Pencil Museum, Keswick

One of the highlights of our recent holiday to the Lake District was a trip to the Pencil Museum in Keswick. The birthplace of pencils, it is home to the largest pencil in the world and is a really sweet little museum that's packed with history and information. The media room has a fascinating video showing the process of making a pencil - believe me, it really IS fascinating! And who doesn't love a pencil shaped waste bin?

Here are a few snaps of my personal highlights, including some lovely patterns made from pen nibs, and some gorgeous vintage packaging and typography. For a stationery lover like me, it was awesome! There's loads for kids to see and do, and they periodically hold family fun days in the holidays. The shop is brilliant, I bought a great wash and line set, and some earrings made from pencils! The museum also hold regular group sessions for demonstrations and tuition workshops and seem really committed to making art accessible and appealing to everyone - which is great to see! Did I mention the lovely coffee shop too?

If you are planning a trip to the Lakes, you should fit this into your plans - its well worth a visit. Go and get yourself a pencil education!

Loads more information on their website, take a look here: Pencil Museum

The Cumberland Pencil Museum, Keswick, CA12 5NG
Open daily 9.30 - 5pm (plus extended hours during school holidays)
Adults £4.50
Under 5s free
http://www.pencilmuseum.co.uk/
Link to the online shop: Pencil Museum online shop

'Wanderland' at Saatchi Gallery

Saatchi Gallery has always sat firmly as one of my favourite galleries. The large and light rooms always house something new, vibrant and entertaining. Its a great gallery choice for taking your children to and always captures the imagination of my daughter and her cousins when we have been. There's always an interesting and diverse selection of work including lots of installations and sculptures, as well as interesting 2D work. The shop is also excellent, loads of creative and new things and a great selection of books as well as artist's work for sale.

Currently running is Hermes Wanderland, featuring lots of wonderful objects from the Hermes archive that are presented within eleven rooms of multimedia interactive installations, its full of eclectic Parisian wonderfulness! It was so fun. There is a room with projections of walking people on the floor, that speak their inner voice when you step onto them, and Narnia-esque doorways that lead you to a giant elephant having a tea party. I took lots of photos with the intention of attaching to this post, but on second thoughts I really don't want to spoil it - you should go and experience it yourself!  The photos also don't really do justice to the magic and theatre of the exhibition. Head down if just to see the awesome set design. I think the Saatchi makes art really accessible to all, and fun too.

Saatchi Gallery is open every day from 10 - 6 and is totally free. Its right there off the Kings Road by Sloane Square, which is always nice for a visit - lots of (expensive) but lovely places to eat and shop, and its always buzzing. Try and make it down there!

Saatchi Gallery, SW3 4RY
Daily 10am - 6pm
Free entry
Hermes Wanderland runs until 2nd May 2015
www.saatchigallery.com 

'Mac Conner: A New York Life' at House of Illustration

I went to another excellent exhibition at the House of Illustration this week. Just entering its second week is 'Mac Conner: A New York Life', a retrospective of some of the work of this mid-century modern true 'madman'. I REALLY enjoyed this exhibition.

Flirting between design, art, and illustration, the most striking thing for me was the strength of his compositions. I was completely in awe of the intelligent placing of figures, lines and balancing of weight in the painting. Couple this with some seriously accomplished colour work and the result is awesome in my opinion, really inspiring stuff. In a similar vein to Norman Rockwell, Conner appears to be a champion draughtsman, designer, painter, layout artist, AND storyteller in one package.

During his career (he is still alive at 101!) he produced illustrations for loads of publications from naval training material to women's lifestyle magazines and novels. His paintings feel effortlessly cool and authentic, representing fashion and life in mid-Century New York. Fascinating to see in this exhibition is the working process; photographic studies alongside original works, and often the actual finished publication too. The printmaker in me was especially drawn to those paintings that use a restrained colour palette, for publications that were to print in 2 or 3 colours. He largely painted in gouache on board, and looking at his work makes me want to go pick up my paintbrushes right away.

House of Illustration is a great little gem of a gallery, a stone's throw from the newly placed Central St Martins in Granary Square behind Kings Cross St Pancras station. Flanked by cranes and new builds, with the canal running through it, there are some lovely old buildings in this square, housing trendy eateries and fountains in the square that kids splash about in. Designers, illustrators, fashionistas & Madmen fans, you will not be dissapointed, go see this exhibition!

See a short snippet on Channel 4 about the exhibition here

House of Illustration
Tues - Sun 10am - 6pm
Until 28th June 2015
Adult ticket £7
www.houseofillustration.org.ukwww.houseofillustration.org.uk

Andy Warhol Colouring Book

Ok, so let me start by saying this is not cheap; at £12.95 it works out at about a pound a page. BUT, this is not your everyday colouring book. Inside are the fun and quirky sketches of Andy Warhol, the book is an adaptation of an original colouring book by Warhol first published in 1961. It's just shy of an impressive A3 in size, and the paper feels about 250gsm, heavy enough for some painting, mixed media and gluing if your little one fancies it.

I am really keen to expose my daughter to all styles of art from an early age, to develop her visual language understanding by seeing a variety of mark making and colour by different artists and illustrators. I have always loved picture books and had a steady collection before I had any children, so I enjoy sharing these with my daughter now and watching her imagination take hold as she studies the pictures and smiles. Some of my favourite early memories are of colouring and tracing books, and I remember clearly getting my first Spirograph in the 80s, hours and hours of fun. All this nostalgia combined with an excuse to make a blog post from it convinced me to part with the pounds to buy one of these!

On the first page is the sentence "For children of all ages to color and paint. You will want to frame these or perhaps send them to someone you want to make happy.' How lovely. The inside back cover has some of Warhol's own coloured renditions of some of the pages too.

If you are a Warhol fan and have a kid who likes to create, you should save up your pennies!

Buy one from Waterstones here

LUX logo design

Last week I completed a logotype for the very cool band called Lux. They are a soulful pop/indy/folky 4 piece and they wanted a memorable logomark that would work at various sizes, for posters,  press shots and flyers to badges. As their music is diverse in style, I wanted to create a classic mark that didnt pigeon hole them in terms of style, and went for bold, clean lines with a clear flow to the overall shape of the mark, and a little distressed edginess to it. As always, I started with lots of sketching and playful mark making, eventually working up a few chosen concepts on the computer before presenting to the band for review and cleaning up the final design.

LUX are opening the BURYFields festival in June and are releasing an EP later this year, you check out their facebook page here.

(Photo courtesy of Catherine Davis)

Workaid - Inside the workshop

Something new and a bit different for the blog today. This will be the first in a new segment on the blog called 'places and spaces' looking at interesting workshops, studios & creative spaces.

Recently I was lucky enough to get a look behind the scenes at the Workaid workshops, in Chesham and to see the fantastic work which they do there. The Workaid building was historically an old boot factory, and I think it's fitting that it continues to be filled with people doing traditional and skilled handiwork, making and mending.

For anyone thats not aware of Workaid and what they do - Workaid are a charity that provide tools and teach trade skills to the disadvantaged and the vulnerable in Africa, in order that they can earn from it and provide for themselves and their families. They also support many projects here in the UK, all based around traditional skills and craftmanship. The warehouse receives donations of all kinds of tools and machinery, in various states of disrepair. It could be a lawnmower, sewing machine, typewriter, hammer, fabric, bike or pretty much any kind of tool or piece of equipment you can think of. They really do have it all! The donations are lovingly sorted and cleaned, skillfully restored or repaired and then carefully packaged up into containers. They send on average 8 containers a year, using donated clothing and fabrics as wrapping material which can be used at the destination - a genius idea!
 

Its hard to do justice to the scale of the operations at Workaid and the vast amount of interesting objects; these pictures are merely a snapshot. With only 4 paid staff, 3 of which are part-time, in the charity, the whole operation is supported by a team of dedicated volunteers, some of whom are retired engineers and crafts people. One day they may be sandblasting rust from a pile of donated chisels, the next taking apart a mysterious vintage tool to see how it works and repair it, giving new life to many interesting and forgotten objects. It's brilliant! Anything that is beyond repair is carefully taken apart for recycling or selling as scrap metal. Items unsuitable for shipping are sold in the Workaid shop or at one of their legendary forecourt sales. Vintage and fleamarket enthusiasts take note!

The workshop is a 2 floored hive filled with bountiful shelves, drawers, boxes, piles and crates. Rows of vintage typewriters, a host of old sewing and knitting machines, a 50's electric drill here, a 20's sock making machine there...crates overflowing with hammers and mallets of all sizes, a wall of neatly organised saws, a huddle of rakes, spades and hoes, a room of bikes & lawnmowers. Every nook and cranny is peppered with an eclectic mix of other interesting objects and ephemera from past and present. There is so much to discover, I could have stayed there all day. The density of the collection is broken only by pockets of workspaces, benches with glues, tapes and tin cans, radios and mugs of tea. The whole rich aesthetic is one that I love, and the smell of sawdust, oil and metal is strangley nostalgic and comforting to me. I'm reminded of my time spent at the puppet workshop, of fiddling about in my gran's button box as a child and of watching my Dad at the end of the garden in his homemade workshop; he was always making or mending something or rolling about under a rusty car.

Swamped in an abundance of bits and bobs I was amazed how organised the whole place was (though they were too humble to agree with this!) Everything, no matter how small, has a place or a drawer with its name on it. So much so, that when the packers are tasked with putting together the goods for a project, they have a shopping list of items and can go around collecting everything they need, ticking them off as they go.

In addition to the workshop, the forecourt sales and the Workaid shop, they also hold 'craft and coffee' mornings and hold sessions for teaching the learning disabled useful skills within the building. They are a very enthusiastic and inclusive charity that succesfully engage with both the local community and those many miles away. They certainly inspire me to keep making and mending, recycling and reusing, and to keep learning new crafts and skills. The hard work and generosity of the charity and the volunteers really is awe inspiring - you should definitely head down to one of the forecourt sales, follow them on facebook or twitter, and check out their website for more information on the amazing work which they do.

Workaid are at The Old Boot Factory, 71 Townsend Road, Chesham, HP5 2AA

The Workaid Office, Workshop and Goods-in for tool donations is open Monday - Friday, from 09.30 to 12:30 and 1:30 to 4:30
The Workaid Shop is open Thursday - Saturday 10 to 4.

http://www.workaid.org/default.html

The next forecourt sale is Saturday March 21st - get down there and find some treasures!

Thanks for reading!

Make your own corkboards

This week I made some really simple and quick painted corkboards to pin your notes, reminders or kids' drawings onto. I found a pack of cork tiles for £2 in the local charity shop and bought some super cheap frames from Ikea, and I used some old tester paint pots I had. The tester pots already come with a brush inside the lid, which is easy, cheap and means no clearing up - hooray! Try it yourself, and get creative! I may even get going on some coasters...