Powercut last night

when my computer was on -seems to have deleted all my Picassa files so will be a while before I can up load my porty pictures.

Street Photography

is Alan Wilson's site. I'm fascinated because he photographs many places and even people (!) I know (I've never met him) and I photograph them as well and the results are so different. But then he uses black & white film with a Nikon and I use colour film & my lomo. Once I've scanned some of my photos of Portobello I'll do a 'compare and contrast'.

Creative Pooches

'gay' poodle Crown St Surrey Hills Sydney 2004

At least this is what my aunt called it when I described it to her. Even your pooch can be a vehicle for creativity. This one had two compatriots one with a purple top knot and another with an orange do. They lived naturally enough at a hairdresser and slept curled up in baskets under chairs. When I took the photo a member of staff came out and gave me a postcard of the pooches which they use in their publicity. If you ever want to have your hair cut there its called Surry Cutters 525a Cown Street, Surry Hills, Sydney ph 9318 2413.

Quick ! what do you L O V E?

Popcorn pink clouds over the city this evening

Arthur's Seat covered in snow

Friends who will listen to you moan and encourage plans to not take it lying down

Finishing another buttonhole bag

Green & Blacks chocolate

Michael Nobbs' drawings

The novels of Armistead Maupin

Go Fug Yourself

Puff pastry and peach pudding with cream

Friends who email you at work

Hotwater bottles

Liqueur Muscat

(Liqueur Muscat and pudding will accompany ER - hotwater bottle will be used later)

Self - portrait day coming soon!

25th February via Harrumph and I got my fantastic badge last week!

Current creative projects

include the Mason-Dixon Buttonhole bag (the Unpattern) which resulted in a really dinky felted bag. I'm going to try the unpattern again with thicker wool. I've also got another creative film project on the go , currently awaiting finance news so trying to not put all my creative eggs in one basket. Colour Rules of Thumb I thought might give me inspiration for my bag colours - via Apartment Therapy.

Love yourself day

As I walked around London I took lots of photos. Being on old fashioned film they will take some time to be processed (I'll have to wait for the spare cash let alone finish the roll). One of the things that transfixed me was the window displays for St Valentines Day. It seemed to me that the day was becoming far more commercial and the message it was pushing was 'Buy stuff to prove you love someone' and the relentless pushing of the it all together was also a way of saying 'the only acceptable way to be is in a romantic relationship'. So I've now got a series of hideous photos with red hearts to come out soon.

Some years ago I was moved to make a stand against the blatant commercialism and organised a Love Yourself Day at the Turkish Baths with some friends. I was moved to do it again. Last time I was able to organise massages but its the wrong day for it and too short notice. Instead I'm taking cupcakes, a flask for mint tea and I'll search out my essential oils so we can catch up, gossip and lounge. We prove love and care by spending time with people not money.

In the same way we can create objects, things, art we can create the kind of world we want one step at a time. I want a world were we value ourselves and the friendships we have so I created my own 'Day'. Its worth thinking about what you can do to make things the way you would like them to be.

High St Bus stop 2004 lomo

London Trip III

Because I stayed with a different friend in London to the one I normally stay with I was able to experience a whole new area of the city. On my third day we walked to Parliament Hill and across Hampstead Heath. Filled with people 'Pretending to be in country' said my friend sarcastically, dogs, fat squirrels and even a few signs of spring snowdrops, green shoots of daffodils. We walked towards Hampstead village and ambled up and down the streets, passing Keats House and popping into Hampstead's local library. At the door of the library a large orange cat greeted us and consented to ear rubs. This is my favourite kind of travel encounter something that cannot be planned from Time Out but happens anyway.

Afterwards we walked to Berg House and looked at the reproductions of Constable's drawings of cloud scapes from the Heath.

We then warmed ourselves in a chain bookshop looking at books but didn't buy there but went onto Daunts Books and supported independent bookselling there.

The next day a sunday I did the only thing I'd prearranged in London a London Walks Tour of Old Jewish Quarter 'A Shetel called Whitechapel'. Last year I did one of their tours of Clerkenwell and was amazed at what good value they were in terms of interest and unexpected information. The walk was great despite the cold and the early start 10.40am. We left an hour and a half to get to Tower Hill Tube Station my friend saying we'd probably be early in the end we only just made it as the Tower Hill Station was closed and we had to walk from Aldgate East. We managed to meet up with all the other people who had been corralled into the tour friends of ours and finished it off in Brick Lane. Now Bengali not Jewish and had a lunch in an Indian Restaurant. Thus fortified we walked along the river and crossed at the Millenum Bridge and attempted to warm ourselves up at the Globe Theatre cafe.

The next day aware of the vagaries of public transport in London I left 3 hours to get to Kings Cross Station. So naturally I was very early I walked the 5 mins to The British Library. Oh wonderful place! Lockers for a returnable £1 coin v the £5 at the station. Went around the Writer in the Garden exhibition (free!) but somewhat hasty. There were items from both Little Sparta Avant Gardening by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Dungness by Derek Jarman. I hadn't planned to visit this exhibition but was delighted to see copies of Jarman's handwritten notebooks about gardening and being reminded of my visit to Little Sparta last year.

London Trip II

I have a weakness for bookshops and even worse a weakness for magazines. I went to corporate nemisis Borders on Charing Cross Road and bought £20 of mags, Utne, Shambahala Sun and others which I've forgotten. Then I went to the National Portrait Gallery to meet a friend in the lobby. Its central, always has good exhibitions and a fabulous restaurant on the roof. We met and went straight up in the lift, got a table by the window and admired the roof top view. We had coffee only being the afternoon, the afternoon tea with scones is a crimminal £14 for 2 but we got away with £5. There is a panoramic view here. I took photos but it will be a few months before the lomos come out.

We talked so long we decided not to go and see the Lee Miller exhibition which costs £7.50 to get into - we thought we wouldn't get our money's worth so instead we saw the free Frida Kahlo photographs.

We then went and met my hostess and scurried around the streets of Soho to find the Hare Krishna restaurant which is vegetarian and very cheap.

lomo high st Edinburgh 2004

How to Pitch an Idea

here

Pinhole photography of London

Specifically this person has followed the Circle Tube line overground and taken photos.

London Trip

Occasionally it does one good to run away to get some fresh perspective and new ideas.

I went to see a friends exhibition opening at St Martins last Thursday in London. Great drama as we approached the building it was being held in (The London College of Fashion) as a man had climbed some scaffolding in Oxford St and the road had been cleared but the pavements were blocked with people gawping and we had to go the long way around to get in.

On Friday I went into the city using the bus from Highgate. My aim was the arts & crafts store Liberty's in Regent Street. I wandered from elegant room to room admiring and only succumed to Jaeger Fur Wool in the wool dept. A headache sent me in search of lunch .. too expensive in Liberty's so I started off for Neale's Yard where I knew there was an ok veggie cafe. I was able to restore my bloodsugar, and up my caffine levels. London is so hectic with traffic and people I find visiting it unbearable without well timed sit downs. I eavesdropped on conversations and drew in my journal then struggled mightily with my lomo ( they are complete pains to load film quickly) as a woman arrived with a pushchair wearing a floor lenth waistcoat hand knitted in multicoloured squares which I had to get a photo of. I wanted to see the radical knitting exhibition at the Design Centre but after scanning Time Out realised that the exhibition hadn't opened yet.

I walked back towards Charing Cross Road dipping into Stamfords the travel shop in Long Acre and then to The Photographers Gallery in Great Newport St. They have two sites on the street. One with a cafe and an exhibtion of ' Stories from Russia: The David King Collection'.

To celebrate the Russian publication of David King's book, "The Commissar Vanishes", tracing the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia, The Photographers' Gallery is presenting an installation of haunting images drawn from a discovery made by the author in Moscow. David King explains: "Like their counterparts in Hollywood, photographic retouchers in Soviet Russia spent long hours smoothing out the blemishes of imperfect complexions, helping the camera to falsify reality. Joseph Stalin's pockmarked face, in particular, demanded exceptional skills with the airbrush. But it was during the Great Purges, which raged in the late 1930s, that a new form of falsification emerged. The physical eradication of Stalin's political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence"."Photographs for publication were retouched and restructured with airbrush and scalpel to make once-famous personalities vanish. Paintings, too, were often withdrawn from museums so that compromising faces could be blocked out of group portraits. Entire editions of works by denounced politicians and writers were banished to the closed sections of the state libraries and archives or simply destroyed."Soviet citizens, fearful of the consequences of being caught in possession of material considered "anti-Soviet" or "counterrevolutionary", were forced to deface their own copies of books and photographs, often savagely attacking them with scissors or disfiguring them with ink. There is hardly a publication from the Stalinist period that does not bear the scars of this political vandalism. From ilikeyou

Making Happy

has published her book!

The revolutionary art of knitting

The Guardian article includes a recipe to knit a hand grenade.