Hardworking blankets

Being a furniture dealer involves a lot of lugging and praying things don't break in the back of your juddery old van. Luckily I've managed to amass a whole load of trusty blankets real quick. If I was a real dealer I'd have a load of shaggy grey blanketish-things that I'd call 'wraps'.
'I've got some wraps in the back'.
Lucky for you guys I'm a poncy pattern fairy who wants only the the most handsome wraps. And here they are displayed for you. These photos were taken in the back garden of the shop - which I'm in the process of clearing out to make nice. Exciting! I will show you pictures when it's looking lovely - this will mean a lot of hard work as well as evicting the resident fox.

Adventures in Toot Town.

Ok you lovely lumps - here is some Toot.

A nice souvenir bag that looks and feels a bit like a rag rug.

A handsome dustpan and brush - so you can be dead authentic even when you're on your knees scrabbling at dust bunnies.

A swirly cutlery tray - I really like it. When Mum spotted it in my box of stuff she was like BLEURGH!

Handsome bookends. On a similar swirly, whirly theme.

Modern, sleek bookends that can be used together or . . . 

. . . individually. You can roll out the curl of metal and grip the books with it - dead smart.

A nice lino print.

A mangy horse made of real mangy horse hide.

A stonkin' bakelite bracelet.

Saucers in nice patterns - would look good under a lush and healthy pot plant (I haven't got many of those at the moment).

An espresso machine. 

Some Victorian playing cards - such nice designs.

Some WW1 lead toys - poor spindly folk heading off to war.

A large wall-mounted mouth.

A mug with ears.

And some scientific posters that are made of whiteboard material, I thought they'd be pretty fun to have in the kitchen to write your shopping lists on.

Phewf! There you have it. I'm off to work in the shop and today and I'm expecting a visit from a chum who is due to have a baby any minute now (maybe we'll have the most tasteful birth session ever, straddling an Ernest Race) and a person named Lion.

So that's nice.

A triptych of lighting in the shop

I am enjoying the shop, it is nice that if I buy a lampshade it gets to go on an actual light in an actual room or lamps get plugged in - dead snazzy! Here's some lighting I've gathered so far . . . 

The Glow Baby. This one is actually a bed warmer! Can you believe it? The warmth from the bulb heats your sheets for you. And if you hop in with it the light from the bulb will also illuminate your nether regions. Handy.

A nice fifties shade all cut on a slant and with stripes. Nice.

And a woven daffodil light. I love yellow so much.

Big news!

Some big news . . . I'm now the proud co-runner of a handsome shop! There are three of us in it: Lorna (a new friend who I'm sure you'll get to know), Dale (who you know already) et moi.
It's called Committee of Taste and it's in Stoke Newington, North London: come Like our Facebook page and keep an eye for things what will happen!
It's a mid-century furniture shop at it's core but all nice designs are welcome as well as rustic pieces and industrial salvage. Yum! It's got a real nice clean look to it at the mo which I'm trying to fit in with, I'll have to save my frilly-silly side for Spitalfields. It's nice to be buying furniture again after doing smalls on the stall for so long. And I've been given the go-ahead on bringing in some house plants so now I can rescue all the sad specimens from car house clearances. Hooray!

Just me in my new shop. No biggy.

Nice big windows.

I love a convex mirror.

So there you go! I'll be manning the shop a couple of days a week - you should pop in and say hello . . . yes, even you: living in another country is no excuse.

Let's see how this little project goes along.

Best buys.

A little bit of Toot this week.

These jelly bowls - I just liked the colours.

A handy bottle holder for carrying booze to the park; seeing as no one gets milk delivered anymore.

A nice little drawer and basket and some dotty fabric that I love.

The dots are an amazing brown red that's a bit delicious.

I'm really smitten with this rug - it's a beautiful fine weave with lovely long tassels, I would like to eat it. But instead I'm just going to put it on the stall for big bucks.

This pot is also wonderful, though it looks like an urn. It's not going on the stall until I can find who made it. 

A few of these lovely speckledy shopping bags.

And one box of these glasses . . . I could have had two boxes, I picked up two, but an old person grabbed the other and kept saying in a loud voice "NO! YOU JUST TAKE ONE", as if I was being greedy wanting to buy both. I was baffled and wouldn't let go but couldn't get it back because my hands were full and they just kept shouting louder it was really embarrassing. So in the end I let go and said "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" in a loud sarcastic voice. That was a weird thing to say eh? Not the witty retort I would've liked. Car boots are funny places. It was at the same car boot that I left some stuff under a van because I couldn't carry it and when I got back to it someone had robbed the plastic bags . . . not the stuff, just the plastic bags it was in. Funny.

Oh well, there you go. Hope you've all been well this week . . . I've been ill and my Jack has been away, double bad. But now he is back and tonight we're having carbs for supper so everything is ok.

x

Takashi Shuji

There's a wonderful exhibition at The Wellcome Collection at the moment of Japanese artists. I loved these pictures by Takashi Shuji: they're somehow similar to Bill Traylor do you think? Dribble

Handmade rubber stamps.

I've changed folks . . . I'm all different now, I hope you still like me.
Once upon a time I would've boshed an Etsy parcel together with a mile of sellotape then spent a half hour scratching my back up against a tree. These days I'm finding myself getting all joyous over sending out uniformly neat and tidy parcels. It's, frankly, a little disconcerting but I'd like to share with you my most recent packaging triumph because I'm dead pleased with it.

I came up with this simple little design and carved it from special pink stamp making rubber which only costs about a million pounds a square centimetre (that's an exaggeration but it is a little bit pricey)

Then I mounted the carvings onto nice bits of wood, but not before I stamped the back to make them look all professional.

And there you go! Special 'Hand-made' parcel paper.

Makes all my post looked damned fine.

Another reason to buy something in the shop! I've got a few new products for that little outlet coming soon too - more to wrap, very pleasing.