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.

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....

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!

Surprise!

My friend Sven turned 40 last weekend (woohoo), which meant he was summoned back home in Hamburg to be showered with Deutchlove (but not in a rude way). That meant I got to housesit at his flat in Old Street. After shivering away in our Hackney Wick garret for the last few months, I was so grateful for central heating I almost wept. So made a birthday card/thanks installation thing to surprise him when he got back.

It was kind of indulgent for me too. I'd wanted to do something with those foil balloons ever since that Amanda Blank video for THAT song. Anyway, it turns out the balloons are actually pretty expensive. So I scaled back my ambition to fill Sven's whole house with them and opted for the 4-0 option. Classier, right. The pics turned out kind of crappy (damn phone!), but it did actually look pretty awesome in the space. Honest. And Sven almost cried*, allegedly. Win!


*He'd been travelling for about 9 hours when he saw it, so you'll need to include a dash of deranged emotional fatigue in there. But still.

Bundles of joy

By some miracle, I managed to avoid a hangover on New Year's day. Which left me with a day without any plans and a napping/groaning boyfriend confined to the couch. So I got busy making meringues. Obviously. As it turns out, three egg whites can go a long, long way. And after an hour or so I'd made piles of them. Not just figure of speech piles either. Actual piles.

I wanted to take them to a friend's place for dinner that night, but brittle cakes made mostly out of air are notoriously difficult to move around. So I packaged them up with grease paper and string. I'll admit, I got a bit theatrical with it. Still, my sugary brood survived the 236 bus. Made a well deserved entrance. And immediately were crumbled into Eton Mess.

I miss Christmas holidays. Sniff.

Christmas Project

I've got a pretty reliable Christmas tradition: getting horrendously ill. Last year it was Norovirus (mmmm). This year it was a killer cold. Which scuppered my plan to finish ALL the half-started jobs been lurking around so long I was starting to feel guilty. So instead, I narrowed it down to one: rescuing a broken legged, beige infested armchair its general shabbiness.

Things I've learned about upholstering:
- Don't hammer the nails in all the way until you're sure the cover actually fits.
- 'If I just cut it a bit here, it'll be fine'. This is untrue.
- It's OK to hire a professional.

Still, it looks a million times better than before. If you don't look too close.

Office outfit

Our office Christmas party was totally amazing this year. Mostly (I think) because it was organised by professionals. But equally because there were free cocktails. All night long. The theme was 'Paradise and the Underworld', aka 'Heaven and Hell' aka 'Sluts and Vicars'. But, despite that, the basque count was surprisingly low (yay). And the fun quotient really high. I get a bit reticent about costumes for work parties so me and my friend Hanisha pulled out some DIY 'voodoo' outfits the afternoon before. The facepaint and jewellery were from home. But everything else was made from stuff scrounged around the office. Is that a good thing? Or just lazy? I'm still not entirely sure.

PS: I look weird in this photo mostly because (on my dentist's strict instructions) I'd got braces the week before. So this is me trying to smile. But also trying not to show any teeth. Unsuccessfully. Hanisha looks hot though.

Hackn'een!

Halloween is amazing (and a little scary). Hackney is amazing (and a little scary). Put them together and you get our Hackn'een party (which was straight up amazing). The house was filled with a wild mix of church-going African ladies, junkies, pound stores, gentrifiers - even a 38 bus! I celebrated my old Dalston days by flexing my costume muscle and going as a chalk outline. Which meant I spent a fair bit of the night lying face down on the floor. But it was worth it.

***Yes, to everyone who was actually at that party, we both know it was actually last year. But don't tell anyone.***

Bearcraft Part V

I know, I know, I should have posted this ages ago. But here's the fruits of our Bearcraft labours. Which, considering we had no money, little time and zero expertise, has turned out pretty well. Hooray for collaborations!

Pimp my paddle

Berlin is so great. Summer is so great. Table tennis is so great. But my table tennis game on the outdoor tables in Berlin...not so great. So I compensated by doing some quick customisation on our bats. One side with a manly, grrrrr-inducing tasch. The other side with a set of luscious lips. Then let the in-between-hits fun commence.

Man Knitting

I don't know what it's like in other places, but in London, you can't really buy anything when you actually need it. So by the time summer arrives, you can't buy swimming trunks. And in winter, all the warm coats have sold out. So I should have known better when I tried to buy a hammock in August. And when I asked in a shop, the assistant did that half-laugh/half-snort-of-disgust thing and proceeded to wearily tell the airspace just above my head that I'd NEVER find a hammock now - but perhaps I could try an outlet store on the edge of town?

To cut a long and slightly bitter story short, I wanted one because my friend Manu was having his 30th in his family's holiday home outside of Madrid. The place is completely idyllic - apart from the fact that it didn't have hammocks. And the small village nearby came up with nothing. So I took matters into my own hands and wiled away a couple of the afternoons knotting one myself. I love hammocks anyway, but this was my favourite one ever. Everything was I used was super-local. The string came from the village shop. The wood for the supports was from the forest nearby. And I used some old washers I found behind the log pile for the ring things. (The instructions I used are here - I spent ages staring at them in disbelief, but if you persevere they do actually make sense)


Sadly, there's no really quick way to do this. Other than going into a shop in winter and buying one.

Then we had to get a bit MacGyver to get a few things ready for the party. First we fixed a leaky inflatable pool using only things we found at the supermarket. Then I got rivet happy and made some sun shades. Throw it all together in a forest your grandfather planted and instant fiesta.

Audrey Roger at Way East

I live in Hackney Wick in London. Which, if I'm honest, is a bit of a dump. But the rent is super-cheap. And as a result, it has more artists per square meter than anywhere else in Europe. Which completely makes up for it. Anyway, I'm in a slightly rambling mood today so I'll cut to the chase and say that once a year, Hackney Wick is sort of transformed into a weekend-long art opening/street party for Hackney Wicked. And this year, I curated a show for it at Way East, which is a space my boyf ran regularly from our house last year, and revived for the festival. The show was a collection of large-scale screen prints and origami by the awesome Audrey Roger - you can see the details and the full art-wank I wrote on the Way East website. Anyway, it was a great weekend, the opening was rammed and I got to meet some incredible people. My pictures don't really do the work justice - it really is amazing. But if you like what you see, there are still some hand-printed geometrics available. They're 100cm x 100cm, £200 each, and are both editions of 8 with two artist proofs. The origami is a one-off, and is £250.

Art in the Attic

Last weekend, the lovely folks at ArtQuest asked me to create a stall for their annual artist jumble sale. So I set up shop offering a free valuation and restoration service to hunt out the hidden art treasures lost among the jumble. Turns out, the room was full of priceless objet d'art - all they needed was a bit of restoration. During the day, I uncovered a pencil that was actually a Jim Lambie, a few unlikely Damian Hursts and a Chapman Bros work. A humble print from a charity shop turned out to be an unsigned Chris Ofili (the dung was missing - but I restored that with some fake poo I from Preposterous Presents). I also found a rare Jeff Koons, a Yayoi Kusama, a Bruce Nauman audio recording, a raft of Christos and a long lost Banksy. After I'd restored these incredible pieces, the proud owners got a certificate of authenticity with a valuation for insurance purposes. I got to meet some lovely folks, have some fun and illicit the odd knowing guffaw. And wear a pair of cardboard comedy glasses. All of which are undoubtably good things.

Luscious locks

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again, but I'm a bit obsessed with Paks. Maybe it's the leave-in placenta conditioner (gross). Or the whole aisle of real human hair (also kinda gross). Or the fact that I have no idea how to actually use any of it. But I find it endlessly fascinating. Anyway, on my last trip, I nabbed a massive length of blond polyester for £2. A quick spruce later and we were both ready for a night out. I've had a couple of requests for hairy rope chains now too, so I imagine they'll be cropping up around these parts sometime soon...

(As a side note, these pics were taken in the small hours, which should simultaneously explain both the slightly crazed expression, and the bad focus (which I incidentally quite like)).

(As another side note, I'm not actually a caner - ignore the above).

Making time and spending time.

I don't know what was in the air in 1979, but this is the year that nearly everyone I know is turning 30. That means good parties, yes. But it also means the birthday presents have to be unusually good too (translation: unusually expensive). But in the midst of this gift-giving orgy, a dear friend in New Zealand who I've known for nearly 20 years had his big 3-0. And suddenly, buying him 'stuff' seemed a bit glib and meaningless. So instead, I'm giving him my time. Every week of his 30th year, I'm going to write him a letter. Because each letter will be one of a series of 52, I've block-printed the letterheads, then each one can be individually numbered as we count through the year. It's only early days, but so far it's been a really relaxing ritual to get into. A proper Sunday afternoon thing. The process could, however, turn me into a real grandpa who gets impatient when people don't write 'thank-you' slips at Christmas. You have been warned.


And this was 1 of 52. The birthday card. But my carefully crafted lino cut was a bit of a disaster (I didn't mirror it before I cut it out), so I had to improvise. Which, sadly, turned out a bit emo. But it's the thought that counts. Right?