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Riverside pub, golden daffodils, storybook canal boats, 14th century tithe barn, ancient churches, banks covered in primroses, honey-coloured stone walls, cobalt blue skies, big black dogs and one happy Minx.
In the spring, the English countryside is the only place to be. Thanks to D, J & N for a glorious day out. |
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Occasionally (er, several times a day) I like to take a wander through my web stats (both for the website and the blog) to check how traffic is doing and see where it’s coming from.
Yesterday I was getting traffic from what appears to be a Japanese/Chinese design blog (difficult to tell as the characters just show up as little square boxes in my browser) which appears to have mirror mirror listed as a supplier of Atelier LZC products.
Anyway, I was browsing through the pictures when these gorgeous illustrations stopped me in my tracks. They are the work of fashion illustrator Eduard Erlikh and I just can’t get over how stunning they are.
There’s something about the rawness of sketches – both fashion and architectural – that just gets to me and sketches with so much movement and vigour in dayglo colours really take the cake.
I WANT.
By a timely coincidence the film Super Size Me was being shown on Channel 4 tonight, so I sat down to watch it as part of my weight-loss campaign.
I have never been so horrified by a film IN MY LIFE*. The bad news is that the thought of taking myself and my daughter to live in America is now scaring the living daylights out of me. The good news is that henceforth I will be living on carrot juice with the occasional alfalfa sprout salad.
*Actually it was a really enjoyable, watchable movie in the Jamie’s School Dinners vein. Highly recommended.
I’ve just weighed myself for the first time in ages and I appear to have put on one and a half stone (21lbs) SINCE giving birth over a year ago.
I wasn’t exactly sylph-like before the birth either, though I was very careful whilst pregnant and fairly active throughout the pregnancy, so I actually weighed LESS a couple of weeks after giving birth than I did when I conceived.
But since then the weight has piled on. I used to be really active – cycling to work, rollerblading in the park and going to the gym – but since the birth I just haven’t had the free time to exercise much at all and over the winter even long walks to the park haven’t been on the agenda. And being at home with a baby is so boring and stressful sometimes that I may have occasionally sneaked one or two more slices of toast with (lashings of) butter and Marmite than were perhaps strictly necessary.
But I don’t want to be fat when I go to Seattle, and I have lots of pent-up fashion spending which it is impossible to indulge when one’s bosoms are this enormous, so I’d like to drop a couple of stone (28lbs) in the six months before we go.
To this end I am currently reading French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano, the GL Diet by Nigel Denby and I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna because I really need to address (I originally wrote ‘lick’ here, but that doesn’t seem entirely right in the circumstances) the mental problem of comfort eating (which I do mostly when I’m bored or stressed) once and for all. There is nothing like a bit of of strenuous reading, I find, to make those pounds just drop off (and into someone else’s pocket).
I will report back.
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Just spotted this beautiful handmade silver dish on Abigail Percy’s Flickr site. All I need now is a spare £1200 and a butler to polish it.
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Please forgive the blurry image – it’s an artist’s impression scanned in from last night’s Evening Standard – but was enough to make me very excited. This is the new temporary pavilion which is being built this summer at the Serpentine Gallery. By Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, it is made from translucent material and can be lit from within at night. The walled enclosure below the canopy will be used as a café and events forum.
Every year for the past seven years, the Serpentine Gallery – a gorgeous little avant-garde art gallery in Kensington Gardens – invites a different world-famous architect to build a summer ‘pavilion’ on its outside lawn. The structures are only open between July and October each year, so the architects are encouraged to go a little bit crazy.
My favourite in recent years was the Oscar Niemeyer pavilion in 2003 which echoed the profile of the Victorian building behind (though I wouldn’t have painted the ramp red) and I didn’t much like last year’s brutalist tortoise-shaped effort. It sounds like this year’s giant light installation will reach new heights of superb nuttiness though.
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NIEMEYER PAVILION |
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BRUTALIST TORTOISE |
When it comes to decorating I love mixing modern forms, colours and styles with vintage furniture and fabrics (and vice versa).
So I just adore this Egg chair by Liberty Bespoke (also from Elle Deco) which is upholstered in traditional Liberty prints and in which I could happily swivel all day pretending I was a Brocante Home James Bond villain.
Of course I’m just waiting for my brother (and new reader to this blog) to phone me up and tell me that this is an abomination – as he did with the Nokia phones.
As the world’s biggest fan of Sex and the City, I was really intrigued to see interior shots of Sarah Jessica Parker’s absolutely gorgeous Long Island beach house in May’s edition of Elle Deco (note to self – that’s the sort of house I want when we move to Seattle).
Not surprisingly the décor is very on-trend, with white interiors enlivened by splashes of dayglo colour, black accents and pretty but not girly accessories. It almost makes me want to forgive her those awful Lux adverts , the ones for the ghastly-named Lovely perfume and the fact that when she talks about her dining room she says things like, ‘When it’s filled with people, they become pieces of art that make it even more beautiful.’
I particularly liked the matte black mismatched dining room chairs, the giant apple in the kitchen and this gorgeous corner of her bedroom.
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MISMATCHED BLACK CHAIRS |
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GORGEOUS BEDROOM |
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PRETTY ACCESSORIES |
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BIG APPLE |
I’ve decided that I need to learn Russian. The Russian blog with the impeccable taste in grendmas has loads of beautiful images on its pages – I just wish I could understand what on earth most of them are.
I clicked on the link next to this image of this amazing hand-knitted rug and found myself on the site of Dutch knitwear company Flocks.
Knitting is the only craft I’ve ever been able to do. I like the way it exercises my brain in a totally different way, though I’m very bad at actually finishing a project and absolutely loathe the final sewing up process (I have about five unfinished, and now too small, baby garments sitting in my knitting bag). But even though I’m quite a keen knitter, I couldn’t for the life of me work out how this rug came to be made.
Until I looked more closely at the Flocks website and found that yes, it really is knitted on huge needles.
