Much of a muchness

I try not to use this blog too often as a personal forum for all my pet peeves, personal traumas and disasters however, every once in a while something happens and I just have to explode! Back in April, I thought I was being very clever and bought some garden furniture from an eBay shop. It was a very good price (but still quite expensive -£600 or so). I still haven’t received the furniture.

Here we are at the beginning of July and my garden is still bare. I am furious. Particularly as the company that sold it to me (Land of Sofas based in Poole - be warned!) are now no longer registered as an eBay seller and do not communicate with me at all, and all their contact details are no longer available on eBay.

I managed to track them down and have contacted them several times. The girl I spoke to (Gemma) is always very short with me and seemed irritated I am bothering her. She has given me several dates for delivery, which have passed with no apologies or explanations, so I opened a dispute with PayPal and they are investigating the situation but as time goes by and our very short summer whizzes past, I am still furniture-less. My lovely big sons keep offering to go round and sort her out, as Poole isn’t too far from where I live (she signed off with her home address when she initially contacted me after the sale) but I am resisting their offer and attempting to do things through proper channels but if all else fails, I may go round there myself (with sons and a couple of their taller, even more scary friends) to discuss my refund!

The annoying thing is that the seller does appear to have lots of positive feedback but on closer investigation, most of it is for selling some sports drink bottles. All the feedback for the garden furniture they have sold in the past, says how long they had to wait for delivery and a lot of those people demanded refunds. The lesson from all this is to read the feedback properly. Don’t just look at the high positive feedback score and assume all is well. That’s the end of the lesson, I’ll keep you posted with any developments.

Anyway, rant over. A nice thing this week, has been reading the new ‘Top 101 Artists’ Blogs’ list over at Kim’s blog. Kim very deservedly (especially since her blog redesign) is at number 1, Emila’s lovely blog is at number 2 and guess who is number 3? Yes, moi! It’s such a phenomenal amount of work to update this list every month (particularly given the vagaries of Technorati) so I do recommend you head over there to check out some great art blogs. Kim was also sweet enough to pass on to me one of the many awards she has received recently - the Friendly Blogger award - well I try to be! Thanks Kim!

I’m going to pass this on to a couple of new commentators here at ‘Much of a muchness’ , 70’s teen and Daddy Papersurfer. If you read their blogs you will see why I enjoy reading them so much. And they are indeed, very friendly bloggers :-)

As I write this, there are gale force winds and rain sodden grey skies above, but does this stop #2 son from lighting the barbecue and cooking the ribs he so lovingly prepared last night? Indeed it does not. He is outside wearing shorts, a jacket and a woolly hat, cooking our lunch before we settle down to watch the tennis at Wimbledon (ladies final - the Williams sisters - should be a good one).

After the tennis, #2 son is going out (to play golf would you believe!) and I am settling in to watch Doctor Who - series finale, cliffhanger ending last week, Martha, Rose, Donna, Daleks, Davros  and all the Torchwood team, especially lovely John Barrowman aka Captain Jack - I can barely wait - 5 hours 20 minutes to go……

I was supposed to be going to a picnic at Mapperton listening to Cuban Salsa music tonight but that is looking like a non-starter so more TV it is….and then tomorrow, the Men’s Final, Roger Federer versus Rafael Nadal, the dream final! Woo hoo!

Couch potato? Moi?

I like this paper. I will confess I relented and bought some more from Paper Source as I still can’t find a source of funky modern designs here in the UK. However, I have found another good supplier of lovely paper called the Paper Studio. They are based in Tempe, Arizona and the studio ‘ is a teaching studio and paper arts shop created and run by Cindy and Gary who are mixed media and book and paper artists’. It’s no good, I am just going to have to move to the USA.

I have been tagged by Kylee over at Bijoux and Banter to tell you all about my studio. I think calling it a studio is over stating it a bit, it’s more of a work room. I do have to confess though that in the interests of making my fledgling business sound a bit more groovy and professional than it actually is, I have called it Limetree Studio. This is a business card which uses a photograph I took in my garden last summer.

Artist name: Diane Aldred

Business name: Limetree Studio

Website/blog: This is it! New one on the way. Honest.

Do you have a dedicated studio/artistic space? Yes. I used to work in my kitchen but I moved to a spare bedroom.

Where is it located? On the top floor of my house.

Is it a large or small space? It’s quite big, it doubles as a study and all my books are up there as well as a TV and a sofa.

What medium(s) do you work in? Paper, I am an addict.

Do you have a separate area for each? If I was organized I would have a separate area for gluing as keeping glue under control is the bane of my life.

What one word would you use to describe your studio? Comfortable.

What do you think is the best feature of your studio? My plan chest keeps me organized.

What would you change if you could? I’d buy more storage so it was tidier.

Can you share an organisational tip? Tidy as you go (that’s rich coming from me…..)

Describe the usual state of your work table? A disaster zone

Does your work table face out into the room or toward the wall? Towards the wall (which has a large painting of my lovely boys on it) and which I am going to paint soon (as soon as I can get someone to help me move the plan chest…..)

What’s one drawback of your studio/artistic space? It’s too far from the kitchen (2 floors away) so I am constantly running up and down stairs to make tea/answer the door.

Do you have an idea wall or inspiration board? No. I take inspiration from the papers I buy.

Do you listen to music in your studio? Yes, loud music which I sing along to.

Do you display your own work in your studio? No

Other artists’ work? I have paintings on the wall.

What’s one quirk or unusual feature of your studio?
My desk where my laptop is, is always tidy but my book making work space is very untidy. Not sure why….

Whose studio space would you like to read about? I would like to tag the following artists to reveal their studio spaces….

Kim at Laketrees.

Astrid at Tulibri

Amy Hanks

Jane at My Wooden Robot

And now for my weekend. Click on all images for a larger version.

I had a lovely weekend. The weather was fantastic, warm and sunny. I went for a walk around the Fleet on Sunday and then stopped for lunch at a pub in Langton Herring. I must confess I ended up watching TV as it was the last match of the football season and my team Manchester United were tied for first place at the top of the Premier League so everything depended on this last day of matches. Without boring you with too many details, suffice it to say, my boys won the title for the 17th time. All in all, a fantastic day.

I’m off to London for a couple of days tomorrow. I’m meeting up with some old friends who are visiting from Australia. The last time I saw them was about 6 years ago and before that I hadn’t seen them for about 20 odd years. I just hope the trains don’t let me down this time…..

I went up to London yesterday. I won’t bore you with the tedium of the journey there and back but suffice it to say it was a sorry catalogue of delays, misinformation and outright porkie pies.

Example, on journey home:

Announcement 1: ‘delay is due to operational misunderstandings at Waterloo Station’.

Announcement 2: ‘delay was due to an electrical storm in the Wimbledon area’

Announcement 3: ‘delay due to major signalling problems just outside the station’

Drives me mad especially as on the way there, the train was 30 minutes late because there was a problem with the train doors which meant they decided not to stop at all between Southampton and London. ‘Hurrah!’ the passengers cried, ‘A faster journey!’ -until the train ground to a complete halt and just sat there for 30 minutes.

Anyway, I had a nice time in London. Falkiners is even more yummy than usual as they seem to have had a bit of a re-organisation and all the lovely papers are now catalogued beautifully so that you can see everything they have in stock and not just the relatively small number of papers on display. Result? I spent probably twice as much as I would have otherwise - genius!

I then walked to Paperchase on Tottenham Court Road and bought some more paper and then walked to Liberty to buy a birthday gift for a friend and yes-you’ve guessed it yet more paper! Surprisingly, Liberty had a really good range of Japanese Chiyogami papers and some pretty gift wrap. So it was a very successful shopping expedition.

I’m sorry I’ve been AWOL this last couple of days and especially sorry I haven’t been responding to your comments but yesterday, I met up with some girlie mates at a friend’s house and we had a very pleasant time making books. I showed them how to make ribbon books a month or so ago and they have caught the bug! It was really interesting to see their different approaches to materials and their ideas for extending what you can do with the books. It might even galvanize me into trying something new!

Last night I went for a long walk with a friend. We drove to a village called Langton Herring which is a mile or so inland from the Fleet and Chesil Beach. I’ve mentioned Chesil Beach before. It is a shingle beach which is 18 miles long and runs from Portland to West Bay. The stones on the beach are much larger at the Portland end and gradually decrease in size towards West Bay. It used to be said that sailors who were washed up on the beach could tell where they were by the size of the shingle. For 8 miles of it’s length, the beach encloses a lagoon called the Fleet. It’s famous because it is where Barnes Wallis tested the bouncing bombs which were used in the famous Dam busters raid during World War 2.

This is a photograph of the Fleet and Chesil Beach I took last year.

The walk from Langton Herring on a cool sunny evening was quite spectacular. It was silent apart from the sounds of skylarks singing and seagulls calling. The lambs in the fields were playing and leaping about, some of the field were bright yellow with oilseed rape. And when we arrived at the Fleet, the water was flat calm and the sun was setting, it was so peaceful and beautiful. here are some of the photographs I took. You can click on each thumbnail to see a larger version.

The other good news is that Abbotsbury Swannery which is also on the Fleet and had to close earlier in the year because of bird flu, has now re-opened and has just had the first cygnets hatch! Apparently, this has happened much earlier than usual and as the arrival of the first baby swan is said to herald the first day of summer, this is good news indeed!

This gorgeous image is by Geoffrey Franklin of Christchurch, Dorset and was taken from a slide show of his swannery images on the BBC website.

I have been getting all experimental. If you have a really good memory (and have been following my comings and goings for a few months) you may remember I tried one of these woven cover bindings a while back. The last one was made with card covers, this one uses foam sheets which I spotted in my local art shop - I liked the bright colours. They are quite fun to make but the foam sheets aren’t terribly sturdy so I may try it again using leather pieces.

I bought some leather samples from Hewits, it was a starter pack and they said it would contain six pieces of various colours of leather for £37. I thought this was a bargain so I ordered one and it arrived today. It’s amazing value - there are actually 10 large pieces and they are all great colours - I am well chuffed!

I was checking out Astrid’s wonderful blog (which she writes in German and then translates into English) and she has been trying out some of the two and three section bindings from Keith Smith’s book using leather from a leather furniture swatch book. They are amazing so I may use some of this leather to have a go at some of these too. Here’s my first effort…

It’s a very simple one but I hope my future efforts will improve and I intend to try some trickier ones now that I’ve got the hang of Keith Smith’s rather complicated instructions! This is the next one I want to try…

See what I mean? :-)

It may have to wait though as I am up to my eyes at the moment making photograph albums for two friends. One is for a birthday gift and the other is for a friend who has two huge albums which she bought years ago and she now needs a third one, so I am trying to make one to match the other two.  They are the largest books I have ever made so I am taking it slowly and hope to be able to show them to you as they progress. I am off to London tomorrow - to visit Falkiners for some paper and to go to Liberty to buy a birthday gift and I maybe also look for a dress for a birthday party on Saturday night.

I am going on the train as you may remember that I am rubbish at parking, so I avoid driving in London whenever possible. I have mentioned my parking phobia many times and today, I found the perfect method for successful parking in a confined space.

There. Sorted :-)

Well here I am, back in soggy Dorset and it is raining. Thank you all so much for your kind wishes, I did have a wonderful time. Ate and drank far too much but did quite a bit of walking so don’t feel too guilty about it. Having said that, the diet started as soon as I got back….

I traveled to Switzerland with my friend and her son and we were joined a day later by most of the rest of her family and some other friends so there was a chalet full. When we arrived in Geneva there was hardly any snow to be seen. We picked up the car and drove towards Crans Montana which is 2 hours away in the Valais region. It’s a lovely drive and skirts Lake Geneva (otherwise known as Lac Leman) for a good part of the journey, passing through Lausanne and Montreux.

The road follows the River Rhone along the valley to Sierre and then we climb the mountain to Crans Montana which is set on a plateau about 1500m up the mountain. When we arrived at the apartment, the snow was very thin on the ground and we had a couple of days of clear blue skies and sunshine. The day after the rest of the party arrived, we woke up to a blizzard and it snowed relentlessly all day. What a difference a day makes! As you can see from these before and after shots of the view from the chalet balcony.

We ventured into town for a little retail therapy and a very long, delicious lunch but the highlight of the day (as far as everyone else was concerned) was a huge dollop of snow falling off a roof top and landing on my head. Hilarious, I’m sure :-)

Here are a few more shots, taken over the week to give you a flavour of the holiday.

The other notable event happened when my friend and I went to the supermarket to shop before everyone else arrived and we couldn’t find a parking space. Eventually we spotted a man walking towards his car. Excitedly we cheered him and then realised it was Roger Moore, getting into a Volkswagen Golf. Apparently, he now lives in Crans Montana. I think he thought we were grinning and cheering at him because he was Roger Moore but we only wanted his parking space - sorry, Rog, we would have recognised you earlier had you been in a groovier car :-)

We actually watched ‘Live and Let Die’ (my favourite Bond movie) one night when we had eaten too much at lunchtime and didn’t want to go out and eat again. It’s such a long time since I had watched it, I had forgotten what a great theme tune it has and what a fun film it is. But Daniel Craig is still my favourite James Bond. Sorry, Roger….