else, what else? Drawing? Nope. Sorry. Lost my mojo there, I'm afraid. I think there's not enough room in my body for both a baby and a brain. I'll see what I can do to remedy this in the coming weeks. I hope to finish work within the next week and a half, to start properly on nursery and other baby stuff I've been procrastinating about and maybe to do some creative stuff too.

Meanwhile, I hope you are all well. Only seven weeks til I'm meant to pop now, so not too long at all. Eep!

this morning

We were visited by this gentleman (who's been eating all of the Hungarian rye seeds that I've sown for green manure). Didn't have the heart to chase him off.

Sorry things have been quiet on the drawing front. I've recently been collared into working again - this time for Nationwide - and there's quite a lot to do. Maybe I'll be a good girl and draw something fun next week. Have a good weekend, kids.

Oh, and yes, the rug smells.

the house today

Progress on the house has been slow, with weekends being taken up lately by Helfa Gelf rather than DIY. The changes have been small but significant, and mostly effected by the husband. The change that has brought the warmest glow of pride to his face has been putting new (old) doors on some of the rooms upstairs. The ledge and brace doors that we had felt too 'cottagey' for a house like this. Now we have some freshly hung Victorian four-panel doors instead and they look pretty marvellous compared to what came before. I'm sure no-one else will notice the alteration, but to us it seems dramatic.

These are pictures of our bedroom today. Remember it? We moved into this room nearly four months ago but it remains rather bare and semi-finished. There are a lot of things still wrong with it (crimson velvet hand-me-down curtains anyone?) and that rug I bought reeks rather horribly, but it is at least starting to feel more comfortable. The pictures show a reproduction vintage geological map of the UK (get it here), grey ticking stripe bed linen from The White Company, vintage Welsh blanket, bed from here, our new pair of bedside tables and a chest of drawers that were £40 from a local antiques shop. Slowly but surely, things are getting better.

In other news, I bought this antique Persian Tabriz rug from eBay for £66 yesterday. Doubtless it will smell pretty dubious too, but I am still happy. Whoop! 

the weekend

It was a glorious weekend here in the UK, even in rainy Wales, with temperatures in the upper twenties and sunshine to bask in. It was kind of sad in a way: like watching the death throes of summer, knowing that autumn - nay winter! - is just around the corner. Today it is bright and windy here, with the unnatural heat and humidity starting to dissipate.

Wherever you are, I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Ours was one to savour - my first free weekend since August. We started off at the new David Nash exhibition at Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno, which was pretty interesting. I'm not a big fan of sculpture, but I like Nash's processes and how his works continue to evolve even after they have been 'completed'.

Photo from Oriel Mostyn's website.

Next stop was Penmaenmawr, from where we hiked up a hill for a lovely walk amidst neolithic standing stones and stunning views of the coast and mountains. We had a picnic lunch overlooking a bay sprinkled with sailing boats, before completing the walk and returning to the village. 

On the main street through Penmaenmawr is an antiques shop called Perry Higgins (the website doesn't seem to be working right now!). Now, I'd heard about this place from some friends, and we passed by it in the car back in May, but nothing prepared me for how incredible it is. It is a warren of a building, with three stories and a warehouse crammed to the rafters with antique furniture, domestic ware and bygones. Everything was beautiful and there was just so much of it that we will have to make a return trip to have a proper rummage through it all. I didn't take any photos, I was so completely overwhelmed, but here are a few photos which I believe are from the website (via here).

We came away with two towel rails, a painted mid-century cabinet which we will use to store linen for now, a pair of bedside tables and a beautiful French bookcase/display cabinet that was a steal for its quality. I may take photos of these things at some point, but you know I'm not very good at that. On top of all this, the owner drove our purchases to our house on the same day! It was all very satisfying.

There. Enough of my jibber jabber for now!

a few things

Damson crumble, using fruit from our trees, that was so good I nearly wept.

The last of the damsons bobbing in gin, to be ready for Christmas. The colour is jewel-perfect.

Gorgeously scented roses from Jenny - one of them smells like lychees. And flowers from my neighbour.

spending...

I still have nothing very interesting to show you! We have been spending money. Lots of it.

I finally cracked about having next to no comfortable seating in the house (fourteen - yes, fourteen - dining chairs and only one sofa?!), and bought this three seater sofa from Blue Suntree.

I also bought this rather girly antique rug to go around/under a bed in one of the bedrooms from Magic of Orient on eBay. I know I can make it work!

Helfa Gelf is going really well - I sold an original drawing on Saturday, which I was over the moon about, although I will be a bit sad that it will be leaving me. I adored the couple who bought it, though, so I am sure it will go to a good home.

office chairs

Sincere apologies for my absence, and the absence of any new work here lately. I have been preoccupied with studio preparations, namely the refurbishment of this beast of a work bench.


Thoughtlessly, I omitted to take photos of it in its original state. Here you can see I've planed off the dark, sticky goo that was deeply ingrained in its top surface. That job took days. I've just finished waxing the top now, and am prepping the base to be painted. It's been a tough job, but it will be such a useful piece of furniture once it's nice and clean!

The other thing that has been preoccupying me at least for the last twenty-four hours is the pursuit of a half-decent-looking office chair. It's a hard life I lead, I tell you. Now I hate most office chairs as a rule but I need something that is adjustable because I have such terrible posture and spend so much time at my desk that I am in danger of damaging myself. So what am I to do? They are so ugly! Of course I like the vintage printers' style chairs, but I wonder if they are any good for your back. I think I need something at least a little more modern.

There is one that I like: godfather of all modern office chairs, the Fred Scott designed Supporto task chair. It looks terribly ordinary in standard 'office' colours of black, grey, blue, but the coloured versions are a joy. I particularly like the low wide back version. Shame that they start at about £800 for a new one, and less for a battered vintage one. Deary me.


Twenty Twenty One, £990


eBay, starting bid £345


eBay, starting bid £125

Image from Supporto.

Image from Spaceist.

my studio

The previous owners of our house were two artists. One of them used the space above our garage as a painting studio. I haven't introduced you to this space yet, so here is a peek. There are two rooms - the large one at the back where he painted, and a tidier room at the front, with a window, which was more of an office. It's a lovely space, full of light: surely the perfect place for an artist to hole themselves up for a day of creativity.

However, it's not watertight or insect-tight. There is a recent leak in the asbestos roof that has soaked one of the beams and is causing me a bit of anxiety; the beam has sprung some orangey mould that I think will need addressing with some urgency.


It doesn't make me feel terribly creative, being surrounded by piles of dead flies, oil-painty floors, mouldy beams and staples all over every surface. It drives me mad. I like things tidy(ish) and clean. He left an enormous work bench that was covered in layers of oil paint and other unmentionable gunk that I have spent days planing, scraping and sanding off. There were other bits of furniture too - an old armchair, a couple of tables, a small snooker table - and a whole lot of junk including a picture of William Gladstone, piles of unused picture frames and some crockery. In a nutshell, it's a bomb site. A bomb site with potential, but I have a lot of work to do to make it how I want it to be. These photos were taken after several days of junk clearance and hard work, so you can imagine how awful it was before this, perhaps.

The studio and garage are in a building opposite our house - ours is the garage on the left, with the studio above.

In September I will be taking part in Helfa Gelf Art Trail, which is an open studios event for the whole of North Wales. I intend to be ready to welcome guests to this bomb site by then - not like 'finished' ready, but at least minus the dead flies. I am collecting inspiration for the space over on Pinterest, but right now it feels like a million years before I will be able to call this space my workplace. Give me a year to work on it. I'll keep you updated with its progress.

the weekend

Did you have a good weekend? I worked all of Saturday and a little of Sunday, so it wasn't amazing, but at least the good weather is back after what has felt like weeks of sodden greyness. The husband worked like a trooper, cleaning, moving stuff, starting on our skirting boards, mowing the neglected lawn and generally trying to make the house feel more like a home. We have seven guests and a baby landing on our doorstep from Thursday onwards, so it will be a hectic weekend. They are friends from when the husband and I were students at Cambridge and I love them all to bits - we are very excited to be hosting our first weekend party at our new house. We are hoping that they won't mind slumming it a bit here although if the weather continues fine, I think we will spend a lot of time outdoors. In other news, we put up a bookcase and unpacked some of our boxes. It felt like a really big step forward. OK, there's no other furniture yet, but we're working on that.

progress

We started off with a room that looked like Satan's boudoir, all black walls and gloom that rose into a cavernous ceiling.


Hours of stripping, wrecking, plastering and painting later:






Things have gotten a bit out of hand here. I will be briefed for another Honda ad this morning, then I'm off to the dentist for some unpleasantries. We've been trying our best to knock this place into a habitable kind of shape and, with a large group of friends landing on our doorstep on June 11th, we're going to have to make some serious progress quickly! Oh, and some furniture might be nice. It's all marvellous fun, though.

DIY lampshade

Remember this post, when we first found our house? I said in it that there appeared to be a George Nelson bubble lamp in the dusty loft. Well, there was not one, but two of them. Sadly, they were not the originals, just some cheapo copy with nasty gilt nipples on the bottom (instead of the chrome ring). They were torn and the wire had corroded inside, leaving a green stain on the plastic. I was loath to throw them away because I like their shape, so after a bit of dithering I decided to strip the plastic off and to find some new way of using them. I'm always advocating the acts of re-purposing and recycling, so to throw them away would have been wasteful.



Now I've stripped them and cleaned them up I'm wondering what to do. I will certainly spray paint them to cover the corroded parts - white is the colour of choice right now, but I also toyed with the idea of using a colour (Yellow? Blue? Industrial black?) and then simply hanging them like cages over some nice bulbs. But then I'm also wondering if maybe I could get a bit more creative with them - covering them in some way - paper or fabric, plain or patterned? I rather like shades like this one (below) from Gong, so I'm wondering, with the right fabric, whether I could make something similar with my frames? Maybe I could even design a fabric and get it printed onto silk by Spoonflower and use that? Now that would be properly bespoke.



Or maybe they can just be the base for something fantastical (by Hutch Studio) or fun.


What do you think? What would you do?

the unmentionables

Everywhere you go you find people with passions about chairs, tables, lighting, desks, sofas. I am one of those people. But today I wanted to talk about the unmentionable pieces of furniture, the ones that everybody ignores because they don't know what to do about them - namely television cabinets and wardrobes. Have you ever met anyone who has a thing about wardrobes? Have you ever found a TV cabinet, or something that can be used as one, that you really like?


We are having a bit of a dilemma about these things at the moment. We are badly in need of a wardrobe or two, with our clothes currently being rammed haphazardly inside suitcases and boxes. But I find shopping for wardrobes really difficult - they are usually too ornate, too bulky, too shallow, too expensive, the wrong wood, too big to get round a couple of tight corners in the house, or any combination of the above. I've never bought a wardrobe before, having had built-in ones in all the places I've lived since I left university. Have I found any that I love? Well, there are the early 20th century gentlemen's wardrobes with sweet labels on the shelves for ties, underwear and hats, but they are often ugly on the outside or too shallow to have a sensible amount of hanging space in the other half of the wardrobe. I do like very simple linen presses, or old school cupboards - I would just have to adapt the interior with a hanging rail. But I also have a fear of too much wood or, if the piece is painted, I get nervous about veering too close to the 'shabby chic' look. Industrial style lockers are an attractive option to me, but I wonder if they are too hard, too dark, too loft-stylee for a farmhouse? I am bewildered, to say the least.

Get this one here on eBay for £420.

The photo below is of the locker we bought the other week in Manchester. It needs a little bit of love, but I was rather taken by the cheery turquoise and those little red triangles on the front. It's currently languishing in our garage until I grow enough muscle to help the husband bring it into the house (or until we can collar one of our masculine neighbours to help!).


The TV cabinet is a different kettle of fish. Firstly, I don't like large televisions and I hate having them in a position where they're the first object you see when you enter a room, I think they are ugly things that should be put somewhere obscure. Secondly, I pretty much hate anything that is purpose-made to put them and their accompanying, multifarious boxes on. It would be OK if any old cabinet would do, but the thing is, you need at least an open shelf or a glass-fronted door so that the magic moonbeams from the remote control can get to the boxes. So annoying! I suppose you could put the boxes to the side or something, but they are so ugly I would rather have them half-hidden at least. Oh, and then of course there's the cable issue - having to have a hole, or to drill a hole if you can bear it, in the back wall of the stupid thing so you can get your cables through. These kind of things should really not bother me so much, but they do. It's how I am.


This haberdasher's cabinet, from eBay, works for me. Shame it's £700!

So. Tell me your secrets. Anyone. Please. Tell me what to do. What have you got your clothes in? What do you stand your telly on? More importantly, does it look good?

Images from various sources: eBay UK, Pinterest, Maisons du Monde, oh Hello Friend, Design Sponge amongst others. Sorry I haven't credited them individually.