sparklehound

Today I am mostly admiring the condiments

They're magnetic!
They can be used with one hand!
They look like startled bunnies!

I love our new salt and pepper mills.

Hydrangea watch #4

My little beauty is still growing great guns - I'm so proud. Thanks to Garderners Question Time (yes, I live in a garden-free central London flat and yes, I am aware that listening to GQT with no garden makes me a total saddo. Thank you.) I now know that hydrangeas are thirsty little devils so I don't have to feel so bad about my watering fixation. Yeay!

Today I am mostly doing the groceries

Bags full of goodies for a cancelled Sunday lunch date (Ginger has the lurgie, poor thing)  lugged back on foot thanks to bus delays caused by this.

I softened the blow with a banana frappe from Coffee@ Brick Lane on the way home... so wrong, and yet so very right.

Its not all bad is it

I met up with my lovely friend for supper at the Tate Modern last night - good food and great company. I just wish that Doris Salcedo would allow an explanation of the amazingly creative engineering behind her Shibboleth.

I took a few (blurry!) pics as we walked back to the bus stop. I love the river at night, the city (and the City) looks so beautiful.

Today I am mostly enjoying lunch with my Mum

A fleeting meeting over lunch at Leon in Spitalfields with my lovely mum. Scatty staff but good food - we had yummy bean and vege soup.

Today I am mostly working on my sketching

Inspired by the Carnet de Voyage trend in French publishing we discovered on our recent jaunt, Ginger and I promised to do ourselves a favour and keep a sketchbook. A retro-fit notebook on Paris is planned, and one of our forthcoming Italian trip is promised.

To that end I treated myself to Danny Gregory's book The Creative License, which is full of tips on building confindence with drawing and keeping an illustrated journal. Inspiring stuff. Today I have been dipping my toe in with some of the early exercises...

Loving cup

I bought this little gold cup in a favourite, now defunct, shop in Whitstable shortly after I moved there - mainly because of that delicious eau-de-nil colour inside (although red has always been my favourite colour, lusciously 1930s eau-de-nil and duck-egg-blue are close contenders).

It is currently home to a necklace that needs a new clasp, just as soon as I get round to making one, and a little pine cone that I picked up the other week in the Bois de Vincennes Parc Floral. It was tightly closed when I popped it in my pocket and as-if-by-magic had opened up and scattered its cargo of seeds by the time I took it out (I emptied my pocket in the woods to give those treasures a fighting chance of fulfilling their destiny).

Little things that make me happy.

Titfer

I love this little pile of 20s style hat and shiny hair things that sits on my 'dressing table' (our chest of drawers). Mum bought me the tatty-tiara for my hen party - she knows me so well. My mum rocks.

(I really need to dust my hat!)

Today I am mostly trying to be tidy

My sparkly slipper collection has been packed into a handy Macy's bag so I can no longer enjoy them in a long colourful parade beneath the wardrobe. I'm not totally convinced that its the way forward but it makes Ginger happier; and as it deprives the dust-bunnies that were threatening to colonise the collection of a home he may have a point. Curses.

Today I am mostly trying to work

Though obviously photographing my pile of diaries and notebooks is also important...