Some friends

Hello. Sorry it's been a rather quiet week here - I've been working and getting distracted by other things which I will tell you about next week. Here is a collection of badges that I painted just for fun - it's like a gallery of the creatures that live in my head! Maybe I will put some of these up for sale in my Etsy shop when I have a moment.

Have a marvellous weekend!

a few things for Friday

I really should stop shopping for a house that I STILL do not own. Grrrr... I can't help it, I'm sorry. It's driving me nuts, but I can't stop looking for lighting and sofas and chairs for my imaginary new home.

So today I thought I should share a couple of non-housey things instead.


Firstly, I took part in a Secret Valentine exchange, organised by the very sweet Alicia of Alicia Rose (website, blog, Etsy, Twitter). We were each given the address of another participant, and had to send something handmade to them for Valentine's Day. I received my gift from Alicia herself, and I was stunned by her generosity and the loveliness of her gifts. She is a talented embroiderer who makes images using her sewing machine (a technique I have never been able to master) and turns them into art for your walls, cushions, tote bags and all sorts of other goodies. I received some note cards, a lovely lavender sachet and two of her art pieces. Now I definitely want a nice house where I can display these!


In Karen's sewing world, this rabbit, temporarily named Konstantin, came into being as a birthday gift for the husband last weekend. I added the silly Russian hat because his head looked a little bare without anything, and the heart because he lacked colour. All very silly. He only speaks Russian and likes to eat borscht and dumplings.

Have a great weekend, all. I'll try to be a better bunny and do some drawing for the blog next week.

Ikea Toy Stories

I illustrated a Facebook app for Ikea, called Toy Stories, just before Christmas. It's an interactive children's book game using five of the toys that are sold in Ikea stores. Basically, you pick a character and a story, and then you write the text to go with the pictures of each story. You can print out the story to keep, to colour in, or you can just save it for later. The husband wrote a hilarious one (at least I thought it was hilarious) for the jungle story.

It's got a few glitches in some of the illustrations but otherwise it's OK. A bit bright for me, but I enjoyed drawing it all the same.

tin toys

I have a real weakness for wind-up toys, especially vintage ones. The one above is from circa 1965 and costs £55 from the ever-lovely Ben Pentreath. You can also get this monkey on a tricycle for £15. Sweet!



Can you tell I've been doing my Christmas shopping? Sadly I keep finding things that I like but nobody else would!

tired

I know you probably have worked this out already but I am having a tough time at the moment. There are so many things going on in my life and consequently my head, that sometimes I feel like I'm going to burst and collapse into a big, weepy pile. The combination of work and house-selling/renting is driving me to the brink of my already limited sanity. I just wish I could escape it all for just a little while.


If I could, right now I would like to:
1. Eat pierogi and borscht at Veselka, New York.
2. Play on the beach. Any beach.
3. Make silly stop-frame animations with my teddies. Pure idiocy.
4. Go swimming somewhere hot, or in the lake at Annecy.
5. Go hiking in Scotland.
6. Gorge myself on panzanella and trippa alla Fiorentina (that's tripe, oh yes) at the amazing diner in the Mercato Centrale in Florence.
7. Go home and get my Dad to teach me all, like, EVERYTHING, he knows about Chinese cooking because he is so talented and I want to cook like him.
8. Go somewhere out of my comfort zone (and no, that doesn't include moving house to somewhere 250 miles away): Indonesia, South America, India. Somewhere fabulous. But armed with insect repellent.

The husband and I will be away on Thursday and Friday, looking for a hovel to rent up north. Have a good couple of days, and enjoy the weekend! Wish me luck.

playtime

So I've spent a whole week procrastinating and pretending that I'm doing something useful. I wish my work were more of a constant, rather than ebbing and flowing as it does - sometimes I feel swamped and then it all goes away very suddenly, leaving me floundering in my own inability to self-direct. I am at a loose end this week, so I've been thinking about the things I could be busying myself with if only I had the get-up-and-go that I am so severely lacking on days like these. I saw this post over on illustrator Dani Jones's site the other day (via another blog I can't remember). It lists 101 things to do if you are an illustrator with a bit of time on your hands between projects. I thought it was a good list but UTTERLY terrifying. I am so bad at self motivation that all these great ideas just scare me.

So maybe I should have a go at some of those things, or find some of my own. I've long wanted to get back into proper painting: doing something a bit more 'arty' than just drawing silly characters and scenes. And maybe I'll have a go at papier mâché - creepy masks and cool animal puppets with fabric clothing could be fun to make. I only ever made a very bad papier mâché hot air balloon when I was very young. Time to play, I think. Now I just need to find a place where I can make a sticky mess!

Today I've been playing with my blank matryoshka dolls and have finally started to colour a second set. See the original set here.



This weekend the husband and I are off to North Wales again to nose around yet more houses, and we will be dragging my Mum with us because she's all lonesome at home with my Dad and sister away. I can't wait! Have a good one, whatever you're doing.

Brighton

In the end we didn't go anywhere in East Anglia, nor indeed anywhere close. We ended up in Brighton. The weather was probably a bit too cold for me (I have the internal heating of a lizard) to be out all day walking on some coastal saltmarsh, so the husband suggested shopping - and I would never object to that. I love this city, even though I've only been a few times - it is like another London only it's more kind of concentrated (you know what I mean?) and, of course, it has a beach! The shopping is fantastic especially in the quirky Lanes and the trendy, studenty North Laine, so after a stroll along the beach we headed into town for a spot of junking (OK, we were distracted for a while by a food fair, some tea and a sausage roll...).

We need more chairs, since we are now down to just three in our house that could be passed off as dining chairs. When we have guests we use the piano stool and our 1920s wooden swivel chair too! So we headed for Pigeon Vintage's shop to enquire about those lovely school chairs that I had my eye on. They were there in the window display, but sadly they had just been sold to a local restaurant (with excellent taste, I might add!) :-( Boo hoo! They were even more beautiful in the flesh - gorgeous blue-green metalwork, little gold Belgian maker's marks on the back... they were so lovely it was sick. But never mind, eh? There will be others!


Other shops we came across included Swag (images above), another beautiful antiques shop with some to-die-for plan chests and French kitchen tables amongst other things.


And then there was my dream shop, Utility. It sells enamelware, embossed notebooks, letterpress stationery, traditional hardware and household products. The shop's name says it all. I would have had the lot! There were other places too, like the amazing Snooper's Paradise, but to talk about it all would probably be boring!

Did I buy anything in the end? Only this little fella (from The North Laine Antiques & Fleamarket), another tin wind-up toy to add to my collection of unloved policemen-type toys. He needs a bit of a clean!


I'll be back later today with another idiot drawing!

new stuff in the shop this week

I've just listed this little lamb in the shop. I am so in love with the damned thing that I don't want to let him go, but I promised the husband that I'd not keep any more of my toys. The lamb is what I was photographing half-finished the week before last - I finished it ages ago but the light has been so poor that it has taken me until today to take pictures of it. The weather has been truly appalling recently. And we lost our internet here for a few days too, which didn't help things.

I shall also be listing two much larger lambs later on this week, and soon, this birdhouse clock that I started yesterday:




Sorry for my absence last week - with no internet and quite a bit of work to do, I kind of let things slip...

this and that...

Hello. The weekend was, uh, expensive. Well, not too much, but let's say we got the chair, and the little wooden policeman and some other junky stuff from the auction. I couldn't resist the policeman after all - he was beautiful. Funnily enough, I just came across another very similar walking toy (above) at the splendid Three Potato Four. Cute, no? Expensive, yah?


And today the husband and I went on a rummage at Sunbury Antiques Market in West London. Got up way before the crack of dawn at 4.45am and drove there in the foggy darkness. Froze our asses off in the cold and bought nothing even though everything there was beautiful and I wanted it all, especially the stuff from the French dealers.

Hey, at least at both the auction and the market I got to work my new Norwegian-cardigan-and-wax-jacket look. Received a suitable and gratifying number of odd looks from people. Miraculously for someone as lizard-cold as I am, this combo kept me warm even outside. Shame about my frozen feet, but hey, you can't have everything. I think I'll wear my sheepskin boots to Newark in December.

head over heels

Remember this post about our trip to New York? I wondered upon my return whether I'd ever adored London so much - I had fallen out of love with it somewhat and couldn't find that magic any more :-(

Well, it took an amazing salt-beef bagel, an Ethiopian pancake and a kangaroo to mend our broken affair. Yeah, I know, it can be tough sometimes. I'm just being facetious really - we had a great day out in London yesterday and did stuff that reminded me what a wonderful place it is.

First we visited Caravan on Redchurch Street where the stuff was all amazing and pretty and a bit too girly for the husband. We moved on quite quickly, even though I could have bought up most of the pressed glass and maybe a bunny lamp. Because it was lunchtime, we stopped off at Beigel Bake at the top of Brick Lane, then proceeded to raid the shops on Cheshire Street. First stop, Labour and Wait for an enamel pie dish, then Shelf for a retro print and some jewel-bright insect pins; and then in a shop whose name I can't remember, I found this new friend, a tin wind-up kangaroo to keep old Froggu at home company. The frog is vintage 1950s, this one is new, but her tail spins round as she goes and it's the most delightful thing. How quickly I am regressing into childhood as I age!

I could have stuck around looking at vintage clothes all day, but we went on down Brick Lane, stopping to stare at two vintage kitchen larder units that I wish I had room for, and then we got side-tracked entirely by the food stalls at the Sunday UpMarket. Oh my lord! We had to have a second lunch. Read here for more of what we ate.

Then we had a quick whip around Spitalfields Market before heading into town to buy clothes. I came home with a shirt-dress that looks like an artist's smock and makes me look very arty indeed :-).

Tombées du Camion, Paris

Image from http://cdn.magasins-paris.com.

I am quite tortured sometimes. Not by my work right now, but by my yearnings for various things. It makes me feel materialistic, greedy, fickle; and I hate materialism. But I like stuff: blue and white china, vintage tins and little boxes, scary-looking old toys that don't really work, chemists' bottles, bowls, jugs, chairs, woollen blankets, stripy bedlinen, more shoes, glass domes, vintage clocks... the list goes on. My house is not big enough for all the stuff I would like to fill it with.

I end up buying nothing, even if we walk into a shop full of the most gorgeous things. We went into one such place in Southwold last weekend. I picked up lovely old linens, a pretty ointment tin, a vintage sign - but did I buy any of them? Not I! I never do - I don't want a cluttered house and I hate wasting money on things I don't need. But I just get this nagging feeling sometimes when I wave goodbye to whatever has caught my eye that maybe I'm going to spend my whole life being thrifty and denying my whims and end up a bitter old hag with an empty house and nothing around me that I really like. Maybe if I just tossed those horrid chairs into the tip and forced myself to find ones I really did like, my life would somehow be fuller and much more charming. I would sit my guests on my lovely new (old) chairs without wincing at the sight of them! B****cks?!? I can't decide.


All this brings me to the point of this post. When we were in Paris in March this year, I came across the most amazing shop near Montmartre. It was freezing cold and I'd been outdoors all day - I was walking alone around Paris, getting to know the city above ground, marching between arrondissements with an explorer's fervour. So I was striding down Rue Joseph de Maistre towards the hilltop of Montmartre in order to see the city spread below in the spring sunshine when I passed the most curious shop display. I was instantly drawn to it when I spotted a crate of old chemists' glassware on its doorstep. I peeked in through the door and at first thought it was some kind of weird doll boutique or a goth-like jewellery store, but I went in despite myself.



Words cannot describe this place. It is at turns magical, creepy, dark, beautiful, both bright and sombre - it is a tiny shop crammed with weird vintage dolls' heads, 1970s masks, wooden toys, vintage ephemera and cards of buttons. There are weird things to make jewellery from, vintage sewing spools, little tins and paper fish. It is delightful, curious and quite bewitching. I could have spent hours in there (drooling a little), only it's so small that they would probably think I was mad. The shop is called Tombées du Camion, at no. 17 Rue Joseph de Maistre - check out their beautiful website here, where you can order stuff via e-mail. I wanted to buy the most lovely little wooden pull-along toy from the 1940s for €28 which was shaped like a little bird, with most of the paint worn off. They had at least a dozen of them ferretted away underneath another display. I didn't buy one and my heart aches a little bit for them now.

There is a set of photographs here on Flickr (where some of the images above are taken from - the others are from their official site).



Oh yeah, and if you happen to be in that area and want some great salad, head for Le Relais Gascon (surprisingly for Montmartre, this place is full of Parisians, not tourists), just down the road from here. You get the most enormous bowls of salad there topped with to-die-for fried potato slices smothered in garlic and parsley. The fact that you end up stinking of garlic for the whole night (garlic always repeats on me and wakes me up :-)!) is NOT a valid reason for not eating there. But don't bother with anything but the salad.

I've been away in London today seeing friends, and have just this evening been called away to London again tomorrow to work on a little job that I haven't (yet) got a clue about :-) Whoop! So I'll be back hopefully on Wednesday.

my jelly mascot on Creative Review

Thanks to Damien this morning for the heads-up that the cat I made for Jelly has appeared on the Creative Review website. Apparently he wanted to have his photos taken in the Boothnation photobooth. What a poser!

grumpy bunny

I'm feeling a bit like this little dude today. A bit down in the dumps. I feel like I'm still asleep even though I've been at my desk for two hours. I've been working pretty hard on this new animation project for the last few days, so haven't had time to play as much as I'd like :-) My stuffing arrived the day after I ordered it, so whilst I've had the materials for making toys, I've not had the time. The stuffing (all 6 kilos of it) is currently sitting in a huge box in the middle of the sitting room like, as Mark calls it, a carbuncle. I think I'd better deal with it before he gets annoyed! If it were his stuff, I'd have made him put it away days ago! I can be such a hypocrite...

a jaundiced lamb?

Well, as promised here's my prototype lamb. I would say she's the most 'proper' toy I've made yet, because she's actually based on the skeletal configuration of a real sheep and doesn't have silly eyes like most of my toys have had so far. I'm not so sure that she's particularly 'me' if that makes sense - I think maybe she should have the silly eyes and that would make her a Karen Cheung toy. Or something else - she's sweet, but probably not mad enough for me. And she's yellow because that's the fabric I have in the largest quantity and that I'm not likely to use other than for making smiley lemons :-) I'll work on it...

Alas, I've run out of stuffing, so friend-making will be put aside for a few days. Plus I got an animation job! I'm struggling horribly with ideas for that at the moment - you know, how clients so often want something so different from what I'd like to do, and usually something so CHEESY that I want to weep into my sketchbook. I digress. More on that project another time.

two new friends

I've been away for a few days. Not been up to much except seeing family up in Birmingham, where my sister and I went to the market and bought lots of very cheap but lovely fabric from which I've made two new friends. The first one is a cat for Jelly's stand at the Creative Review Portfolio Exhibition in June. I'm going to make him a little Jelly sweater to wear. He likes to eat Oriental instant noodles with fried egg like me, only they won't give him heart disease... I haven't given him a name yet. Maybe the folks at Jelly will christen him in June.

The second little fella is a glove puppet I made at the weekend. He is a sports-mad gym bunny and likes to do sit-ups. I haven't quite perfected the art of making puppets that fit properly yet, but I can just about get my hand into him for some good sit-up action.