Christmas!

Happy Christmas - I hope you all had a lovely holiday. I definitely did; nothing better than being spoiled at home, champagne and snacks at 11am and a pretty dusting of snow outside. Here are a few snaps of my time at home.


My lovely main pressie from Josh, an Erica Weiner letterpress necklace - she uses vintage letters re-cast in silver to make these.


It's always customary for my sister to force the family to play loads of games over Christmas. She got this one - the Great Penguin Bookchase - for Christmas after I saw it on notcot - no better gift for a board-game loving English student. It's like Trivial Pursuit but all literature related and with tiny books instead of pies to collect. So cute.


One of my favourite presents, the hefty and beautiful Fat Duck Cookbook. The illustrations by Dave McKean are truly gorgeous making this a dream to flick through, even if I'll never try any of the recipes.




My other favourite pressie is a lens adapter for my E-P1 so I can use a ton of interesting vintage lenses on it. I'd already bought an old Wollensak projector lens and these are my first few shots with it. I love the super-pronounced vignette effect and it's surprisingly sharp for such an old piece of kit.

A few more photos on my Flickr. Oh, and happy New Year!

Favourite photos of the year

I guess this time of year is always ripe for remembrance of the year just gone, so I thought I'd do it visually with one favourite photo from every month, plucked from my Flickr archives..


January
Flowers on Columbia Road market. It was also my birthday, and we moved into our new flat.

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Failed crafts

Despite being seen as a generally 'crafty person', there are two things I can't do well at all: bake, and wrap presents.

Baking, I suspect is because it's a very precise practice more akin to science than art, and I tend to be a little slapdash in everything I do which doesn't fare well with baking. I'll substitute baking powder with bicarb of soda, or leave it in the oven until I think it looks ready, or run out of flour and think 'oh, 100g less will do, I'll just put in a bit less of everything else too'... predictably, the results are usually fairly disastrous. Viz my failed entry into the recent Poke studio bake-off:


I had visions for a charming little gingerbread house decorated with iced gems and silver balls, but my dough was too crumbly to even stand up and no amount of squeezy icing or melted chocolate (and icing sugar to hide the damage) would convince it otherwise. In the end I got too angry to continue and forfeited the competition. You can see some of the more successful bake-off entries on my Flickr.

The other sticking point, wrapping presents - I think again because it requires the kind of precision and attention span I don't possess. I can never get corners tidy, the tape curls up and sticks to itself, ribbons and bows are liberally applied to hide the damage.. the whole thing generally looks like I let the cat wrap it for me.


So this year I went for a purposefully 'rustic' look with handmade wrapping paper and tags. Even the rubber stamps are handmade (at the Make Lounge class I did last month), and just stamped onto brown parcel paper and manila tags for a rather pleasing lo-fi look.

Poke hack day - tastebuddi.es

Last week, Poke threw their first Hack Day - we downed tools Wednesday lunch, got into teams, and were set the brief to create a 'web thing' on the theme of FOOD in 24 hours.



Several manic hours later fuelled by crazy sandwiches and Angel Delight, each team presented their ideas to the judges - chef Yotam Ottolenghi, writer Russell Davies and editor of New Media Age Nick Howell.



Our team created tastebuddi.es, a website to inspire new unusual flavour combinations. Just keep hitting the big blue button to pop up two random ingredients, vote on whether the combo is a hit or miss, and share your best results on Twitter.



There's a running tally of the most popular combos and in February we'll announce the overall winner. We also plan to extend the site to allow users to add their own favourite combos and share them. Follow us on Twitter to keep up with changes to the site.



Here are some of the delightful combos we made to try during our presentation - orange and curry, strawberry and balsamic (a hit), olive and nutella, and Marmite with shortbread.

We didn't win the first prize as voted by the judges - that honour went to the World's Tallest Sandwich - but there's another prize for the site with the most visitors by March, so please use and share tastebuddi.es as much as you can - hope you like it!

Rifle Paper co

If you haven't yet discovered the beautiful Rifle Paper co store, I urge you go to have a look. Super pretty cards, prints and other paper goodies all with a distinctive muted colour palette and naive charm.


I especially love this stationery set personalised with an individual portrait by the illustrator behind it all, Anna Bond.


Anna's blog is well worth a look too, for inspiring posts along the vintage-nostalgic-handmade theme.

Embroidered Christmas cards

After my first attempt at paper embroidery I decided to try the same technique to make some Christmas cards this year. Here's how they came out:



If you'd like to have a go, here's a small photo tutorial.


Create your designs, either hand-drawn or on the computer. If you want to use mine, you can find them here. Make the designs fairly simple and don't put lines too close together as the holes might tear when you punch them.


Tape to the front of the card, then you need to pre-punch the holes before stitching. I found the easiest way was to stick my needle into a rubber eraser and use that as a kind of handle. Punch holes about 3-5mm apart - not too close or the paper might tear.


Here's the whole design punched. Keep the drawing as reference..


And get stitching! Simple outline backstitch works best here.


To finish, cover the messy stitchwork inside with another piece of card.

w+k Advent Calendar

I love wieden+kennedy's Christmas Advent Calendar. They've placed real-life Christmassy 'art installations' around their Shoreditch office and made the calendar into a cute map, illustrated by Hennie Haworth. I might go have a poke around and try to find some of them at lunchtime...

Cushions

I made these cushions at the weekend using some of the fabric I bought in Japan. Very happy with them, they brighten up the living room! They're simple envelope style like in this tutorial, if you fancy making some too.