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.

Megan hearts Francis. Officially.

Two dear, dear friends, Megan and Francis are about to get married (woohoo). But that raises the ever-tricky wedding present issue. Which is made even trickier when the bride and groom in question are social innovators and make-stuff-happen-ers, rather than simple collectors of stuff. So I wanted to make something (of course), but make something meaningful to all of us.

I've known Megan for ages, and one road trip long ago, we found ourselves staying on an amazing beach with a couple of Lomos and a strangely abundant stash of sparklers. So we spent an evening fooling around with those. One of the pics of Megan was particularly wedding-friendly. So I framed that. But I didn't have one for Francis, so I framed a sparkler for him, and the night before their wedding, got him to do his own one. Here's the 'before' pics of my gift to them. The 'afters' will be coming soon...

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.