Home made ice sculptures

We have been quiet as the youngest of us is off making a film at the moment. We are hoping that she will be able to post some more over the next few days. We just wanted to share these lovely ice sculpture makers for your drinks. They are designed by Atsuhiro Hayashi and we think that they are tragicaly beautiful.

Beautiful children's fairy tale posters

Last night we came across the most wonderful fairy tale posters designed by the very talented Christian Jackson. Click here to go to his website. We just love the simplicity of them, and the clever way that he has summed up each story with only a few hints. 

Enjoy our favourite ones. Which one do you like the best?

Rupunzal reminds us of the youngest one of us when she was a little girl. 

How to make a Liberty print oven glove

We are sorry that we have been so bad at posting recently. There has been lots going on and we haven't been able to keep up with everything. So today we wanted to share this with you. We received instructions from Liberty in London, on how to make a Liberty print oven glove!

You can download the pattern by clicking here.
You can down load the instructions by clicking here.
You can watch the video of how to do it by clicking here.


Do post your pictures if you make one, we would love to see them.

Sorry we have been quiet

Oh dear we have been very bad at blogging this last month. The youngest one of us was off working as the picture editor of the New Statesman magazine for three issues and only got back a couple of days ago. She had quite a crazy time with all of the horrible London riots and the magazine had to be re-written several times because of it! 

For the next three days we are looking after this little puppy called Zorro. What a cutie, he is sat under the desk as we type and has been very good considering it is his first time away from home. 

We were lucky enough to have one of these beach huts for the day at a secret location in Dorset. It was a hot day (not like the wet ones that we have been having this year) and the place was deserted. We packed a few things for lunch and sat on the rocks watching the sail boats drift by. It really felt like Famous Five country. 

The view from the beach hut, just perfect. 

Loving those apples!

We were excited to see that after we posted about the love of Discovery Apples, and that we had heard that they were coming out early this year..we passed the local green grocers and look what we found! It seems that they love them as much as we do.

Better than those 'too perfect' ones the super markets like to sell. 

These aren't Discovery Apples, but we just wanted to share the wonderful star that we found inside them! Hope you are enjoying this great bumper crop of English apples like we are! 

Apples are coming early!

We have just heard on the news that English Apples are out early this year. We thought that would be a problem, but the reporter seemed to think that it was a good thing as we would be able to eat English Apples from August to May next year! That sounds great to us. Our favourite is the Discovery Apple which has a very short  lifespan, but that makes it all the more treasured. 


And we heard that there is a 40% increase in English Apples being sold in supermarkets since 2009! Fantastic! 

Amazing bird boxes

These incredible bird houses have been made and photographed by the group calling themselves London Field Works. Click here to see more of them. We haven't seen these in situ yet, but we really want to. This is how London Field works describe what they do:


London Fieldworks was formed in 2000 by artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson as an umbrella organisation for creative research and collaboration at the art, science and technology intersection. Typically, their projects engage with the notion of ecology as a complex inter-working of social, natural, and technological worlds. 


You can see their website by clicking here. 

This photo is taken by Hazel Saunderson, click here to read her article about it. 

The beauty of sand

We have been away working for a couple of weeks and thought that we would have time to blog, but alas we had no time at all! But now that we are back we wanted to share this wonderful research with you. The photo above is of sand photographed 250 times its normal size by Professor Gary Greenberg from the University College of London. You can visit his website by clicking here. 


We never imagined that you would be sitting or walking on all of these amazing things on the beach! How wonderful the world is!

Such tiny little creatures!

Country Life In The City

We came across this new magazine that we thought was a brilliant idea, and something that we wished we had found before we moved out of London. (We still love the Big Smoke but fancied a bit of life by the sea side).


The magazine is called Lost in London and we love the description of the latest issue. You can buy it by just clicking here. 


"For everything you need to know about living simply in the city 
this season, don't miss the spring issue of Lost in London; over one hundred beautifully illustrated pages packed with ideas on how to find the country life in London. 

Discover London's best spots for spring flowers and wildlife, how to create you own roof garden as well as outdoor activities to blow away the cobwebs of winter. You will also find tips on craft in the home, seasonal recipes and where to forage for the city's own grown produce."


We think it sounds like the perfect way to escape the noise of the city without having to leave completely...Wonderful!


You can get to the magazine's own website by clicking here. 

Sorry we have been quiet

The youngest of us is editing a ilm at the moment and so is sitting in a dark room for over 8 hours a day...very un-healthy! So we are hoping that she will be back in the day light tomorrow and able to post what we have been up to...


These are her shoes...which we rather love. 

New buttons

            

You might have noticed that we have some new buttons on our blog. We made them with old photos of us, and our lovely friend and artist, Andy put them on the blog for us...we tried...but failed to do it ourselves! (Do have a look at Andy's art work if you have a chance. You can see it by clicking here.)

The photo at the top is of Judy when she was a little girl...we are hoping to open a shop on here soon and so we thought this was a great image for it.

The about us button features Grace as a girl guide...see if you can spot her on the right hand side...(Andy did immediately which we thought was very impressive!)

And finally, the contact us button was the house that we all used to live in...and the old Dormobile van that wouldn't fit in the garage! But we had great camping trips in it. 

We love this video

We wanted to share this video of the singer Sara Lou with you. One of us is a professional photographer so was amazed to find out that this whole video has been made with 4500 photographs! How awe inspiring...and the song is rather lovely too and the album cover.

A book we love

We have been waiting for this book to come out for a long time. We love the blog of Pia Jane Bijkerk. You can have a look at it here. 


She is a wonderful stylist, photographer and writer. Some days we dream that we had her life as it sounds rather wonderful...she used to live on a house boat in Holland, but is now back in her native Sydney...just lovely!


You can buy the book at a bargain price of £11.60 if you click here. 

Home safely

Just wanted to let you know that she is home safely and made it to the top of the mountain. A poor 22 year old died on the mountain the day that she was supposed to climb it. She thankfully had listened to the mountain weather forecast, not just the ground forecast and knew that the temperature was going to be -14 that day with 75mph winds....not a day to climb. She will be back to blog this week. 

Climbing a mountain

The youngest of us had always been a climber, first of kitchen stools, picnic tables, then trees, onto trapezes(!) and now mountains...she is an Aries and seems to be living up to her mountain sheep tendencies. This weekend she heads off to climb Ben  Nevis, which is the highest mountain in the UK. So this blog might be quiet for a little while until she comes back to up date it. She has blisters already from the training! Hope she makes it to the top.

We love this album

We love this album. It is made by a guy called Aaron Beckum who went to Vancouver Film School and now works as an assistant to our favourite artist Miranda July (we will write about her in another post). 


We have tried to load a sample of this for you to hear, but we haven't managed it...so if you click here you can hear the album and then download it. 

Strange things

What a lovely weekend we have had. We hope that you did too. The sun was shining the beach wasn't too busy and one of the youngest of us had a friend from Bristol come and stay with her two boys. Children really do show the passing of time. The oldest was now much taller than his mother aged 12 and was already displaying the teenage sulks! So lots of entertaining distraction was the order if the day. But we got distracted ourselves when we saw these pears sat on the pavement early in the morning. We wondered how on earth they had got there and how surreal they looked on an empty bright morning! We have had lots of fun thinking up their story...

This was the other thing that we were wondering about at the sea side...now we know what a cappuccino, hot chocolate, milkshakes and snacks are...but a cup of Slush anyone? Sounds horrible! 

Gift wrapping

We sent a package off to America today for our Brother (son, and grandson). But we wish that we had seen these lovely paper flowers made by Jurianne Matter. You can buy them from the Selvedge shop by clicking here. 

We just love the packaging and the fun things that you can do with the flowers....we want to buy some to make a head-piece with! 

They look pretty just as flowers in a vase as well...and you never have to worry about them wilting!

Or gorgeous party decorations! We want some now!

Country Life

Although we missing living in the city there are some things that we like about the countryside and heading out of the door with our camera is one of those things. We found this car hidden in a farm yard. We just love it but wish that it was ours to drive around in!

There is a local country show that takes place every year here. For one of the years we were asked to take photos of the show...some of them were very funny we thought! Not sure that the client agreed...but we liked them! 

This looked as if the goat was stopping to have a chat! 

A new craft magazine

We received a little card telling us about this new magazine which goes on sale today! We just wanted to blog about it as it made us very excited, and the by-line.."We believe that fabric makes you Happy" made us smile. You can read a sample of the magazine by clicking here.

Here are some more images for you to enjoy...and click here to go to Mollie Makes website. 

Have a lovely day...the sun is shining here!

The Royal Wedding

Thinking that we were going to play Baahumbug about the Royal Wedding we woke up that morning still thinking about Tim and thought that we should go out and have some fun instead. Our new mantra is "What would Tim do?" ..this has really helped us to get up in the morning and see the fun in the world. 
So we put on tights with little hearts on, a Rob Ryan skirt and pink heart shoes for the occasion. 

 We made rabbit shaped jelly (vegetarian versions) as Jelly is such a British favourite...well it was in the 1970-80's! 

It went down so well that one little girl who tried a couple of mouthfuls then ate the whole rabbit...eventually discarding the spoon and using her hands! Now that is how we think you should eat jelly!

Some people came dressed as Brides and a little cinema appeared in one of the lovely shops called Old Albion. 

The crowds were out in force in London and we all suddenly felt very proud to be British...how very un-British of us!

We noticed a picture of the Queen above the TV and she didn't seem very amused at all!

We tucked into good old British food of egg and chips outside in the sunshine.

Then the magic Canadian tea-lady turned up in celebration of all the things that she liked about the British which included, cream teas, tea-ladies, eccentricity, china tea cups and saucers, meringues and general silliness! 

She had been baking until 2am! Now that is what we call dedication  to the party! We loved that she had done this and caused hours of giggling and tea-party fun.

What a lovely cream tea we had.

But the star of the day had to be Queen Sharon from Old Albion who had us in stitches the whole time. We salute you!