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!