I finished this piece this morning. I braved the outside world and went and bought a staple gun to fix the applique to the canvas box mount and she was finished. You might have picked up, if you follow me on Instagram, that I went to Vienna a couple of weeks ago. I really loved […]
This is my new dog model, Chomsky, name chosen by the Medieval Historian, so we should be grateful that it’s not Egburt or Wizzo, who really did exist. I took Chomsky out on a frankly less than tremendous photo shoot this week. I thought we might get a nice shot in the cafe in the […]
Every year I make a doll on New Year’s Day. The only rule is that they have to be achievable on one day and they have to say something about the past year or the one to come. It’s interesting to look back over the many years I have been doing this. It really shows […]
This post is about more work for my other role in life, that of humanist celebrant doing weddings and namings. I was thinking about older brides in particular after leafing through another wedding magazine. There really are only fresh-faced, porcelain-skinned young women in them. You would be excused for thinking that no older women ever […]
I am sure that some of you know that I am a humanist celebrant. I do non-religious namings and weddings. I like to give the baby a present when I do a naming, and this particular baby was adorable and had an unusual name. For this reason I decided to make her something with her […]
Now that I have retired from the university, like lots of the retired, I find myself in straitened circumstances. One of the things that I do to support myself is to work as a Humanist celebrant. I create Wedding and Naming ceremonies. Humanists do not believe in supernatural forces, including God, fate, destiny, and so […]
Some of you may know the work of the mighty Ann Wood who makes lovely fabric dolls and other creatures as well as a range of galleons and little boats and so on. She has a variety of free patterns on her website and an Etsy shop which is worth a look. She has a […]
I was in the Wallace Collection a couple of weeks ago having a look at the delightful Manolo Blahnik exhibition. The shoes are dotted throughout the exhibition which means there is a kind of treasure hunt to find them. One of them was placed in front of this famous portrait. Now, The Laughing Cavalier was ubiquitous […]
There was a very good documentary on BBC 4 last night about Dieter Rams who was, for many years, the head of design at Braun. I had an orange Braun hairdryer throughout my adolescence which I really loved, and was slap-bang in the middle of his tenure so he may well have had a […]
Yesterday I treated myself to a trip to the Wallace Collection to see the Henry Moore Helmet Head exhibition. Moore apparently went to the Wallace Collection to study and draw the helmets in the Collection’s armour exhibitions. He worked on these ideas throughout his life. I only like three elements of Moore’s work; his drawings […]
