On the 4th Day of Christmas...

... I give to you...

... four sassy cats...

... three ballpoint pens...

... two in/appropriate characters...

... a little souvenir.

Between five and eight every morning, I am woken up by screaming and scrabbling. Sometimes the call is coming from inside the house, sometimes it's coming from outside my bedroom window, either way, I end up with cold feet (often with cold toe beans trampling across them) and somebody demanding breakfast, attention and to be escorted to wherever he's decided is current his bed.

He's a monster, but I love him.

Which is pretty much the subject of Day 4, our collective inability not to love the psychotic little fluffballs whose homes we rudely occupy. 

So we're sticking with pen drawn illustrations, and some of the posts I look forward too most when they pop up in my Instagram feed, and those are created by Portuguese illustrator Luis Coelho of Purr.in.ink.

Don't touch the toe beans without full awareness that you may not walk away with fingertips.

There is nothing more annoying than waking up to your cat screaming while beating the shit out of your bedroom door at stupid o'clock in the morning. Although waking up to him beating the living crap out of the door of the shower (which rattles so it ten times louder) is terrifying!

The fluffy one seems unaffected by my meowing at him. This either means I'm fluent in cat or he's fluent in idiot. Either way, don't sneeze, cough or make any weird noises near him because that will freak him out.

Yes. It means I've said your name seven hundred times and you've blatantly ignored me, but you always react to weird noises. 

Let's face it, cats are weird.

Cats are weird and these illustrations are so weirdly intense, yet adorable that Coelho has to own (be owned by) cats or had cats in his life, because only a cat owner knows how irresistible fluffy tummies and toe beans are. Even when you know you're taking your life in your hands if you touch them.

These illustrations make me happy, and I love the texture of the crosshatching, which looks like the exactly like crazy floof, and I love the humour. So they make me smile whenever Coelho uploads one of them to his Instagram feed. 

And in a year where I had to stop myself checking the news headlines too often, and ban myself from Twitter for a while because there was only so much misery and scaremongering from ill-informed people I could handle. Having sweet and silly things appear in my feeds helped to not fully succumb to panic about what was happening in the world. 

I think everyone needs a little silliness and joy to break up reality. So for that I highly recommend following Purr.in.ink if you like illustrations of cats staring into your soul and daring you to touch their bellies...

Merry Christmas! Day five tomorrow...

Link || Purr.in.ink || Website || Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Pinterest || Tumblr

Link || Frazzled Cats Formed From Hundreds of Hatched Lines by Luis Coelho by Laura Staugaitis via This Is Colossal

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Listening: The Love Cats - The Cure

I Carry Your Heart With Me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

- EE Cummings

I saw this design for Capsule Letters on a random website I was linked too via another blog, called Poketo and it reminded me of that EE Cummings poem, I Carry Your Heart With Me. In all fairness, it also reminded me of Ted Noten's solid gold Wedding Pills but I prefer Cummings.

I wasn't the type of person to carry around photos of friends or deeply meaningful nicknack's when I was younger, unless you count a huge number of cinema tickets meaningful. But my friend Fe wrote out Max Ehrmann's Desiderata and Billy Connolly's alternative Desiderata for me when we were in second year of uni. I think it was because I'd never read them and I was a bit low at the time, but I folded them up, put them in my wallet and then got it stolen the following year. Gutted. I loved that purse and I loved that my friend had taken the time to hand write these HUGE poems for me. Anyway, the point is, I rewrote Ehrmann's version and stuck it in my new - distinctly suckier - purse and they're the only none currency/identification I do carry.

However, I'm really attracted to this design, partially because of my partiality for boxes and lockets and hiding things away, partly because of the novelty of the pill form. So like the poem in my purse, you open it up, read the content and feel a little better. It's not a pill to cure all ills, but it's a sweet placebo.

via - Poketo!

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Listening: Ryan Adams - Rescue Blues

Monday Mood Board: Dreamscape

Row 1: A Cup of Psycho Traumatic Hypnotic Dreams by Crazyfrogleg [catching flies],

Her Body of Water by Kane Longden, Untitled by Hoi-Kam Chan

Centre: Inception ? by Roger Do Minh

Row 2: It's our light, not our darkness by Jessica Islam Lia, To The Dreams... by ~Potapova

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

- William Butler Yeats

Okay, this is Monday Mood Board on a Tuesday, but I had a busy day yesterday and was confronted with making a half assed mood board at quarter to twelve when all I wanted to do was sleep. So I decided to shut the computer and continue today.

The reason I had a busy day is because I was my sisters and I decided to go the cinema in to see Inception and then I was preparing for the latest practice window and the Christmas window...you know after all this preparation for the December window I hope it will be good! Anyway, Inception, it was amazing and I'm now desperate to see it again and my sister said it best "it was like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for boys". Therefore, inspired by the film todays/yesterdays mood board is based on Dreams and dreamlike imagery.

Also, my song today is Edith Piaf 's Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, which I already love, but was one of the triggers in the film for waking. I've had lucid dreams before, usually first thing in the morning, just as my alarm clock's gone off and I've not woken up, I'll hear music, I'll realise I'm dreaming and then I'm in a fight to keep dreaming. Where I used to spring up the second my alarm went off, I've now come to loathe it. But I love that feeling when you realise. Must dream more.

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Listening: Edith Piaf - Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien

I Heard You Fell Into a Rabbit Hole

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

- Lewis Carroll

Finally went to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and bar the 3D and the subsequent commentary made by certain members of my family about their dislike of it...I really enjoyed it.

The basic premise, of retelling the original story as though Alice has unwittingly returned to Wonderland ('Underland'), seemed a tad redundant, why not just tell the original story? Personally this didn't bother me, I went into the cinema looking forward to the traditional Tim Burton explosion of colourful madness and wasn't disappointed.I admit, they could have gone a little madder, been a little more extreme given they weren't following the story to the letter, but it's a Disney film and you expect a certain level of sanity, especially for a PG.

It was beautifully done though and the costumes were amazing. Some of the 'makeshift' dresses which Alice (Mia Wasikowska) wears were incredibly and Mad Hatter's (Johnny Depp) costumes were perfectly insane to depict a possible madness alluding to mercury poisoning used in the felting process by milliners. Whenever I watch films like this, with elaborate costume it makes part of me wish I'd gone to do costume design at Edinburgh instead of Jewellery at Dundee. I'd been so textiles based right up until we got a talk about jewellery and I couldn't image being part of any other department. Sad but true. Speaking of which, maybe this is the perfect time to start looking at doing some Alice based designs, as well as adding in more textiles to my work. I'm lusting over madly dyed wool tops for felting...perhaps I'll go mad as a hatter while working with it.

We also did an Alice based window for work based more on the Disney cartoon Alice than Burton or Tenniel illustrations - though given Burton's focus on the poem Jabberwocky, we were actually more on theme than I first thought. It leads on from our Floral Pom-pom window in February, the poms popped up to reveal knitted momeraths with glasses on and Alice chasing the white rabbit through Tulgey Wood, trying not to step on them.

My clever little sister did all the cut outs (we reused the cut out trees we slaved over together at Christmas), while mum and I knitted legs and I turned them into momeraths using the pop pom flowers as hair. Then we found sets of Winston's old glasses to put on him. Winston being a teddy bear which used raffle off for charity when we did teddy bear picnic windows and asked patients to loan us their teddies. It was lovely and one day we'll hopefully do it again, if I find a picture I'll post it.

However, for now, I'm going to await seeing the film again when it comes out and try and steal Louise's copy of Alice and finally read it properly before that happens.

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Bright Eyes - Down In A Rabbit Hole

Silver by Walter de la Mare

Slowly, silently, now the moon

Walks the night in her silver shoon;

This way, and that, she peers, and sees

Silver fruit upon silver trees;

One by one the casements catch

Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;

Couched in his kennel, like a log,

With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

From their shadowy coat the white breasts peep

Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,

With silver claws, and silver eye;

And moveless fish in the water gleam,

By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Everbody's Free (To Parody)

A blatant parody of Max Ehrmann's Desiderata, not the first - Billy Connolly & Baz Luhrmann being obvious ones though it could be vaguely compared to the Trainspotting Choose Life speech - and it's not the last parody, but one I liked enough to save it in amongst some clippings for sketchbooks. I think it's sweet, and it's a clothing advert which (a) has no clothes in it and (b) tells you to be individual and buy things because you like them, not because they're fashionable. Even from Boden that's a change from the bombardment we usually receive of shops telling us what to buy to make ourselves fashionable.

Fashion is great, embrace it, chop and change it, mix it and "before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that, who cares? ... He's a mile away and you've got his shoes." - Billy Connolly's Desiderata

Baz Lurhmann - Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

Sublime Mundanity

"REMEMBER me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day."

-Remember, Christina Rossetti [Excerpt]

In Latin Memento Mori translates as "Remember you must die", translated using English it means "remembrance of death". To the Victorians this meant that as a means of remembering the people they loved who had passed on, they collected ringlets of hair and captured them within pieces of jewellery. They would be wound and shaped into intricate floral plumes.

The ultra modern equivalent being to compress your loved ones ashes into a small number of diamonds. A truly horrific thought, which was only worsened for me when I saw an interview with a woman who had created diamonds from her cats, each of which she had had set into a series of rings. For future reference, I have no desire to be made into a diamond and no ring shall be waiting for me to be set into, preferably I'd like a little bit of pink glitter in the old ashes, but that's by the by.

Morbidity aside, I do love the sentimentality that we place onto jewellery. We have piece from loved ones, pieces which belonged to other members of our family and we use jewellery to celebrate the momentous moments in our lives. But that's why I love Melanie Bilenker nod to Memento Mori.

Bilenker uses strands of her own hair set onto reclaimed ivory, behind resin, to create elegant and simultaneously complex and simplistic line drawings of scenes which seem commonplace. Someone lying in the bath, putting up their hair or making a cup of tea; mundane parts of everyday life which we take for granted. But aren't those the things you miss?

"The Victorians kept lockets of hair and miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to secure the memory of a lost love. In much the same way, I secure my memories through photographic images rendered in lines of my own hair, the physical remnants. I do not reproduce events, but quiet minutes, the mundane, the domestic, the ordinary moments." - Melanie Bilenker

Bilenker's jewellery is one of my favourite examples of not only a jeweller creating a contemporary twist on a traditional type of jewellery, but also of it being used to capture memory in an unusual way. Especially as this is without feeling the need incorporate high-tech components or resort to the traditional locket form.

Plus, I don't think I could draw a person that accurately these days with a pencil let alone bits of my barnet!

Be Passionate...

This isn't my first blog. In fact this is my fifth - I admit, two never get off the ground given I was locked out of one and then I tried a different server from blogspot and really disliked it. My other two are still going, emilyluciedesigns is about my personal practice as a jewellery designer and designeresearch was about my research for my Master of Design. One is very personal, the other is very subject specific but neither really let me talk about the things which intrigue and excite me.

At the end of September, 2009, I finished my Masters, but during the course, the course leader continuously told my class, "be passionate; it sustains you."

To understand what I'm passionate about, you have to know a little about me. I am a 24 year old jewellery designer and my work tends to be quite narrative, or at least initially based within literature and poetry. My degree work from 2008 focused on the poetry of Norman MacCaig and the landscape and architecture of Scotland and from these I translated them into chess sets focusing on the tourist trade and politics.

I'm not particularly politically minded, in fact most of my political knowledge comes from comedic satire on the television but that's where the narrative led my design and I love that. I love that when you Google one thing, it leads you to find another, then another and then something you never considered and that can spark something new.

All the blogs I love, have this wonderfully quirkiness to them. They tend to be jewellery, design or craft based, but they're full of serendipitous discoveries as the authors go through their lives. My younger sister is a good example of this. I encouraged her to write a blog, as a means of archiving her research during her fine art degree, but she posts music she loves, her current obsessions (quilts) and images of the pieces she is working on, as well as the work she admires. It is a mismatch of everything which buzzes through her brain. Whereas my random research get archived in files on my computer, in my bookmarks or in sketchbooks and that's no good.

What I'm hoping to achieve through this blog is just that, for it to become a place I can enthuse over the things which inspire me and have driven my passion for my craft - and no, I don't think CRAFT is a dirty word. So, I hope to post jewellery, textiles, music and as much randomness as I can and if me and my family are the only ones who read it - then who cares? I don't want to lose my enthusiasm for design, especially as one day I would like to teach jewellery and the worst thing I experiences was the tutors who seemed to have lost their passion.

So to any readers I pass on this advice: Be Passionate! It sustains you!