Sock it to me

Nicky (she of sock-monster-making fame) and I were emailing back and forth last week with a plethora of cool footwear - thought I'd share some of them. The ones above are my favourites from my personal collection, from a Tokyo store called Mighty Soxer (sadly not available online or over here). They even have a cat tail printed on the sole ^_^


Love these bright geometric designs from the appropriately-named Happy Socks.


Owl-, sushi- and moustache-print from Sock it to me. They also have a rolling sock-design competition where you can submit your designs and the best ones get printed - awesome, no?


If full-on Japanese cutesy is your style, check out the selection at Artbox - a bargainous £2 a pair (£5 for three in their Covent Garden store). The closest I've found to the wondrous Mighty Soxer over here.

Any other favourites, footwear fans?

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The Flexitarian cook book

This Flexitarian cookbook looks like a great little project. The brainchild of 3 ladies - a designer, a writer and a chef - the book aims to please veggie and meat-eaters alike with simple, accessible recipes. With teaser recipes including Maple Ginger Cookies and Truffled Cauliflower Soup, it sounds like it will be a nice inspiring collection for the home cook.



Being veggie myself for most of my life, I think it's pretty important to encourage people to eat as little meat as possible, but brow-beating and guilt trips are never the way to go - little steps like this are much more welcoming. Whether you're already veggie and living with meat-eaters, or just looking to cut down your meat intake for health or moral reasons, I think it this book would be a great buy.

The project is currently looking for funding to get it printed. 100% of the proceeds will go to healthy-lifestyle charities and the girls are donating their time for free. I just donated $30 - if you love the idea too, head over here and show your support!

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Why? gig poster

I've had this idea for a gig poster knocking around for a while. It's for one of my favourite bands, Why? - who we saw last week. Unfortunately I didn't get round to starting it before the show, or I might have given it to the promoter to use (Josh did this on their last tour and got his poster signed by the band!). But anyway it's done now and I'm pretty happy with it - it's just how I pictured it in my head.



The image idea came from these lyrics from the song Gemini (Birthday Song) (Spotify link)

When we're on different sides of the globe
I thought we'd keep our veins tangled
like a pair of mic cables
And if there ain't enough slack to reach
we'd solder them together
'Cross oceans they'd stretch...

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Daytripping in Bristol

So we made it over to Bristol on Saturday to check out the Across the Way show, amongst all the other little recommendations you guys gave me (thank you!). Unfortunately the weather was overcast and drizzly so we didn't really fancy doing much leisurely strolling or cider-drinking, but we fitted a fair bit in.

We started by hiking up to Stokes Croft to find Here Gallery. It was an interesting area, the self-proclaimed 'cultural quarter' of the city with lots of interesting street art and nice looking cafes alongside a rough-and-ready kind of atmosphere - it reminded me of Mile End in London.



We found the gallery/shop with no trouble and it's a gorgeous little treasure trove of prints, books and cards from tons of artists, both local and ones I was already familiar with having seen their work online. The exhibition space downstairs is small but perfectly formed. The prices were all really reasonable but I resisted buying anything due to a severe lack of wall space.




We lunched in Cafe Kino, a community co-operative just over the road from Here which served tasty vegan falafel and bean burgers, then headed down Jamaica Street back into town. We walked down Park Street, popping into a few nice clothes and interiors shops on the way, then found Start Gallery, hosting the Teasemade exhibition by local artists Peskimo and Chris Dickason. The whole show was lovely and I particularly fell in love with Peskimo's bright, retro-feel work - we wanted to buy the tea tins print below for our kitchen but didn't have enough cash - hopefully we can find it to buy online.



I also loved these characterful mural paintings going up the stairs into the gallery space, anyone know who did them?



I was impressed with Bristol's arty community feel. Obviously Banksy had a big influence on the city's art scene - there was lots of interesting street art at every turn and it has more than its share of small quirky gallery spaces. It's a shame our visit was short but it was a nice taster for the city's art scene.

Lots more photos on Flickr!

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Experiments in gig photography

Since I got my 'decent' camera and a small collection of lenses, I've been enjoying taking photos at all the gigs I go to. The great thing about the Olympus E-P1 as opposed to a full-blown DSLR is that it's small and unobtrusive enough to tote around (and sneak in when photos aren't allowed - sshh) and not get obnoxiously in everyone else's way. Obviously I'm never going to get the same image quality as someone kitted out with a Canon 5D and super-fast telephoto lens, but I'm enjoying learning how to get the best out of my camera and use it a little more creatively.

Most of these are taken with a vintage OM 50mm f1.8 lens - despite being an old piece of kit it's pin-sharp and easy to manually focus, especially with the E-P1's zoom focus assist. I've also recently bought the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 pancake lens which works nicely for wider shots, and has the bonus of auto-focus.





Marina and the Diamonds at Hoxton Bar, 18th November.
I was bang under Marina's nose for this gig so the 50mm lens was actually a little too closely cropped - a wider angle would have been more flexible. But Marina was fun to photograph as she's such a charismatic performer - I like all her facial expressions in the photos.





Why? at Heaven, 16th March.
This was a tricky venue to get a good spot for as it's very long and narrow, but I ended up at a good distance to take mid-angle shots with the 50mm. Yoni Wolf was dashing and dancing about the stage so it was a bit tricky to get him in focus - I ended up using this to my advantage to get blurry action shots that summed up the energy of the show. The light show was lovely and colourful and I got some interesting lens flare effects.





Broken Bells at the ICA, March 3rd
The light show for this gig was crazy - a projection of patterns that went over whole stage, and hence the people on it too. But it made an interesting effect in the photos.

Lots more photos in my Gigs set on Flickr.

Blog redesign

In case you read in a reader, just thought I'd point out that the blog's layout has changed. It now looks like this:


First thing is the sidebar and main content flipped sides; I think it reads better (to the extent that I'd visit my old design and find it looked really wrong!). The main area has expanded so I can fit nice big 640px images into entries. I also cleaned up the dateline and comment/category links because people were sometimes clicking the wrong entry's comment link.

I hope you like the little illustration in the header; it kind of sums up everything I'm into at the moment, and hence what I write about here. It's a bit surprising that there's no pink at all - I went for a bit of a retro look with shields, swags and a diamond background pattern. I'm particularly proud of the little overhanging flags on the sidebar titles - took hours of CSS hackery to get right!

Well, hope you like it and please let me know if anything looks broken..!

Books: Jeffrey Brown's cat and Fire & Knives

Sorry for the lack of posts lately - I've been off work all week sick, but all better now. I've also been furiously working on the new blog redesign which should be ready in a week or so! It's so pretty, I'm really excited to get it live. I've had this layout almost a year and I'm bored of it :)



I bought two excellent books from Magma today, thought I'd share:





Fire & Knives is a beautiful zine-book made by these fine fellas. As you can see, the design is beautiful and it's a lovely tactile thing to hold. It's also well-written with interesting articles on why and how we're inclined to photograph our food (or particular interest to me) and a nostalgic piece on the history of railway cuisine. A great read for food fans.





'Cat Getting out of a Bag' by Jeffey Brown caught my eye as a set of postcards in the window, then I saw the book. Yup, it's yet another cat cartoon book but as soon as we picked it up and started to flick through it, every page we were going 'awww Yoni does that!' 'he does that too!'. It made us realise our cat isn't quite as unique as we might have thought - both reassuring and a shame! But it's good to know someone else puts a sports sock on their hand to play bitey-games and nearly trips over their cat getting underfoot on a daily basis. A must-have for owners of crazy kitties and guaranteed to cheer me up any time.