The Horrors

I've been listening to The Horrors a lot since we saw them supporting Florence and the Machine in our home town of Bournemouth a few months ago, especially their album Skying. I wanted to share Neil Krug's photography from the album, as I adore and am very inspired by his haunting yet colourful double exposure images of flora and the band members. 

Here's an image of a double exposure of me in ballet class aged approx 9, with an image of our back garden, that occurred by accident during a botched photo processing years ago; but I actually quite liked it and used it for my CD cover artwork for my imaginary band Ivory whilst studying a Media AVCE qualification. I got an A!! The original was in colour, and was accompanied with a few other double exposures of a swan on a river with me sitting on the rockery in the garden where I grew up, and also a small image of our late Cat Mitzi with a large close up of our late Hamster Niki! I won't share with you which ballerina I am in the photo below, as I was an awkward child and always hated ballet.

Here's The Horrors' song 'Still Life' from Skying; hope it stimulates shivers for you as it does for me:

Nina x

Ava Lily with her cushion

Do you remember the cushion I made for my friend Tony's niece Ava Lily, with a ditty called Babbit the Moon Baby, back in December? Well, here she is with her cushion, taken over Easter when it was given to her as an Easter present. It's so good to see it again, and Tony tells me she doesn't let it go. I'm so pleased. It's such a cute photo! :)

I've nearly finished my White Fox cushion, just the sewing and stuffing left to do (a bit behind), and many more ideas for the opening of the shop and a craft stall I'm going to be doing with Katie in the summer. From Autumn I want to learn to do patchwork, then I can make a quilt covered with stories and ditties, stars and ivy and girls with long long loong hair...

Pleasant dreams!

Nina x

It begins with a doe and her fawn...

I've been posting my creative writing a lot more these days, but I'm aware it's been a while since I posted an extract from The Thicket Dwellers that I completed last year. And so, true to my neuroses, I've started reading through my manuscript again. It's been, like, the sixth time! And as I go through it I'm going to post extracts that I like/that are relevant/that I just wish to share with you. So here's the first extract from within the prologue, from the beginning of the story... 

Source of image

'The cool loamy smell of the forest began to thicken and catch in the throat of the deer. The beasts were nearing the road. Pin-pricks of light appeared through the lattice-work of branches, growing in size and brightness until it passed them by ahead, then was gone in an instant, swallowed by the night. The dragging roar went on, but was without direction, and filled the animals’ pricked-up ears as they swivelled around to catch the sound. More lights came and went, but the noise did not cease.

     Moments passed, unmeasured by time, standing still like the breathless trees. The doe was still, her head bent to the earth, contemplative. The lights were gone a while, long enough for the roar to fade into quiet. The doe bounded, assured by the silence, breaking apart the stillness like a faltering, but stubborn, heartbeat. The fawn hesitated, but an unbroken umbilical cord pulled her to her mother in panic.

     The open road and predatory light. There was piercing noise that did not belong to the night.

     The fawn remained by the roadside, hidden amongst the trees and undergrowth. The cord had been snapped by the explosion that had emerged from a darkness thick as molasses, bringing with it an orange heat that singed the fawn’s eyelashes even from a distance, and roasted her coal-black eyes, so that they glowed from the depths of the woods. The mother-deer had been thrown onto the roadside, her body twisted; the car spun like a fairground ride. Broken glass burst into the air and fell like devastated glitter.'

Nina x

Work in Progress

I came home from Amsterdam a few days ago and want to share some of my favourite photos with you, but I took 400+ in 4 days and there's just so many fluffing images to chose from! So meanwhile I've decided to show you how I'm getting along with the White Fox cushion, which I hope to finish this weekend. I brought some shells and tree cones back from by the lake near where we were staying in Holland, as I'm a bit of a collector (of sorts) of such things. My room is adorned with stones, shells, dried leaves, conkers, sycamore seeds and the bones of animals as a consequence of living by the woods and by the sea. During Autumn, my room gets very messy.

I'll have to leave you with this short one for now, as I have more snowflakes to embroider, and a room to hoover. There was sand still in the shells, you see. But oh! before you go, I also wanted to share this ditty I wrote whilst away, based on the moon poems by Ted Hughes that I wrote about in my last post:

*

She's made of porcelain poetry,

jumping down from her magnolia tree

in a dress that was crafted upon the moon.

Spun by spiders and sewn with silk,

white as a ghost and cold as milk,

she is my phosphorescent little lune.

*

Nina x

Katie's Adventures in London-Land

Last weekend (or maybe the weekend before that) me and Nina traipsed off to London to stay with our bigger sister a couple of days before she moves a little closer to home. It was lovellyyy.. One of the first things we experienced the morning after we arrived (also the morning after trying some really amazing and peculiar cake) was what it feels like to hold a dead robin...

You might think us a little morbid.. But the experience felt somehow poetic. It's inspired me to do another illustration, but it's a work in progress at the mo, so watch this space to see what it could be. But anyway, I hope this robin's gone to birdy heaven, where there are plenty of worms..

Later that day, after all of us doing a little sewing, me and Nina found ourselves in a cute little teashop somewhere in Highgate village. There were roses in vases, tea pots in the shape of cows and lovely illustrations on the walls.. How could we resist? I think we also liked the look of the scrummy cakes for sale, but we were good for once, and instead had equally tasty and slightly healthier savoury tarts.. yummy :)

Afterwards, we trekked all the way from the village to Highgate cemetery, walking through Highgate park to get there, and on our journey we met a squirrel under a cherry tree who just stood and stared at us for ages as if he was begging us to take a photo of him, and Nina obliged him..

We saw the grave of Jeremy Beadle and various others in Highgate, but I'll only show this one photo, because Nina wants to write a post about grave yards soon (can't wait to se it!), and then you can see all that we've been up to in Highgate cemetery :)

-Katie XxX

Nina's Last Trip to London

Katie and myself shared the same experience of our last stay in London with our sister Lubix before she moves down to Dorset near to us next weekend; however, we have different photos, and because I'm older I go first. Also, Katie takes her sweet-ass time about composing blog posts, whereas mine are scatty as I like it, so you get to hear my version of events first ;)

It all begins in Highgate. Actually, it all begins the night before when we arrive late and have cake that makes your head spin and you hear people in the next room talking loudly when in fact they are just whispering - but we won't go into that too much. 

During one of our last visits we'd had it in mind to visit Highgate Cemetery, as not long before I'd read Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffeneger and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, both set in said cemetery. When I read at the end of former book that La Niffeneger works as a guide at Highgate giving tours, I wanted to go in the hope of meeting her, and also to see all the parts of the cemetery she described so well. Alas, she was not our guide when we finally did get to go...

...wilderness and catacombs...

...but it was nonetheless an interesting experience. Cemeteries are beautiful places, so peaceful and full of birdsong and when you walk among bones and stone you can't (or I can't, at least) help feeling reverent. It's not everyone's cuppa tea, however. But a dusky sunset among ghosts and birds is a lovely thought to me.

We did a bit of charity shopping in Highgate village and popped into the local bookshop, which I promptly fell in love with. It had lovely displays and great stock for a small bookshop. That is most definitely the kind of book store I would love to work in. Not a glum overheated corporate chain store that forces us to sell chocolate without paying commission. I mention no names. Anyway, I bought from there a small copy of Flower Fairies of the Spring for my friend Naoko's birthday present, as it's in springtime, and also a set of note cards called Naoko's Forest, as, well, you know. It's got her name on it and I know she loves forests.

We stayed up late sewing - Katie doing her owls, I embroidering a ditty called 'White Fox' that I'll make into a cushion, and watching a film called Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; and we got up late, but only after reading for a few hours - Katie reading Hollow Pike and I The Snow Child, which inspired my embroidery; and watched Hugo. 

We spent Sunday at Camden Market, and just when you thought you'd gone around all the stalls, another little lane appears with more stalls. We've been to Camden a few times before, and I'm always amazed by how many dresses I see that I love, and this time I even fell in love with a beautiful lacy-red number but was good and denied myself, as my mission was solely to find something for Dan's birthday. 

Soon, however, all the dresses start to look the same, and you're lost in a market-town wonderland and need to find the rabbit hole back to reality, in the form of the underground tube station. We did this, respective sanities in check, but I however pined for this red dress all that evening and the next morning so that I contemplated going back to Camden to seek it out and buy it, but I didn't have the time, which was probably a good thing. I did, however, buy a book from Black Gull's rare book shop in Camden which was a collection of children's poetry by Ted Hughes, one of my favourite poets. 

I fell like sakura in May - full of surreal imagery, moonlight, beauty and horror, I find it hard to imagine these poems are suitable for children. But then I thought perhaps they're not suitable for grown-ups, because grown-ups only pay attention to things that are sensible and things that make sense. Which is daft.

The part of the collection I love the most is called Moon Whales and Other Moon Poems, and the illustrations are wonderfully weird and sweet. The last few stanzas above are so lovely and strange. Imagine being a poet and sewing your eyes together with thread spun from molten moon-silver, just so that you could sing better! Sigh.

And then there was a poem called 'The Arctic Fox', and it seems that these hardy white foxes are pervading my consciousness a lot of late. Firstly from watching Frozen Planet, then through the song Arctic Fox via the ears by Ruby Throat, then through the book The Snow Child via the eyes. 

Above is a snippet of the embroidered poem I'm working on. The ditty reads like this:

*

A white fox roaming across the arctic snows

Dazzling Jack Frost melts upon his nose,

Only the polar bears and seals understand where he goes

When stalking among the arctic snows.

*

And below are a few photos that don't really fit anywhere in the telling of our time in London, except that they occurred there and I want to include them, because they just were.

So there will no doubt be many more trips to London in the future, just not to crash at Lubix's flat somewhere between Hackney and Shoreditch. I've loved it there. I've loved that you can walk down the road there wearing any shape of shades and no one bats an eyelid; I've loved the Banksy street art that are there during one visit then disappear before the next; I've loved how inspired I feel every time I stay a few days. But it'll be so good to have my whole entire sistership close to me at home. Buh-bye for now, London :)

Bathwater - Final Part

Pond Creature by Katie

When Coral opens her eyes, it looks at first as if the bubbles like crystal castles are still above her. Wait…no…it’s frogspawn! Yes, the bubbles are larger with black dots in the middle like thousands of eyes, eerily goggling around near the surface. A shadow breezes by swiftly over the bath, and the spawn seem to throb with anxiety, but don’t move otherwise. The shadow swoops again, but is bigger this time.

     Omigod…she thinks. It’s a bird! What on earth is a bird doing inside the bathroom?

     She has an urge to go up to the surface and fetch the frogspawn, before it becomes bird food. She wants to bring them to the bottom of the bath where she can keep them safe. But she doesn’t want to move, not yet. It’s so quiet and peaceful down here…

     But then another shadow swoops, and she knows she has to go.

     Near the surface the light changes. The water is the shade of grass when burnt under a long summer sun, and pondweeds dance and sway in the bath. It is much deeper than she expects. She must’ve left it running, she realises. She’ll reach for the taps when she gets to the top.

     And when she does, her face and hair is covered in soft slime. She is no longer in the bath; she is in a pond. There is a large weeping willow that bends down over her, and bluebells beneath it on the edge of the pond. A heady waft of lavender floats by. It’s a garden she’s in, she comes to see; and, realising she’s naked, she tears a large water-lily from the roots and covers her chest. She must’ve left her nightgown behind. She can feel the smooth, slick bodies of fish brushing past her belly, and it tickles.

     There is no sound but the faint buzzing of a dragonfly as it alights, rests, and then leaves the green foliage surrounding the pond.  There are no shouts or screams anymore: just the simple peace of water and the hush of the willow leaves in a slight wind. She can’t see any birds above, but she gathers the frogspawn close to her, just in case.

     Then she sees the legs below the curtain of willow braches. Trousered legs, with socks and trainers. A boy bends down and peers under the drape of leaves, staring at Coral, his face tilted to the side. He blinks and blinks again.

     ‘Huh – hello,’ he says. ‘What are you doing in the pond?’

     Blushing, Coral slumps into the water so that he can’t see her skin. She is about to take the frogspawn back to the bottom of the bath, but then thinks better of it.

     A call comes from a distance away. ‘Elliot! Dinner’s ready!’    

     The voice belongs to a woman – urgent but affectionate; the boy Elliot turns back to the world beyond the willow tree and shrieks ‘Coming!’ in reply. He looks back at Coral, fairly agitated.

      She smiles, and raises her finger to her lips.

     ‘Hush,’ she whispers. ‘Keep me secret.’

     She dips her head beneath the water, knowing that she will come back, and leaves a water-lily floating in her wake. 

     The End

It's been a while since I last posted a part of this short story, and if anyone's been following and eager to read the rest, sorry for the delay, and I hope you're not disappointed. It's more of a children's story, this one, and I've come to realise lately that it's for children that I'd most like to write for. I'm planning a small story, based on my characters I've created through my embroidery, that I want to send away one day in the hope I can get it published as a picture book. J'adore pictures books. Also, in spite of my mistrust of the increasingly popular e-readers, they nevertheless afford me the possibility of self-publishing short stories through Amazon for free so that anyone interested can download straight onto their computer of e-reader for a minimal cost, and therefore I can have a store where I sell my short stories. So that is a project for the future. For the moment, if you've fallen into this story at the scaly tail-end, other parts I'd posted can be found from the beginning if you search the archives from February onwards. It's short and sweet, and I hope you like. The above drawing is a sketch of Katie's she did after reading this story, so I thought it was appropriate to post alongside. FYI we've just come home from our last stay in London with big sis Lubix, so within the next couple of days we'll be blogging individually about our trip. Until then, sweet dreams

Nina x

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days"

Watched Bright Star the other day, and it left me inspired and slightly sombre, (well, I say slightly, but really I wept like a baby) so I took advantage of my inspiration and wrote a few poems, doodled a little, and spent a long looong loooooonnng time on Polyvore. I’ve become addicted to it). Have a peek if you’re curious J

http://runnybunny-cxci.polyvore.com/

(Forgot to mention) I also spent some of my weekend stitching up a lil’ something…

Meet Toots J I named her after the little red–head girl from Bright Star, and sewed a little rose by her ear because somewhere in the film John Keats asks Toots if she’d been eating rosebuds, as her cheeks always glowed pink. At the moment Toots is roosting in the cherry tree in our garden, so best not disturb her..

Short 'n sweet by Katie x

Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman

Yesterday Katie and I had a day of craft like we haven't had in a loooong time! I finally shook off my flu and fuggyness and managed to finish my embroidered ditty Crazy Hair, a snippet of the poem from Neil Gaiman's picture book of the same name that I'm absolutely besotted with in all my apparent adult-ness, whilst Katie is making somink cute n' special that she'll share with you in due time, a slave to the sewing machine as she so gladly was. Here are some pics of my finished piece that I've chosen to frame in a wooden picture frame for a change, with tatty, fraying lace that I glued on for a touch of shabby-chic.

Look closer, and you can see the stars in the fabric! I did the lady's hair pink as in real life I really covet pink hair. Alas, it doesn't suit me, as I found out at the tender and blushing age of 15. 

 

Here are some Dave McKean illustrations from the pages in the picture book I took my inspiration from...

...and here I am piffing Katie off by taking a hoard of pictures of her at the sewing machine.

All things bird-related occurred throughout the day, such as a thimble I found...

the wise Rob Ryan mug I drink gallons of green tea from...

...the various blue tits I watched trying to perch onto the still-leafless branches of the silver birches as I took our dog for a walk...

...and the blue tits that did manage to perch upon the branches of a silver birch, painted onto this bone china knick-knack. 

I have many things coming up. Firstly, I'm creating something for Husband-to-be's birthday (so no embroidery for a li'l while *sad face*) then I'm off with Katie for our final stay in London with Lubix before she moves for good back down to Dorset, and then days later I'm toodle-pipping you all again as I migrate for a long weekend in the Netherlands with Himself.

Projects in the pipeline: I'm writing a short story for my friend Jasbeer to go with a graphic novel-format short that she's drawing - check out her blog Conversation with my Cat - and making a cushion for my friend Emma's mum's birthday. Then the rest of my time until July is to be spent preparing for a stall that Katie and I are renting at the Boscombe Vintage Market where we hope to be selling crafty stuff and secondhand clothing in the summer. And more...of course, of all these things I will keep you posted. 

Until then, I will leave you with this amusing public reading of Crazy Hair by the Man Himself:

Nina x