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 :)