Whimsical Kitten

This is my second post of the day, I was simply compelled to share these two videos with you. Whilst searching for images of Mavis Cruet, the wonderfully plump and inept fairy from Willo The Wisp a much loved cartoon of my childhood, I came across a website belonging to a software engineer by the name of Michael Hogg, among the pages of things that he has developed, was this page dedicated to Foxy, I fell in love with her and the video Michael had lovingly made of her straight away and after at least 20 minutes of struggling first to embed the vimeo video unsuccessfully and then link to the URL unsuccessfully I found the same video in two parts on You Tube (phew!).  I have lived in the countryside for the last seven years and have only seen a fox twice playing in the back field, also we kept hens and never once had a problem with foxes, so it would seem that they are now firm town-dwellers. Enjoy. 

Part One:

Part Two:

The stripped and shapely

Maple grieves;

The ghosts of her

Departed leaves.

The ground is hard

As hard as stone.

The year is old

The birds are flown.

John Updike (1932 – )

A few days ago I was watching BBC Breakfast news when I came across an item about the ‘Chux Tux’ a knitted jumper designed to keep ex-battery hens who are mostly featherless warm this winter……I was intrigued.

After a bit of research I discovered that the pattern is available here if you feel inclined to knit one for any ex-battery hens that you may know or as a charitable gift for your local branch of the Battery Hen Welfare Trust.

I am a big fan of BBC Four programming, and have been delighting in their current three part series called Picture Book which documents the history of illustrated children’s literature over the last 150 years. The first programme ‘When We Were Very Young’ which can be seen again for a short time  online here  focuses on when we very first start to read and develop our imagination.

The second programme ‘Now We are Six’ aired this week focuses on reading when we are going to school and how it helps us both understand the world around us but also to escape from it, and can be seen again online here.

The final programme I believe will be aired Wednesday 19th 9pm BBC Four. It has been a wonderful nostalgic literary blanket that has wrapped around me and reminded me of all the fantastic books I read as a child, and has featured some of my favourite writers/illustrators such as Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Briggs, Quentin Blake, Roald Dahl, Michael Rosen, Phillip Pullman and many many more talents.

I will leave you with my most favourite picture book from my childhood…………

My Gocco PG-5 finally came today!!

Earlier in the year I had heard some twittering about the Gocco no longer being in production in Japan and that the increasing scarcity of machines had pushed up prices and also interest in them. I thought nothing of it until my path crossed once again with Gocco, by inadvertently finding an Etsy tutorial about printing using a Gocco on You Tube – it looked so easy and appealing that by the end of the video I was hooked. I eventually managed to procure myself a PG-5 from Australia, but not without having a major dilemma about purchasing, at a vastly inflated price, a machine that may become obsolete if they also stop making the consumables. There is one slight problem, the instructions are in Japanese! But then there is always You Tube to teach me how.

Poetic, poignant and filled with pathos, this film won the Camera d’Or in The Cannes Film Festival 2005. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to find it. Beautiful.

When I was a little girl my father told me that my great grandmother was a gypsy and used to travel around the country with the fairground telling peoples fortunes for a living from personal items such as a watch or a handkerchief. I have absolutely no evidence that any of this is true but the bohemian in me likes the idea of having gyptian heritage, so I have been reading a few books about these people and their way of life and found it fascinating. The books describe the lives of some of the original Romany families travelling around Britain from the turn of the century up to the 1960s, the two books by Betsy Whyte are autobiographical and the other is written by Rowena Farre who had travelled for a time with the Roma in the 1950’s.

Just in case you were wondering when the shop will be stocked, here is a teeny tiny glimpse of what I am working on at the moment……more to follow shortly.

Congratulations and thank you to the people of the USA, here’s hoping for a new era of international unity and cooperation.