The Armchair Traveller

One morning recently I was on my way to work and I came across an Elephant in the middle of a London street. Yes, that is correct, I said an elephant. I then looked a little bit harder and noticed that there were a lot of elephants all over the place, the elephants were on parade!

I did some digging and discovered that this is a project called Elephant Parade which is a conservation campaign using about 250 large scale elephant sculptures decorated by artists and designers scattered right across the city of London to spotlight the urgent crisis faced by the endangered Asian Elephant. Amazing sculptures all to raise awareness for a good cause, what a great idea!

I loved discovering a new elephant around every corner, and in some cases they moved overnight so I saw them in one place one day and then bumped into them somewhere else another day! There was even a whole line of them marching from Piccadilly directly to Buckingham Palace!

Built out of fibreglass and coated in a graffiti-proof layer these elephants are allowed to be touched by people and it was great fun to walk around and see everyone posing in front of them and taking photos of them and talking about them, they really have brightened up the city of London for the start of summer!

All these large scale elephants are being Auctioned off at the end of June and all money raised is going to help save the habitat of the Asian elephant. They have also set up a few temporary shops around the city where you can buy replica elephants or even paint your own mini one! The replica elephants are also available for online purchase.

Anyhow, enjoy a fine selection of elephants I have managed to track down, just a very small sample but a great sample none-the-less!

I recently decided that I needed to take up a new hobby, something the I could do at home but that wouldn’t take over too much space in the house and also something that I would actually find relaxing rather than challenging. Then some girls in my office were talking about some arts and crafts stores around London that they love and one caught my eye – a Knitting Shop. I was looking at the website for a knitting shop in north London called Loop which had classes for different skill levels at affordable prices and decided this was the hobby for me.

When I was growing up my mother and grandmother and aunts were always knitting something, I look back at photos from my childhood and clothes were always knitted by my mum, I also remember mum teaching me how to knit and having kids knitting pattern book full of ideas but I never really got the hang of knitting, I was more of an embroidery (cross stitch) girl. But I did like the idea of re-learning how to knit now, what could it hurt really, I would be able to make something useful for myself and others if I could get the hang of knitting the second time around!

So I enrolled in a Knitting for Beginners course and for two hours after work every Monday, for three weeks, I embraced the basics of knitting and even learned a few cool tricks. There were 5 of us in the course, two pregnant women, one older lady and another not much older than me, all there for our own personal reasons and only two of us who had ever held knitting needles at any point in our life. We all went at a different pace but the teacher was good at accommodating us all and in the second week we all had to come armed with a pattern we wanted to start on so she could teach us how to read a pattern as well as get us on our way to creating something more than just a sample of different stitches!

The project I decided to start was to make a hat for my brother Damian which I planned to give him for his birthday. My brother has quite a small sized head so I found a great simple pattern in a children’s pattern book, which also happened to have been written by our teacher! It was a patterns for beginners book which has very handy explanations of different techniques etc at the beginning of the book.

Armed with a new vocabulary of casting on, casting off, knit, pearl and so on I started work on the hat and two balls of wool later the masterpiece was complete. Well, almost complete. At the point I finished knitting the hat we had also finished the classes two weeks earlier so I was flying solo when it came time to stitch the two ends of the hat together to actually make it a hat! In the last lesson our teacher had given us a brief demo of stitching two ends together but I hadn’t got to practice it too much so there was a lot of trial and error in that part of the project, I cannot tell you how many times I undid my stitching and started again!

Eventually I managed to get the hang of the sewing up and I finished the hat. I am very proud of it actually, there was only one spot in the whole hat that I notice a loose stitch and otherwise I think it is pretty good! I even managed to get it to fit my head

A month or so after the course finished my teacher held an improvers class at a cute little cafe on a Saturday morning. It was 2 and a half  hours of tea and cakes and learning some trickier stitches. It was also an opportunity to show our teacher any completed projects, by which time I am pleased to say I had finished not only the hat for Damian but also a tiny baby hat for my friend’s newborn baby and was halfway through the tricky process of making the cardigan to match the baby hat!

I am now working on a scarf for my grandmother’s 80th birthday and have been knitting while waiting for trains and while travelling from one destination to the next. A nice portable hobby, never mind the funny looks people have given me!

I am really enjoying just how relaxing knitting can be and while working on one project I am constantly thinking ahead to all the other things I can knit for myself and others!

KNITTING IS GREAT!!!!

A few days before Christmas I got a phone call from my mum to inform me that her younger sister, my aunt and godmother, had been diagnosed with cancer. This was really upsetting news to hear especially because I am so far away from all my family. I am very close to my family and so in a situation like this I would go into support mode, but how do I support my aunt from the other side of the world?

I had some time to think about everything over the Christmas period while spending time with some close friends. One afternoon my friend and I sat down to make origami paper cranes from a kit she was sent by another friend of hers who was living in Japan and it was at this moment that I was hit by inspiration, I remembered the Japanese legend of making 1000 paper cranes and then making a wish so I did a little bit of internet research and this is what I found:

An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane, such as long life or recovery from illness or injury. The crane in Japan is one of the mystical or holy creatures (others include the dragon and the tortoise), and is said to live for a thousand years. In Asia, it is commonly said that folding 1000 paper origami cranes makes a person’s wish come true. This makes them popular gifts for special friends and family.

Hanging a Senbazuru in one’s home is thought to be a powerfully lucky and benevolent charm.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_origami_cranes

So, I had decided, I was going to make my aunt 1000 origami paper cranes (commonly referred to as Senbazuru) and make a wish for her recovery from illness. It was a big challenge but one I was determined to carry out. My ultimate plan was that I would complete the set and then send them to my aunt for her to hang in her home and know that I was thinking of her.

The first challenge was where to get enough Origami paper to complete this project. I ended up going to a London store called Muji where a purchased two packets of origami paper to get me started.

Once I had removed all the black and white sheets of paper out of these packets I worked out how many more packets I would need to complete 1000 cranes and I went back to Muji to purchase a further 9 packets. The girl in the shop gave me very strange looks as I went to pay and as she counted how many packets I had she asked me if I was sure I wanted 9 packets and not 10 as she felt 9 was an unusual number. I didn’t explain my project to her I just let her continue to look confused as I paid and walked out with my paper.

1000 paper cranes is a huge undertaking and I tried to be systematic about it so that I could keep track of how many I had done as well as be as efficient as possible. I created the cranes in batches of 10 and would record each completed crane on a sheet of paper counting down to 1000. On average I could complete about 50 cranes in an evening in front of the television, any more and I started to get concerned about repetitive strain injury on my hands from all the folding!

I was beginning to get concerned about whether I would be able to create 1000 cranes in a reasonable amount of time but once the first 500 were complete and I could see the riot of carefully folded colour sitting in the paper bag in front of me I was more determined than ever to complete the other 500!

Each evening when I came home from work I would sit down in the lounge after I finished dinner and start folding. I found it quite a relaxing experience, there is something very calming about the process of folding a piece of paper repeatedly to create something simple and beautiful like a crane. I very quickly got lost in the task each day and would marvel later at what I had done as I was in some other zone as I made them. In the back of my mind the whole time was my aunt and what she was going through and what I wanted these cranes to mean. Then all too soon (about 1 month later) I was finished, yes I had actually produced 1000 origami paper cranes!!

Now that I had made them I had to work out how to gather and hang them. Thanks to the internet I discovered that they are most commonly hung in vertical strings in groups of around 40 or 50 per string. the string goes through the centre of the body of the crane as they slot in one on top of the other. Once I had found a string I was happy with I began the task of threading each crane onto each string. I put 50 cranes per string so there were 20 strands all together.

Once they were all together and hanging in my lounge I fell in love with the vibrancy of these cranes and was really sad when I finally took them down to post to NZ. With 200 per parcel I sent my aunt 5 parcels over the course of 1 week with other little pick-me-up gifts to let her know I was thinking of her and sending my love and positive thoughts her way.

Whether you believe in the Japanese legend or not, this senbazuru which I created is guaranteed to make you smile at all those amazing colours and the peaceful repeated shape of the crane, and that can’t be a bad thing.

I had so much fun working on this project that now I feel a bit lost without it! Does anyone else want 1000 origami cranes? Let me know

“Everything is Going to be Alright” by Martin Creed – displayed on the outside of the Tate Britain

These are comforting words that I think everyone needs to hear every now and again! I know they brought me comfort yesterday when I looked up and saw them!

Yeasterday I met up with Rosie, Guy, and Jack and we headed to North London to the Business Design Centre to go to the London Art Fair. At the art fair dealer galleries present themselves and their artists to the buying public under one roof. It normally costs £15 to enter the fair but through Rosie’s art-world connections we had complementary passes to enter. The London Art Fair is all about Modern British and Contemporary art, both established and emerging artists, and prices ranging from a few hundred pounds to a few hundred thousand pounds. Everything you saw was available to purchase the the galleries use the fair as an opportunity to network and to bring in more new clients whether they be seasoned or first time art buyers.

As I was in no position to even contemplate buying even the cheapest of works I just enjoyed the experience of seeing what the different galleries had to offer and seeing how many of the galleries I recognised the names of and how many I had never come across before. There were big-named artists whose worked popped up in multiple galleries – for example Bridget Riley prints and paintings were a very common sight. It was also great to see so many emerging artists sitting alongside so many established artists, and the art dealers who were pushing these names onto the visitors to the fair with just as much enthusiasm as for the artists you might actually have heard of.

The first thing that struck me upon entering the art fair was the building itself and how it was arranged. Spread out over three floors and divided into little gallery spaces for each gallery with lights shining down on each space, all sitting under an impressive Victorian-styled arched ceiling reminiscent of many old train stations here in London. Another interesting observation was the sheer number of people walking around. The fair had been open for three days already before we visited and it still had another two days to go and there were people everywhere actively engaging with the artworks, the dealers and with each other. There were also an awful lot of red dots next to pictures, which, for those of you who don’t know, indicate that the work has been sold, so it would seem that people were spending their money and getting themselves some very nice works indeed.

Since I wasn’t spending I felt like I could just soak up the environment and take the opportunity to observe those around me. It is always interesting to hear what people are talking about as they walk around:

A Picasso? 7 grand?! That’s nothing!

Overheard a man with a very posh English accent saying this to a couple of other people he was standing with.

At least we know she’s full of milk…

Overheard a man saying this to the woman he was with as they walked by me pushing a grizzly sounding baby in a pram.

Maybe one of these days I might be able to afford to buy at art fairs like this but until then I will continue to enjoy the experience of attending as a keen art lover and observer of everyone else who is buying

We have had snow in London recently. London looks rather magical in the snow. I like it.

What I don’t like, is the ice that is left behind when the temperatures drop below zero and the snow stops falling…