Buttons and Tools

A while ago I was given some (read, a hell of a lot of) hand me down sewing room things and this pile of button cards have been sitting on my desk for ages because I want to keep them but don't quite know what to do with them.
Aren't all those tools awesome? I'm not even sure what they're all for. The one with the wooden handle was from my nan in a different set of hand me down things.

Closed and Open

Saturday

On Saturday we decided to work all day then have a bbq and watch Eurovision.
I love the little feet on our bbq bucket, it's such a cute little bbq. It turned out to be a good day all round except for us doing so badly at Eurovision, but like I said on my Twitter, I kind of hope we don't win it because I just don't think we'd host a Eurovision-y enough show.
That beer Will has is takeaway from the pub that just opened near us. Takeaway beer! Why have I never lived near a pub that does this before, it's genius! (It's not takeaway in the glass, that'd be silly.)
Also if we ever want to win Eurovision we really should just use Iron Maiden. The whole world loves Maiden, we'd get ALL the votes.

A Few Pics and How To Make Tasty Plums

Homemade cake.
Gold socks.
Snail shell.
Army dude.

That cake has poached plums in the middle. They taste like Christmas. So tasty that I couldn't not eat half my slice before taking a photo. I got the recipe from Sophie Dahl but did it with what I had (which I believe to be slightly different to the recipe) which was: a punnet of plums, stoned and quartered in a pan, cover with water, 5 dessert spoons of soft dark brown sugar, a stick of cinnamon, boil it and then simmer till it's gooey. Awesome.

I Made a New Friend

Well kind of, this new friend wasn't interested in me at all but really wanted to get in our house. Which, as you can see, they succeeded in doing. They took advantage of the fact that I was paying more attention to taking photos than I was to keeping them out of the house. Sneaky so and so. I managed to keep them out a few times before the cat had a short lived victory.
If I wasn't allergic to fur (and the idea of a scared cat fucking up our things) I would have shut the door and stolen it.

City Hall Gets Yarn Bombed

Norwich city hall got yarn bombed, it looked awesome. I instantly set down my iced strawberry lemonade (which was also awesome) on the steps and ran around clicking my camera. I love it when there is art places it shouldn't be, especially when there's no damage done, surely no one can complain.
Then we headed into the library where you can see my beloved dino shoes chilling out near the comics (their first outside adventure outside of our garden) and also Will brilliantly finding issue 2 and 3 of Transmetropolitan. We've been keeping an eye out for issue 2 for ages and it was finally there. We were excited.

Dino Shoes

Will hand painted me some shoes for our anniversary, I'm oh so pleased with them. They're the best shoes ever. The shoes were originally plain white, all the blue is painted on by Will as well as the dinosaurs. I hope you're jealous because if you're not there's probably something wrong with you ;)

I'm feeling the need recently to have a little mention about Will and I'm hoping you'll stick with it.
He's mental.
He's an illustrator, mostly of the painting kind but he can essentially turn his hand to any medium with an annoying amount of ease. He seems to have a strange idea that he's not really producing things yet that are worth showing off. I keep trying to point out that he's great and that other people think so too and that if he just started using his flickr etc (there is so much work that isn't on his flickr and at the moment it doesn't really do him justice) he'd probably quite easily get some people interested and be able to start making a career out of art in some way or another but it's obviously not working from me, maybe he thinks I'm just being nice to spare his feelings or something but I'm not, he's awesome.
Go check him out (or just look at the shoes) here is his flickr, his twitter and his etsy, he has been toying with the idea of un-deleting his facebook and getting a blog but he seems to put it off because he doesn't want to be showing his work to people, which would be fine if the reason wasn't because he thought his stuff isn't good enough yet. I implore you to go to his etsy, flickr, twitter, comment here or whatever and let him know that he's good and you'd like him to upload more work more often. Even if some of the stuff he does isn't to your taste I don't think you can deny that he's really good. Just look back at the shoes. Remember how you want some too. (Can you tell how much I love the shoes?!) He's definitely good enough and should definitely be showing himself off more.
So please, go pester him into showing off more of his drawings, it's not really fair that I'm pretty much the only person that gets to see them on a regular basis. There's so much more than what is on his flickr and it's all really really good most of it isn't even scanned into the computer so I can't give a really good thorough example of his work. Even his super quick scratchy doodles are brilliant and would make awesome zines.
I feel like I'm starting to ramble a little so I'll stop now but I really do hope you go check out his work and if you like it, let him know :)

The lack of work on his flickr is bugging me so I just ran upstairs and took some quick photos of the drawings on/near his desk and also from an old sketchbook.

Thanks for staying till the end :)

Sketchbook

Ra-coooon!!

Some recent things.

This Is Rock n Roll!

For our 6th anniversary yesterday we went to The Waterfront (for Will, the first time in years and for me the first time ever, it's been stupidly long since we went out and saw a band) to see The Quireboys. We've seen them a couple of times in London and they were as awesome as ever.
My right ear is paying the price today for standing so close to the speakers but to be honest I really don't care, it was worth it.
I can't pretend I'm not disappointed that they didn't play Sex Party and also that people have gotten so complacent about bands doing an encore, it seems people don't cheer anymore and if you do, you get funny looks from the non cheer-ers but never the less I had a brilliant night.

Just want to say, I'm not sharing the video because I think it's a good example of video-ing, or because I'm showing off or any reason other than it's just a little, poor quality video memory to be stored on the blog. Just like the blurry poor quality photos I just printed out to stick in my sketchbook. I don't want to watch the band through a camera rather than actually seeing it but I do like to have a reminder of the night and a quick blurry pixelated reminder of the night is good enough for me :)