Big Lunch!

Goodness me, there are nice things going on around here.
In Bellenden Road there's a very long table laden with foodstuffs and decorated with the most elaborately carved melons...



And all over the place the shops have put out little tables with food. I walked out of the door and got some Pimms and a cream tea straight away... Roz at the bookshop has baked some bread and made apricot jam.



Nice.

UPDATE: Here's a video of it. Don't I have nice neighbors...

Why you want a sewing awl in the house

This box contains one of my More Useful Possessions: a sewing awl.

I just used it to fix my backpack - the zip was broken, and I was tempted to get a new bag but then this one is covered in patches of places I've taken it to, so...

I fixed it. I absolutely recommend owning one of these, because there's some stuff you just can't fit under a sewing machine.

And, probably more interestingly to most of you, it's a BRILLIANT tool for stitching a wodge of paper into an impromptu sketchbook.

It's also great for punching horrific holes into yourself by accident, I do hope that red stuff on the book spine isn't blood. It's from 2002 so I don' really remember... actually I WOULD remember if it was. So it's more likely red ink.

They shaved some creatures at the City Farm.

And I'm glad I saw them.

Bouncing, and writing.

Running, I have decided, is not my thing to do every day. Jumping up and down and flailing my arms with my ipod tucked into the waistband of my pyjamas, much better. So my flatmate made some space in the bathroom to put up the trampoline, and found lots of things while tidying up, for example my Totoro hairclip.



Ha.
(Incidentally, this is my "is this mobile phone camera working???" face, I'm ok really.)
And otherwise and anyway, I shall be alternating bouncing on the trampoline and writing today until I've finished part four of "The Sleepwalkers" (all seven parts due in end of this month) - right now the monkey and the bear and the dog are all rowing out to sea, towards a strangely shaped island. There will be adventure.

CALLING ALL CROCHETEERS AND KNITTERS: Make a dinosaur!

London artist Matthew Robins needs dinosaurs for his show, so obviously we should all knit one.
The show is called "Walter Knitty" and will be performed at the National Theatre's Flytower on Saturday the 15th of August, turn up before 10PM with your knitted dinosaur and it will become an extra in the show. And there's a prize for the best one, if that's not enough excitement for you.
Here's Matthew's website, so you can see the kind of thing he does... and even if you don't make a dinosaur (booo!) you should come and see the show, because it will be brilliant, beautiful and funny.
You can also find his contact details on his page, I think he'll be happy if you send him pictures of your dinosuars in progress.

This will be my one, incidentally.

Here's some more information about Watch This Space, part of which this event will be.

Cats, dogs and socks at the Kirkdale Bookshop

So! Sue Eves and I did a reading, assisted by Woofie the Dog and Biskit theCat.



Sue is more of a pro than me by several miles when it comes to readings, and puppeteering. My cat got lost under a shelf for some time, and blindfolding it with a wooly hat to play "find the wool" almost malfunctioned because I actually forgot where the wool was hidden... all in all, my cat-handling skills are not that great. It's a fine cat though.

Then I ran a sock beast workshop, and some rather wonderful beasties resulted, here are a couple of them presented by their makers:





I do enjoy these sock workshops. I forgot to show everyone how to tie knots at the beginning this time, which caused some confusion, but in the end we had a good menagerie anyway.

Old pictures

I'm still trying to work out a good way of sorting my photos. iPhoto is irritating me immensely, I want some way that is not date-based or event-based or look-who's-on-this-picture based but... sense-based, basically. Project-based. Ideas-based.
Anyway, I keep coming across old pictures that make me happy...



this was in-between the scenes of a film my friend Kris Loeer made years ago. I helped out a bit, mostly with the fake blood.



And this is Alexia in her most excellent pig-head on a beautiful day. Also years ago...



Gosh, old times. I am thinking back fondly now, which would have surprised me then. Life was all a bit Withnail and I, I just still don't know whether I was Withnail or I. Or if I was I, who was Withnail. Or otherwise. Not that it matters any more, now that everything is so shockingly well-sorted...



Yay!

Running

Huh. Hah. I spent all of yesterday thinking about stories, and monsters, and designing a monster, and thinking about my comic, and sketching, and in the end I felt absolutely dreadful. This morning I swung my arms around a bit, which made them creak, and then realised I had better get out of the house and run around before I fused into a knot.
Unfortunately I don't enjoy exercise. I hate every sort of exercise that is unproductive, I loathe cycling because it puts the fear of serious injury into me, and I am not competitive in any way so team sports are out. I mean, I've tried being competitive, in the same way one tries to take up smoking to look cool, because all the popular people in school were competitive. And sporty, actually. But it never caught. My parents tried, like good parents do, to get me interested. I remember being very small and my mum saying "See if you can touch your toes!" and me touching my toes and saying "yes" and her saying "but can you do it again?" and me saying "well, very probably, yes" and worrying about her state of mind a bit when she demanded proof.
Anyway, I enjoyed running at one point in my life. Well, that's not strictly true. I enjoyed getting away from my irritating home situation at speed, and I enjoyed arriving at the beach, sometimes even before the sun came up so I could look for planets. The point is, I didn't MIND the running.
And I really do enjoy long walks by myself, so why not just speed up the walks gradually...

Enough of this now, I feel reasonably exercised after running halfway to the park and walking the other half and then flopping down onto the grass and watching the crows walk by. Cup of tea and drawing now!

Oh Frabjous Day!

Oooh what an EXCELLENT day this is. First, I was given this here lovely thing:



Polly Dunbar-illustrated, this is!

Then I wrote a whole chunk of script while it was raining outside (at last! rain!) featuring a monster that I am particularly pleased with, and some lines that made me laugh. Then I got to see the latest state of "There are No Cats in This Book", and all is looking good.
And when I got home I found a parcel from Belgium, containing all the needles I could need for my workshop at the weekend plus a badge for my bag, a pretty hand-made keyring and chocolate.



The chocolate I put in the fridge, hence its not being in the picture even though it's very beautifully wrapped. This means that now the workshop is all ready to go, and on my trip to town tomorrow all I have to buy is thank-you presents for people, in particular some nice tea and suchlike to swap for this brilliant parcel.

Duck eggs, felt cats and colour coding

I have a sort of a feeling that I've not been communicating much, which is down to me working on... hmmm... how many books? Several. Each one has its own schedule, some of them colour-coded.



That's the one for my latest picture book. The colours mark out the different sorts of reference I need to get and other important things, red means "check what the dialogue is on this one" because I'm not writing the text. And scribbled out means DONE.
(The comic has a digital schedule, embedded into the project file, and the pirate book has a lot of marker pen scrawls in my diary saying YO HO HO.)

The drawings are getting done quite steadily... here's a detail. Can't show you much more yet.




Meanwhile, the comic is scripted up to page 20 and I just realised I mis-calculated the space I have for each episode in the book, but thankfully I mis-calculated downwards, after brutally stamping on the exposition until it fitted into a handful of pages I suddenly have amazing amounts of space for epic adventure in the middle part.

Meanwhile, I am having a reasonably quiet Sunday here. There's lots of tasty treats, Alexis and I went to Khan's Cash Emporium (no hang on, what is it called... never mind) to buy ingredients for some interesting curries (which he promptly cooked) and to Sainsbury's, where I bought some duck eggs. I love duck eggs. This morning I did my very favourite Sunday morning thing, which is sitting next to the cooker for twenty minutes, reading the paper and watching a pan full of duck eggs Not Quite Boil. It's important that they don't, then after twenty minutes they are absolutely perfect, with yolks like little orange pillows. So now I cn have one every morning until next weekend. Yay.

So now I'll tidy a bit, and make plans, and straighten out my old cat puppet who is scheduled for an appearance at a reading next week-end.



he's been chewed by the canary a bit, I wonder how to straighten out his whiskers...

Stickers and Scripts and Mornings

So... yeah! Um. ooof. I feel hungover, but actually I've just had the first morning of my new regime. Write script from eight to ten, before going to work. I'm seriously sleepy in the mornings at the moment, what with a heatwave going on, but I think it's the only way to meet my deadline, and I like writing in the morning when nothing else has happened yet to distract me.
I'm writing in bed on my eeepc, which I enhanced with some nice stickers...

I got them in the post as a treat from Mia in New York, these ones are designed by Genevieve Gauckler.

Hot Day

I patched my green dress up this morning because it's the only dress to wear in this weather.



The day got too hot to draw, and then it was too hot to walk home, so I walked along South bank instead.




















I bought some nice things on the way.
Then I got home and ate a whole bag of olives that friends brought me from Greece. There are little white flowers on the chili plant.

Now I want to make ice cream, and eat a salad and something with artichokes in it.

Camera set-up

I'm using half my desk for animation now. That is, I've just put all the parts together to see if it all works, and it does. I just need to tidy the surface, mark it up properly and make some sturdy cardboard characters to move about, the paper cut-outs are too flimsy.
Not today though, I need to write some script for the comic... had some ideas in Norway for the second chapter, so I'll try and write that now.

Oslo

I had the best weekend ever.
Oslo was sunny, apparently it was warmer than it had been since some time in the eighties. It was so hot that the ash tray on the balcony spontaneously lit and smoked itself.


We went to parks and climbed a tree.



I liked the statues a lot.

I stayed in a beautiful house. - Even the cat was stylish - her favourite toy was a plastic lemon.

I got searched at customs in Oslo airport. They pounced on the baking powder and tea leaves. I showed them the clotted cream and the jam, and explained that all together it would make cream tea. They frowned a while and let me go.

We baked scones and I made a pot of Assam as properly as I could, and we had cream tea at midnight when the sky was turquoise.
Even when the night was darkest you could still read. This bench says:

"Nothing is stronger than this person who survived a loneliness". I think.

I bought brown cheese, and wild strawberry jam, and salted licorice.

We went to a forest lake and fed an apple to the ducks. They liked it. In Norway, even the ducks are wholesome.

We also took a boat to an island in the fjord and went swimming. Now I'm back home, with treasure:

A pretty red cup to keep food in...
And a Hatifattener mug.

When I got back home, there was a tiny crop of balcony tomatoes the size of peas.

And now I shall look at the Moomin collection I bought on my new special Moomin Mama reading pillow.

Oh, and: Norwegian strawberries might well be the best in the world.