This evening I went to see Jung Chang give the Baggs Memorial Lecture at the University of Birmingham on the topic of happiness. I love both of Chang’s books Wild Swans and Mao so was very keen to hear her speak in person. She did give a previous lecture at the […]
Jung Chang on Happiness Read More »
Phil spent this Sunday helping his mom buy and set-up a new TV, which gave me time to get a few jobs done at home. Now that the weather has improved (hopefully) I thought it was time to start planting some vegetables. I made a start today by planting a
Printing and potatoes Read More »
Manchester is a bit of a haven for craft shopping. The absolute best shop (in my humble opinion) is Fred Aldous, a three story craft shop. It’s a local business and has been in business (in one form or another) since 1886. We made two trips there in two days.
Happy craft shopping in Manchester Read More »
Me and Phil spent the weekend in Manchester, visiting galleries, shopping & generally wandering around. One of the reasons we made the trip was to see the Chen Man exhibition at Chinese Arts Centre. Chen Man is a leading fashion photographer within China, but this is her first solo exhibition
Chen Man exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester Read More »
Me and Phil are more than a little obsessed with the cartoon Regular Show. We’ve been working our way through the three series currently being aired on Cartoon Network, and will sadly soon have seen all episodes until series four is aired. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about two
Give us a raise, Loser! Read More »
I managed to find the time to carve some images into lino this week. I’m waiting to buy some better inks, but did some tests prints just to check if they needed further work. Here is one of those test prints: This is a picture of the back of a woman,
Linocut Test Print -Liu Ye imitation Read More »
Last Tuesday me and Phil went to the MAC after work for a valentine’s day screening of Brief Encounter. Prior to the film we visited the Made in the Middle craft exhibition which is currently located at the MAC prior to going on tour. Going to a craft exhibition after
Made in the Middle Read More »
I carved a couple of small images in lino on Thursday evening. I carved them sat on the sofa in the living room while watching TV which probably isn’t ideal! I was a bit more careful when I printed them at least. The first image is of a blue jay,
On Monday we went to see the film Tatsumi based on Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir A Drifting Life and five of his short stories. This is the fabulous poster for the film (here in postcard format): The animation style of the film is beautiful and very close to Tatsumi’s original manga. If you’re not
Tatsumi and Great Silent Films Read More »
I’ve finally completed the embroidered Lum that I’ve been working on. Yippee! I used backstitch for the black outline. For the coloured areas I used a mixture of stitch types (and admittedly wasn’t too precise) including long and short stitch and fishbone stitch. I used a blackwork filling pattern called Holbein
Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Embroidered Tiger-Striped Bikini Read More »