Gone to market (day 2)

Selling my lovely, lovely notebooks at Marston Vale forest centre. I said farewell to my favourite witch confection, offering magic wand, animal bone and blackbird feather, but the homage to Sherlock is still waiting for the right customer to come along.

Off with the KnickerDrawers

Stall at the uber trendy Best Made Local craft! spectacular!

I was most impressed by the blacksmith on the stall next to me, sporting Raybans and stripy tee-shirt. If you passed her in the street you'd swear she didn't have enough weight behind her almost-zero size to raise a salad bowl, let alone bash hot metal in a forge while swinging a hammer over an anvil.

But after a long day spent in the company of this amazingly crafty lot I am more convinced than ever that my destiny is standing behind stalls selling my handmade beauties to the most wonderful of people. My delightful notebooks bring the stories out of them all, and that's the best of it. I heard tales of secret affairs and sewing patterns, Roman bones and camper vans, sweet teeth and wild places.

Inspiration for another KnickerDrawer NoteBook, every one.

Photoblog steampunking

To be collected shortly over at the Knicker Drawers.

Dragon and sword

Flayed dragon hide, shiny silver armour, smouldering sword, and everything! Honestly, the roads I travel, creating these hand-crafted works of art. 

 

I hope you're writing inside them all the truths of the family skeletons, alongside your moments of laughter, passionate secrets, embarrassing foibles, private weaknesses and bitter regrets.

Just don't let the children find it all before you're gone, that's my advice. Give them some of your words to discover, and make them feel you're still around.

Star crossings

I discover I am not the only one!

This comes as a relief, given the time I spend in fringe cultures. We attend a public meeting, called by a local user of the arts centre for those affected (code: the trustees have pissed everyone off).

Yes, if you have concerns or complaints about the way a charity is managed, then write to the Charity Commission. Anyone can do that, whether your concerns are valid or can be acted upon, it's still within your powers.

Enough of that. Have lovely pictures of a photo album-styled book for a star-crossed lover.

Steampunk notebooks

Am I having fun with these, spinning those brass cogs and fondly entertaining thoughts of corsets.

If found, return to Indiana Jones

Apparently they cook cake

Wander round St Albans while Shark, Squirrel and Tiger attend their new teen social group.

Basically, apart from the cooking that goes on here weekly, it looks like an anarcho-syndicalist party of teens who meet in a hut.

Be wary of them, that's all I'm saying, because one day they might be in your local government, where some of them have dodgy ideas about how to spend your taxes. (On municipal fish tanks.)

Anyway, parents can stay or go. I went. I fantasised about using the unaccompanied hours by escaping St Albans altogether, maybe travelling to London on my own.* Then I bought a book about political theory in a charity shop.

Um.

I think there should be pictures. In the absence of my afternoon in St Albans, have yesterday's bones book, suited to a radiographer.

*Such stuff makes my most pleasant of day dreams. (I am a person of meagre ambitions.)

Book for the quotation

Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

We travel miles for this

We pilgrim to Apsley, land of Dickinson stationery*, to say Happy Birthday to Denis, the company's very own Fire Engine, 75 years old this year. 

He now has his own Fire Fighting Museum at Frogmore Paper Mill. Let's all celebrate, English-style, with a cup of tea and a fine collection of hoses, masks, and nozzles. 

I know some of you celebrate big time with hoses, masks, and nozzles. I sometimes click through the keyword search. I need only scatter a few punctuation marks about, break the lines for an elegiac pause, and I am rewarded with a bewildering, awkward, but strangely touching poetry, like this morning's early gathering:

Passive aggressive sex
with my vacuum cleaner.
Thank you for the invitation
but, unfortunate.

And then we journey on to Dickinson's triumph, Frogmore Paper Mill! (Same building.) Here they make lovely recycled paper on an old machine.

(Not so very different from yourself, hungry searcher, I also have ulterior motives**.)

* I didn't know Dickinson pioneered the window envelope in 1929, did you?
** Not sex with machines/paper/window envelopes, but inclusion of recycled paper made on historic machinery into lovely, lovely, notebooks.

All in the name of art. Honest.

It's a natural development, isn't it? A range of notebooks with antiqued leather, crafted in Victorian style for a niche market of Memento Mori enthusiasts. 

It fits in with my thinking, anyway. As I see it, there are wide-open markets and there are special-interest markets. If you want to join the throngs with your mass-produced travel notebook, then get thee to Paperchase. But if you want a special-interest hand-made notebook with animal bones dangling from the front, then come to Grit.

The only problem is, I haven't got any animal bones. Tiddles next door has some, but he's using them and may be reluctant to let me have a leg or two. I can't ask the butcher. I'm sure he still suspects me of doing in his window in 1983. But it couldn't have been me because I was never active in ALF. Even if he did oblige, he'd only offer me a great chunk of cow which wouldn't fit on the cover.

Anyway, I know where I can get animal bones. They'll be proper decayed, salt-sea licked, withered and wretched, everything perfect. 

The Thames has loads of them. 

I make the children come with me to collect a bag. I can't say they thought it was the most exciting educational experience they've had all summer - being forced to hand-pick eroded goat carcass from the banks of a river that once ran as an open sewer - but as I told them, it pays to be open minded in this world. Treat the experience as a lesson in London history. Now get picking.

And you can expect those objects of delight to appear on the Knicker Drawer blog just in time for Christmas.

Life along the Thames - not just a load of old bones