i love looking at artist’s sketchbooks.
i have many visual diaries and scrapbooks and sketchbooks myself; full of pages torn from magazines, photos, scraps of paper, scrawled notes and watercolour blobs. some of them are topic specific – things to make, pretty paper ephemera or photos that i love – but mostly they are simply a place to collect and catalogue inspirations and ideas.
much like this blog, i guess…
today i had a nice day doing nice things with nice people in nice weather.
if every day could be like this i would be a very happy girl indeed!
all images juergen teller, found on history of our world
today: a list of pictures.
i still remember the first time i saw snow. real snow. snow that settled on tree branches and made everything clean and white.
i was living in prague, and it was the week before christmas. one of my dearest friends had just arrived to stay, and we were walking around a christmas market in the old town.
i think we were both nervous with excitement (and maybe a little tipsy from hot honey wine). nervous because we hadn’t seen each other for several months, and nervous because we were anticipating the arrival of two other friends later in the week. two friends who we also hadn’t seen for a while, who were living in barcelona and glasgow. the four of us had met and worked together in tokyo, but had all gone our separate ways over the (northern hemisphere) summer.
now it was winter, and a lot of things had changed since that summer.
but i still remember the snow. i remember being in vaclavske namesti – wenceslas square – and i remember looking at the snow in the trees. i remember wondering why it wasn’t falling off the leaves; wasn’t it too heavy? and i remember taking photos of the snow falling, and each flake reflected the lights and camera flash like they do in these photos. in my year in prague, i don’t think i ever got tired of the snow, even after walking through it to work everyday for months and months and months.
and the snow that christmas was wonderful.
a month after christmas, my dear friend moved to barcelona to live with his (now) wife.
and though i stayed i prague until the end of the school year, by the time summer came around again i was living in glasgow with my (still) boyfriend.
it’s funny to think of this now. it seems so long ago, and it was – 2003 – but not many things have changed.
and i still love snow.
i ordered a copy of this new magazine today.
the postage – from denmark – was not cheap, even with the ridiculously strong australian dollar.
but the anticipation of a package in the post makes it worth it.
every morning i catch the 6:48 tram to work.
at that time of the day – pre-coffee – i can’t really focus on much except for not falling asleep and drooling over myself.
thank god for my iphone, especially the guardian app.
i read the real news on the way home. in the mornings, i just want to look at pretty images like these.
becoming slightly obsessed with patchwork and quilting.
my own quilt / picnic blanket is coming along well, but slowly (i’ll post some pictures soon). i’m enjoying the process; repetitive but soothing. but then this is from the girl who studied palaeontology AND tapestry; quiet and slow processes are my cup of tea.
and i have to say; even though it’s more time-consuming, i would definitely prefer to sit down in front of a pile of fabric scraps than photoshop.
found this on the weekend…
how could i resist?!
some nice pictures for the start of a busy week…
i’ve always wanted to be a florist.
i did my school work experience in a florist, which admittedly wasn’t very interesting – obviously i wasn’t entrusted with making any arrangements or fun things like that – and i left with hay fever and rose-thorn scratches up and down my arms.
but i always had this romantic notion that when i was forty or so, i’d throw everything in, quit my job and open a flower shop.
of course, now that i’m older, and have yet to start my ‘career’, i’m not sure if that will ever happen.
but i still love the idea of spending the day surrounded by jasmine, honeysuckle, daisies and sweet-smelling roses, and hellebores and jade plants and tiny succulents, queen anne’s lace and dogwood blossoms and even dill, and eucalypt foliage and grevilleas…
after indigo dying this morning, my hands are the same colour as these vases…
