Posh googly eyes.

I noticed the other day that the top right-hand corner of the eBay homepage has a ticker counting down the days to Christmas (41, btw). Which means Christmas is nearly upon us...kind of. But for me, the Christmas shopping panic starts a little earlier than for most people. The reason being that my Dad's birthday is at the start of December, so it makes sense to buy all the presents and send them all in one swoop. Ie, RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!

Anyway, when I was in New York I bought one of my favourite things ever - an eyeball stamp. I love it! So for this year's presents, I rolled out the lining paper and got stamping. Which was hugely satisfying for the pedantic/neurotic side of my personality. Anyway, without further ado - here are some nice pictures.

Plus, for added neurosis, I cunningly concealed the name labels among the pattern.

Awww.

Ice Cube! (As in the rapper. And actual ice cubes. Does that count as a pun?)

New York is HOT in September. Clammy, shirt-sticking-to-your-back, unattractive damp armpits hot. And I love it! Which is why I decided to flee the creeping London autumn and spend a week sweating it out in NYC with my friend Paul (who is awesome).

Paul is one of my favourite collaborators EVER. And together, we devised some ice-jewellery to combat the Manhattan swelter.

(Moulding clay by Nearby Art Shop. Water by New York Tap. Fridge by Paulie and Andrew.)

Icy knuckle duster.

Iced out. Oh yeah!

I miss New York. I miss summer. Waaaaaah!

Cufflink EMERGENCY!!!!!!

Not a common emergency. And debatably, not an actual emergency in normal life. But when you're in rural Poland for a wedding, and half an hour before the ceremony your other half realises the left their cufflinks at home, and their shirt won't actually work without them,the situation can quickly turn ugly.

Anyway, after unsuccessfully scouring the hotel for a spare pair. I scoured our room for something that might work. Luckily, I was wearing a vintage blazer, and the previous owner had left some black and white ribbon in the pocket, which instantly transformed me into a bridal MacGuyver.

The original ribbon. Without any scissors or sharp objects of any kind in our luggage (thanks, Ryan Air), I used a cigarette lighter to burn the long bit in the middle and make two pieces.

Carefully knot one end....

And then knot the other (with varying degrees of success - it's quite a bit harder than it looks!).

And crisis averted!

This particular drama was actually swiftly followed by the classic pre-wedding 'I-can't-get-my-bowtie-to-work-how-come-it-worked-before!?!?!?-emergency'. But let's not get into that one.

Into the Hourglass

Posts have been a bit thin on the ground here lately. Mainly because I've been super busy with the meadow (which has been incredible) and life/work/moving flat has been getting in the way of making stuff. So to (sort of) make up for it, here are some pics of costumes I helped out on for The Hourglass Social Club. I put up sketches for this a little while back, but they haven't been made yet, so these were a kind of stop-gap. To be fair, a friend did the bulk of the actual costuming, and I chipped in by doing the styling and making some accessories: The Pickled Shopkeeper's beard, a ripped rag petticoat and bustle for the pie seller, and a sort of weird hairpiece/hat thing made from a platinum hair weave. Which sounds wrong, but looked awesome! I'll finish up the other costume bits shortly, probably. And I'll post them soon, kind of.

G is for Guerrilla

Urban gardening is taking over my life a bit at the moment. So hot off the heels of the Mabley Green meadow, I did a bit of guerrilla gardening with my meadow co-conspirator Rowland, and floral-intervention celebrity Richard Reynolds. Who's really nice!

I have to say, gurerilla gardening is sooooooo much easier than permissive, inclusive gardening. From start to finish, it took two hours to seed a big strip of ground and a huge mound of rubble. And it meant we got to do fun stuff like climb 10 foot fences and scramble around on demolition sites. Though doing so gave me a gnarly, guerrilla-sized bruise on my knee.

No pics (apart from this one I took on my way home). But more to come if/when our seeds grow.

FOOD FIGHT PARTY - the big event!

Not much to say really. Apart from: IT WAS AMAZING!

Food fight - the prep.

After lining the front room with serial-killer-esqe plastic sheeting, the fun, making part could begin. It was a bit of a military operation really. Jelly was made on a strict schedule, pasta boiled every eight minutes, and the cake - my god, the cake - it started pretty good, but got better and better as we went on.

Filling balloons with hundreds and thousands...

Then hanging them from the ceiling (I came armed a pin on a stick...yessss)

Food colouring and mash = genius.

Piping the giant cake - which a later leapt out of to start the shenanigans.

Adding sweets and sandwiches. So amazing.

Finished! Not the party poppers (filled with hundreds and thousands) and the bowls of dark stuff at the bottom. That's jam. God bless the Cash n' Carry!

Me in my fighting whites.

The laden table - it actually got pile higher than this AND you can't see the massive buckets of pasta and tomatoes on the floor.

The room (before). Not sure if this gives a particularly good picture of it - it's one of those things that's far better when etched into your memory than seen in photos, but anyway....

Food Fight!!!!!

Yes. That's right. Count those exclamation marks. They're there for a good reason - we're having a party soon for my 30th. And it's the party I've been dreaming of for years - a food fight party!(!!!!)

More details/pics will be up soon. But until then, here's the flyer. Can't wait!

The Hourglass Social Club

My friend Karim's been putting on extravagant parties for a while now. But he's about to go supersonic. His latest venture is the The Hourglass Social Club - 'a time travelling odyssey through London's illustrious past' - with a fair bit of gin drinking/tomfoolery/frenzied dancing thrown in too.

He's putting a big effort into set dressing the venues and wants the nights to be a visual feast, so he asked me to do the costumes for him. Exciting!

The idea is that each event is one in a series of episodes following the adventures of three central characters: The Pickled Shopkeeper (who turned pickling and preserving into a science, making his Newington Green shop famous) and his two protogés (the Lazarus Twins, who were taken in as orphans and are now life and spirit the business). You can read about the set up here. But if you'd rather look at pictures, flex that itchy scrolling finger and take a look at my initial sketches for their outfits.

Rather than creating everything from scratch, I'm just going to concentrate on making slightly weird accessories and twist up the styling a little. Then hire/scrounge the rest. So for the shopkeeper, I'm making a long plaited beard festooned with pickled and preserved objects. Then as the twins have grown up around pickled things, my concept is that as a result, they're subconsciously and irresistably drawn to the preserved. So Max always wears some leather, and Gracie wears fur. Come along - it'll be fun!

Slave to the squeegie

Audrey Roger is doing amazingly well at the moment. She's made a print for a Patternity's Tapestry of Dalston exhibition for Land of Kings, is part of Pick Me Up at Somerset House for Print Club and supermarketsarah picked asked her to make some bags and shirts to go on her concept wall in Selfridges.

Whoa. That was a lot of links.

Anyway, bags and shirts don't print themselves (sadly). So I once again donned my screenprinter's assistant apron and got stuck in at Print Club. The bags look really great, and the shirts do too. To check them out, pop into Selfridges before 28 April.

Mabley Green Meadow

At the same time as pushing for the Fitzrovia meadow from a couple of posts ago, I started pushing to do another one somewhere a bit closer to home. So close in fact, that I've been staring at the area in question from my kitchen window for months thinking 'someone should really do something with that space'.

Essentially, it's a pretty big but generally neglected piece of grass between a row of houses and a motorway overpass. Nobody really uses it (apart from dog walkers who stand at the edges and usually and totally co-incidentally checking their watches/bend down to tie their shoes/looking elsewhere at the EXACT same moment their dog is doing it's nasty business). Then job done, they leave.

So it's not an area that's loved or cared for. But on a recent set of plans for the neighbourhood in general, it was designated as a 'community garden'. Nobody really knew what that meant, least of all the Council. So I leapt into action and proposed it become a wildflower meadow. And after much wrangling and hand-wringing, it's happening! Which is where most of my time and energy has been going in the last couple of months. And while it's been much more work than I thought, it's been great and I've met some lovely people.

I could have posted about the process endlessly here, because there's been a lot to make and do for it. But as it's a community project and there, doens't or shouldn't really belong to me, I've become a media mogul and made a whole new blog for it.

www.mableymeadow.blogspot.com

Take a look and let me know what you think - of it you live in Homerton or Hackney Wick, come get involved in one of our volunteering or fun days!

In the mean time, here's one of the many iterations of funding proposals we put together to get the money together to make it happen.

Fun with googly eyes. Again.

Our organic box has been providing a rich seam of oddly-shaped vegetables lately. Which makes vege-box emptying (one of my most avoided chores into one of my all time favourites).

Fitzrovia Meadow

OK, OK. I know it's been aaaaaages since I've put anything up on here. But I have a good reason: I've been busy. Really busy. It's been great! For some reason, rather than tiring me out, it's been making me pile more onto my plate instead. Here's what absorbed quite a bit of my time a couple of months back. It was an idea to turn the big (now derelict) lot on Mortimer St in Central London into a field of wildflowers. It's really possible to do. Though only if the developer says yes. But after much harassing and sleuthing to find the right people to talk to, they said no. Well, they didn't really - they just stopped replying. Then sold the land to another company, who's going to build a car park. All I can say is it'd better be a totally kick ass car park. Grrrrr.

Anyway, here's the proposal we made to get their attention. It had to be pretty comprehensive (hence the length). And I really wanted it to look good, so I got super into making the little photoshop illustrations at the bottom of the pages. So there are lots of little details in there - though you might not see them at blog-friendly sizes. Muchos gracias to Simon (my Art Director) for doing the design for me. I can be a pretty demanding (read: pedantic) creative director but he was very patient. Bless him.