Utter distain!

My parents have recently moved from a three bedroom family home to a two bedroom flat, as part of the downsize many childhood photos are being unearthed.  There are many, many photos of me wearing outfits that I clearly have UTTER DISTAIN for, the above being a fine example, my first communion outfit check those socks out!  Yummy.  As a kid I seemed to perfect this look of indifference/annoyance/displeasure as there are other photos where clearly the haircut, food, person sat next to me, weather or coat (infamous green coat story in my family, don't ask) don't seem to be to my satisfaction.  It's a stitch up!  I'm really not that miserable!

Good things come in small packages

This weekend was our allotments' 'Big Lunch' weekend, the weather wasn't amazing but the people were.  The place was heaving and I met lots of my allotment neighbours who were all really friendly and had lots of good advise for beginners.  Whilst queuing for lunch and trying (and failing) to answer a quiz sheet I had just been handed on plant related trivia a couple in front of me gave me a few pointers so many pointers in fact that I ended up winning a bag of zoo poo!  Now, I don't know about you but I don't think anything says winner as much as a bag of elephant and rhino poo.  Kevin (resident allotment God) has from day one been great, he's helped us get our bind weed under control, advised on pest management and been a friendly face who always says hello and stops for a chat.  My measure of how great Kevin is came when I showed him our first radish harvest:

Kevin suppressed a snigger and gave us some hints and tips for keeping black fly away from future crops.  In the face of such a comedy radish I thought this was very restrained!

We bought lots of fantastic plants at the big lunch and some really tasty cake (I did my bit and donated one banana bread which sold out in ten minutes and an elderflower tea bread made with Sam's homemade elderflower cordial), also picked up two bunches of some gorgeous smelling flowers it's exactly this style of flower arrangement we're going for with our flowers at the wedding:

As we edge towards the home stretch before the wedding the various odds and ends are coming together.  Sam's mum and step-dad visited at the weekend and brought fantastic craft treats for us to include in the big day:

Guest book made in my favourite turquoise, the lines look like layers of earth which are just beautiful and conjure images for me of all those family holidays we went on as kids, they always seemed to end up having a geography type theme/visit/interest (my parents were both geography teachers, yep envy me I've been on day trips and holidays to slate mines, nuclear power plants, up mountains and treks across moors to find the source of this river or that river).

The second and last batch of knitted flowers for the napkin rings!  I think Mary may never want to see a knitted flower ever again (I think the final flower total was close to 200), aren't they great? 

Just over 7 weeks and counting.......



Trying to be a creative and not a 'normaloid'

I have a friend at work who gifted me the phrase 'normaloid' which I just love because with both our wedding and our lives Sam and I are trying very hard to be creatives and not fall too much into the category of normaloid.  I love my work, and the people I work with but it is so important to me that I have something to come home to that I enjoy, makes my brain tick and hopefully one day will make me my living.  So I thought I would take a mini break from talking about the wedding or allotment and showcase a few examples of what I like creating and what keeps my brain from turning to fudge:

This was a painting I did during my degree, I really don't like it much any more, it's too cluttered and lacks theme, but you've got to start somewhere and this was my starting point.  I've had a long running fascination with domesticity, especially in the 1940's and 50's where it seemed to me women had fewer avenues of expression beyond the home, but conversely there seemed a wealth of innovative creativity that sprung up in advertising, graphic design, fabric, clothing etc to entice and lure women to buy products for the home and their family's.  Sam introduced me to the stunning world of diagrammatic design which played a massive role in my paintings throughout my degree.

I don't actually own this painting, I painted it and have it in my home but it belongs to our lovely friends Ian and Lisa who now live up t'north, I'm waiting to see them so I can return it to them.  For the time being though I'm taking good care of it, it hangs in our bedroom as the safest place to store these paintings seemed to be the walls.  Its a very narcissistic home!  Again, I've been poaching images from advertising archives and the spaceman was actually referenced from a set of children's bedlinen.

More 1950's imagery but this time a reference from a recipe book that seemed to come free with the purchase of a certain brand of oven (I've lost the recipe book now which is a massive shame).

Sam says this is one of his favourite's.  It has a border of yellow to tie in with the brownies in the main image, like the spaceman painting I was beginning to look at border less imagination, expectation, and aspiring which tends to be eroded as you get older, but is evident by the bucket load in kids.  The imaginations of my two nieces still amazes me they can create whole worlds from nothing, I hope they hang onto that for a long, long time.

I think this was my prophecy painting (terrible photo, sorry!  A flash with glossy paint = fail) when I was doing my MA I was looking at why people start collections and have collecting as their hobby (not just one or two items, I was interviewing people with enormous collections of seemingly random stuff like eggcups, Russian calculators and banana labels) and the idea of man and allotment sprung out at me when I came across this image of a man smoking a cigarette.  I found it in a 1950's (again!) French hunting magazine (I had bought three very full boxes of these hunting magazines at a French car boot sale, the woman thought I was insane and likely charged me a couple extra Euros but lug them home I did and they've proved very useful so no regrets here).  Anyway I liked the idea of people who'd owned allotments for years, grown prize roses and vegetables and gained a real sense of escapism from their plots.  Now I have one of my own I am beginning to understand why people have them for so many years (our neighbour has had his plot for 52 years).

Well the above are just a small selection of work that's cluttering up the house, there are more at the studio, and I really want to make a commitment to carry on painting and make it my income source.  I want to be a creative not a normaloid, life is too short.

Talking of things being short, I am short no more!  Despite swearing blind that I would be wearing flats to the wedding I've gone and purchased a pair of heels :-S

I jest not, I am having to practice wearing them around the house.  I am not a natural heel wearer, in fact I look like a bloke trying to walk in his Mrs' heels as a joke, when walking downstairs I adopt a bandy legged frog pose, dignity is not a look being conveyed when I do this but I do give off a sense of stability which I think is half the battle won.  Just over 8 weeks of practising to go!!

Two weeks hard labour

It has been two weeks since we were handed the keys to our new allotment and we have been doing ALOT of digging, weeding, planting, watering, lifting, shifting, causing trouble and getting excited.  I'll start with the getting excited:

The sunflowers that we were going to plant at West Town Farm are now in the allotment (59 in total) and when we arrived yesterday we saw the very beginnings of our sunflowers (not very clear from this photo, but trust me they're on their way!).  Not just sunflowers are finding their feet or more appropriately roots at the allotment:

We have beans (in the foreground), next cabbage, then sunflowers, followed by a row of courgettes and squashes (the first row with black mesh), then a row of pumpkins, next tomatoes and more courgettes, two rows of strawberries, and today I added a row of radishes and a row of beetroot nom, nom, nom!

There is something very important missing from the photo above......the shed!  We've moved it from the front to the back of the plot where it is shadier and is going to be a challenge to grow things.  The plan is to sit out between shed and apple tree, drink cider and watch the world go by.  The other day we discovered a crate of beer had been left in the shed by the people we are sharing the plot with :)  After moving the shed we discovered a mass snail graveyard, as far as the snails of the allotment were concerned under our shed simply was THE place to die, there were 1000 plus empty shells that when we shoved them into rubble sacks crackled like bbq charcoal when really hot.  Odd.

The strawberries are making a good start, we've had one ripe fruit so far which was tasty, tasty nice (the other was eaten by a creature boo).

To continue with our new found Good Life theme Sam and I were out harvesting elder flowers ready to brew elderflower champagne.  Removing the flowers from their stalks is an arduous task and the pollen is a nightmare but we did manage to collect enough to brew 5 gallons of champagne:

Large mixing bowl of elder flowers ready to brew.

Barbara or Anna?

Working the Barbara look with me new specs, geek chic is ok though right?

Back to my roots?

It shouldn't come as a massive surprise to discover that I be a proper Devon maid tho innim.  Mum has been researching our family tree and as it turns out I am from Chagford farmer stock, which is perhaps why I feel a massive draw to grow veg.  I can't take all of the credit of course, last year my soon to be sister-in-law took us to her allotment and I ate peas fresh from the pod, and oh. my. god were they tasty nice.  So here it is: our new allotment...

Man inspects his first shed, happy, happy days!

Spot the frog:

We've been told that the plot will be hard work, it has bind weed, it's overgrown and man alive we have been doing some crazy digging today.  I hurt, I mean I REALLY hurt, but what has made it all better is that the previous tenant had left some potato plants behind so on day two of owning an allotment we dug up our first harvest, as I write this we have roast potatoes and homemade pie cooking, nom.

On a different note, mission confetti is ongoing, last week at the car boot sale mum bought me some tulips with ragged edges, a variety of tulip I had never seen before so when it came to removing the petals to begin drying them out I was struck by how feather-like they are:

Should make for some interesting confetti.



Oh My Days!

Oh my days!  Or to over punctuate: Oh.  My.  Days!  Sunday was the glory day of car boot sales, I am seriously considering buying an old lady style shopper on wheels, but to go jazzy and modern, or old skool and green tartan?  Either way it needs to happen, I had to make two trips back to the car to offload the good stuff.  Below is a photographic gallery of said 'good stuff':

A vintage Ritz tin to keep with the old lady theme I seem to be heading for.

Old lady buttons in old lady jars, next to an old lady glass jug on an old lady blanket I'm working on, well if you're going to have a theme you might as well do it properly.

Old lady.  No, no these are just beautiful, perhaps a touch old lady-ish but all good, and building on last week's theme of bird related glassware.

Perhaps my best find of the week:

The photograph doesn't do it justice, it was one of my first finds (of the second car boot sale of the day) so I had to sling it under my arm whilst browsing, it drew a lot of comments.  I have to say by the time the tenth person had asked me if I would sell them an ice cream my smile became a little more fixed.  Ha ha ha. No.

Re-used, re-cycled, re-markably ace (sorry, bad pun).

Sam re-potting sunflower seeds, we have quite a flower factory going on at the moment, everything is crossed we can keep them alive long enough to use them on the day!

I will be making activity bags for the children coming to the wedding, with colouring in bits, sweets and now barnyard animals!!

Oh.  My.  Days!  It's Ruth-a-tron who makes me smile when the wedding stuff gets a bit too much.





A Cautionary Tale

These fabulous and terrifying beauties are the result of covering for too many people at work, running a charity in my spare time, too many late nights, and definitely not enough rest.  Love them as much as I do they are definitely not a wedding must.  I jokingly wrote on facebook that when I opened the box it was like opening a box of children's nightmares, but actually I really don't think we can get these out until the children have gone to bed.  The plus side is they have brought me so many laughs already, they are child size and look ridiculous on an adults face I suspect those who choose to camp for the evening will make good use of them - Wicker Man anyone?

I have treated my little seedlings to a new home:

It may not be the most beautiful thing in the world but like a damn fool every evening when I get home before even taking my coat off it is compulsory to run out to the garden to check on progress.  I am pleased to announce progress is good.  Sunflowers are on the up, I have more coriander than I know what to do with, beetroots are peeping through, the flowers that Lynne sent me are doing well but the packet was in French so I have no idea what they are, and finally my sweet peas are flopping about all over the place.  They've made it onto the list (the good list, there is another but you don't want to make it onto that one).

Spring is pretty ace for many reasons, but perhaps one of the best reasons is that the car boot sale at Matford grows and people have a clear out and we swoop in like hawks of kitsch tat and magpies of all things shiny.  Here is a small selection of what we have been gathering for the big day:

Slightly wonky display.

Best glasses ever, especially the bird labelled 'Troglodyte', Sam's favorite - natch.

Pineapple glass vases, still not sure about these, but they were going cheap, surely a good enough reason? 

To round things off a non-wedding, non-car boot sale item:

Throne of happiness.

Sometimes I don't want to think about, talk about, organise or think about the wedding, so this weekend I completed a project that was on the back burner for almost two years.  Happy days.