Thatch

This is the lovely, the talented, Alice Thatcher. She's a wonderul gal. Kinda gal who always has a smile for you. Proof of her wunnerful-ness can be seen below.


Alice posed for a sculpture for me, her arm went a bit skew-wiff but who can't live with a few mistakes?

Hey Lloyd

Are you ready to be heartbroken?

Making people is an arduous task, it take s a lot out of me if I'm honest. It's a comfort to me that my desk is in a gloomy corner where few people can see me, since I'm pretty sure I've been making stoopid faces along with my little people. For example I was trying to figure out what someone would look like when they're angry, then five minutes later Lois started laughing at me since my face was a comical grimace of anger.

This is an early figure, she's a little sad and a little lost. And then to make matters worse I chopped her heart out. Even though I feel she's ever so slightly 'on-the-nose' and unsubtle, she's the figure that most people have been pointing out on my desk so I guess there's an immediate emotional connection to her poor little heartbroken self.

Slow cooked Sunday

What do you do when you've had a no good week? Go out dancing and drinking? Run 5k? Well here we take a big lump of meat and we cook it for 6 hours.
Some people drink, some people take drugs, us? We enjoy meat.
Today's offering is lamb in a tomatoey gravy with mash. Exactly what you need after a nervy portfolio review and being put in charge of other people's kilns. Mmmm lamb.

Trespass

Dust

My house is crumbling. The plaster has been chiselled and drilled off the walls so that now I can see the bricks. I do not enjoy this sensation. It needs doing, apparently we have damp, which, I genuinely don't understand. What's a damp? What does it do? Why do I need to pay hundreds of pounds to have a very nice man strip the plaster off my walls and cover my entire house in dust? It's everywhere. Every inch of me feels itchy and dry and every inch of the house needs dusting, hoovering, washing or just plain throwing out.
I'd hoped this would be an adventure, but right now, where our battered TV usually stands, there's a gaping hole. Exposed brick work never was my thing, and now it feels as if I'm staring into the bowels of my house, the house doesn't like it and I don't like it.
Last week the plumber came to look at our horrid boiler. Our horrid boiler only pumps out hot water if you turn everything up to 9, like some sort of rock and roll diva it demands you heat the entire house if you want to do the washing up, so we need a new one.
The boiler man looked at the boiler and then proceeded to rip up floor boards. He clearly explained things to me about pipes and suction pumps, and flushing the system and all I was thinking was;
"Those are my floorboards" and stare as a dirty great hole appeared in my kitchen.
"Why are my floorboards doing that?" I wondered in, what I can only presume was a state of shock.
"It's the man, he's tearing up my lovely floorboards." I then knocked over an ironing board and scared the dog.
I agreed to all sorts that day. He wants to put a thermostat in every room. I just want to never see that my house is built on a great stinking pile of rubbishy bricks. I like to imagine that my house is a solid little machine, ticking over happily, but instead, I've seen that under it's floors are rubbish and pipes that look so rickety I don't trust water or gas anymore. I've looked into a great gap between walls and I've pulled out a piece of newspaper from my bedroom wall that was acting in place of mortar.
It's making this week difficult to deal with, I'm going to do lots of drawing and pretend my house is clean and whole and then, hopefully without me noticing, my dusty house, broken from however many decades of living will transform into a house will be mine and will work and be a place to be happy.
Well, that's what I'll hope.

This is the year of me thinking about New Designers, for those who don't know, New Designers is a London trade show, it has massively high footfall and incredibly important people and prizes. It's no small deal, and it's no small target.
It means fundraising, some of our total for the degree show came from stalls, markets and silent auctions with the rest from food. Today I set up a table at St Peter's library in the University of Sunderland, it looked like this.

We have for sale, beautiful glass like these martini glasses.

My thinking was that people (men) would pick up trinkets for Valentines but I also baked cookies, wore a nice dress and looked at myself in a mirror today. Therefore it is with a massively sad face that I admit, we have sold, nothing. Nadda. Zilch. Zippo.
I get that the table is in a weird place (right beside a toilet and an exit so people aren't inclined to linger) but I'm now giving away delicious cookies as some sort of karma bribe to the universe. We have this spot booked for tomorrow, what the heck should I do? How can I improve revenue, in short, HELP.

Chef, designer or both?

Having a subscription to Delicious magazine is not something I'm proud of. I'm 22 and it's odd to subscribe to a cookery magazine this young but I do. I'm admitting this because it's how I found out they're launching a range of dining ware. I'd like to poo-poo it but it's actually quite nice. But it makes me ask questions about who should design this stuff, chefs do know what they need out of plates, but do they really know design? Not really, they know pretty and they know tasty and since they're usually celebrities or (in this case) have easy access to promoting their new product, it get's a lot more attention than something designed by someone who actually loves this stuff. And it gets under my skin more than I can really explain.
The real problem is that names attached to products all too often have nothing to do with the design world, gone are the good old days when celebrities could stand beside a product and say 'This is lovely!' now they have to unconvincingly claim that they designed it. And it erks me. I was going to loudly complain about Jamie Oliver now, but a quick flick through his website shows lots of credit going to the real designers, there's no pretence, there's just some excitement about good design, hard to criticise.
A lot harder to criticise than what Wedgwood, Royal Daulton and Waterford Crystal practice, their collections are now filled with fashion house names, designed to draw a customer who wants to surround themselves with famous names. I understand that fashion influences design, I just don't want to wake up one morning in a house designed by someone who really makes shoes.
I broke my favourite mug the other day, it's a very simple white mug from M & S with sprigged flowers and fruit, it's horrifically twee, but I'm really struggling to find a replacement I actually like. Part of me worries it's because I can't get beyond the endorsed and fashionable thing which makes me sad. And thirsty, since I have nothing to drink out of.