Curiouser and curiouser!

I've been having lots of strange dreams recently - discovering weird hidden rooms and spaces in our house. The top floor of our house used to be a library, and at the moment we're renovating one of the bedrooms and stripping back to the original pine panelling. We removed one section yesterday and this dropped out:-

Now, all we have to do is find the door or box it opens?! :) Whilst on the subject of strangeness, we went to a special night for children at Tate Modern-Liverpool that opened their current Alice in Wonderland exhibition.

 Great fun, some enthusiastic live performances in the gallery spaces and to top it all, a couple of sleeping Alice's.

Happy Halloween!!

Love Halloween:) We live a few yards from an abandoned grave yard, and this time last year at around 3am, there was the strangest howling and what which could only be described as the screams of a hundred tortured souls.. You might say, Badgers! Foxes!..but you'd be most certainly wrong :( We were too scared to investigate, and we've still never come to a rational explanation, other than the possibility of  someone going to the effort of setting up 200k sound system in the middle of the night.

Not wanting a repeat performance this year, thanks spooks! Besides, we've got our own devil dog looking out for us!

Have a good one!

YSP

We took a day trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last Friday. It was a beautiful autumnal day, quite busy and I was surprised how much it has changed since my last visit as an art student nearly 20 years ago! Swanky new visitors center, shop and restaurant etc..all very nice - and still populated by art students looking introspectively tortured... that was me that was ;) 

 

We ended the day with a Yummy Yorkshire ice cream in the cafe, Lou's Liquorice comes highly reccomended.

100% Design

A friend is presenting some of her work at 100% Design, as part of this years London Design Festival. She works in experimental textiles as a surface pattern designer, and spent some time teaching with me at London Met - A very talented artist, so please check out some of their work and if in London, visit Tactile Wonderland at the exhibition (register for free entry below) :

We are pleased to announce that we will be presenting our latest creations at 100% Design from the 22nd to the 25th of September 2011 as part of the London Design Festival. Renowned for our hand silk printed fabric wallcoverings with intricate laser cut detailing, we will be unveiling an enticingly new mural design. Inspired by Delft tile motifs of flora and fauna with laser cut feathers that come away from the wall to reveal peek-a-boo glimpses of colour. Alongside this we will also be exhibiting our first digitally printed wallpaper collection and homeware range for 2011 – Petit Tactile – in an intriguing space that can only be described as an interior wonderland. 

 

To find out more on what we will be exhibiting please go to our blog http://tactilewonderland.blogspot.com/2011/09/tactile-wonderland-100-design-22-25.html  

To register for free entry please click on this link http://www.100percentdesign.co.uk/tactile

 

Victorian Winter

'Victorian Winter' .. a great name for a 80's Goth band (any fledgling Emo's can have that one for free)  :) But it's also how we spent our summer this year in Melbourne, Victoria. And with it being an Australian winter, it wasn't that bad at all! When not out with family, we were able to spend some time looking around some of the vintage stores of Brunswick St and Daylesford (apparently ranked No.1 'Funkiest town' to Hebden's 4th place.. Ahem, ..I beg to differ) and have a couple of short road trips to South Australia (where we came across, what the owner/artist described as 'Wolf Creek' sculpture park) and to the Grampians, where we saw the most fantastic night skies.

So a few holiday picks below, those of a more cynical disposition may turn way! Back to the grind and getting on with making:)

Cuba

..no, not the place - the dog. Meet the new addition to the family :) After dropping off Parry at the Kennels this morning,.. with less than 24hrs before we fly to Australia.. we bought a puppy. We had intended to get another dog at some point, and were telling the Kennel owner this and whaddya know, she had just chipped some puppies for a neighbour that very morning.

So we popped down the road for a look..

..cute? He's a Patterdale Terrier 8 weeks old, but he'll have to wait another 4 weeks before we can take him home. Anyway, enough waffle - we've got some packing to do!

Australia

Very, very soon.. Too soon in fact! We have a couple of days to organise ourselves before leaving for 4 weeks.  Typically, a month isn't enough time when on 'Holiday' in Australia - however for us, it's time we will be spending mostly visiting family, having a bit of a rest and hopefully doing a bit of rummaging in the thrift shops of Melbourne.


It's been an extremely busy summer so far, and although we haven't had the time to design+make+promote in the last few weeks as much as we would have liked - but, after a bit of a break we will be all the more geared up and ready to hit the ground running in September and crack on!


One of the new product lines we're creating is a range of kitchen items & wares, hopefully, interesting in design with a quirky appeal ;) So by way of a sneak preview, we present!

After recovering from the jet lag, we'll be putting together new stock early in September with view to getting it online and into the markets before the end of the month - we'll keep you posted!

Anyway before leaving these green shores, we decided to drop into Howarth yesterday to check out a couple of vintage shops, forgetting to set our clocks to Yorkshire time.. you will be lucky (as in Hebden Bridge) to find any of the retail outlets open before 11am :) So to kill some time as it was a beautiful day, we took a stroll to the Bronte Falls, which is a short drive and walk from the village.

Hope you all have a great summer, it'll be winter for us in Oz :)

Manchester

  

Not quite the afternoon we had planned. Today we took a trip into Manchester with the hope of having a bit of lite lunch, check out some free events at the Manchester International Festival, browse and rummage around some of the thrift shops and maybe drop into Abakhan the best fabric and textile shop in the Northern Quarter..But the harsh reality of having to deal with an overly tired 19month old in a (thankfully) near empty restaurant brought the day to an abrupt and terminal end.

However, the one saving grace was this nice bit of street art I photographed on the way back to the car (with a now happily asleep toddler..) which in a way sums up my love of the 'grim' North and were I grew up. 

Vegan Chocolate Chilli Muffins (Gluten Free too!)

My sister in law was looking for a good Vegan and Gluten free recipe recently as she was looking into starting a catering business, designed for the Gluten intolerant. So after much trial and error, I came up with this recipe - the cakes are just as tasty as regular Muffins and deliciously moist :) Let us know how you go if you give it a crack :)



Vegan Chilli Chocolate Muffins

Makes 12

DRY INGREDIENTS
1 Cup of gluten free plain flour
2 tbs cocoa powder
3 tbs arrowroot
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup of brown sugar
1 to 1 1/2 tsp chili powder (add 1 teaspoon then taste and add extra if desired)
1 teaspoon of instant coffee
pinch of sea salt

WET INGREDIENTS
140g of sweet potato puree (approx 1 med sweet potato cooked in microwave for 5 Min's till soft then remove skin and puree)
100g dark good quality chocolate (Needs to be good quality for it to be suitable for vegans- check to make sure that there are no milk solids in chocolate)
juice of 1 orange
1 an 1/2 cup of chocolate soy milk

METHOD
1. Pre-heat oven gas mark 4, 180C Degrees, 350F Degrees and place muffin cases in tin.
2. Melt chocolate by placing large heat proof bowl over a pan of simmering water.
3. Prick the outside of sweet potato and microwave for approximately 5 Min's till soft. Keep an eye on the sweet potato as you don't want it to over cook and burn. Remove skin and weigh approx 140g of flesh (usually 1 medium size sweet potato).
Place flesh into food processor with the juice of one orange, only 1 cup of chocolate soy milk (reserve 1/2 cup of milk for later) and mix.
4. Once chocolate is melted, take off the heat and let it cool slightly then add to wet ingredients in mixer and mix for about 2 Min's. Mixture should be mousse like in texture.
5. Sift flour, arrowroot, bicarb soda, baking powder, cinnamon, cocoa powder and chili into a mixing bowl.
6. Add 1 cup of brown sugar, teaspoon of coffee and pinch of salt mix with a spoon.
7. Then add wet ingredient to dry and add the rest of the milk and stir through evenly.
8. Once mixed taste to see if extra 1/2 spoon of chili is required.
9. Spoon into 12 large muffin case till bout 3/4 full and sprinkle with brown sugar (optional).
10. Bake for 25-30 Min's.
11. Let to cool then enjoy!

It never rains..

Just taken the dog out for an evening walk after a spectacular downpour. Watching the mist rise out of the valley, it reminds me of the struggle we went through to get out of the city, and why living where we do makes it all worthwhile :) A few pics from our first year.

A room with a view

This picture was taken a few weeks ago, and is the view from our workshop/studio and is one our favourite places in the house. Before we cleaned up and organised the workshop, you could barely see the opposite side, let alone the river itself. Now, the light floods in and it makes a fantastic space to work, relax, grow veg and feed the ducks!

A bit about us? Really?! Oh, go on then.. Mr Forage has worked in various roles in his time, he's a Fine Art graduate but used to write Video Games for a living(!) and over the last 10 years has toured at music festivals and clubs performing & providing visuals for various acts (no name dropping required..). He also teaches Digital Media, creates Interactive Art installations and fiddles with technology.

Mrs Forage is and was a Nurse, all the way from sunny Melbourne Australia (and recently discovered, that she is NOT the only Aussie in Hebden Bridge) and has worked in various healthcare roles, before deciding to settle down, raise a family with Mr Forage on the Lancashire/Yorkshire borders!  


We both have an interest in handmade crafts, cooking, growing our own fruit and veg and supporting the local community - it all sounds a bit Tom & Barbara, but that can't be helped as it is the good life! 

We will be posting pictures of the stuff we make, general waffle and pics of our dog most likely.
 
Thanks for dropping by and we hope you hang around!