What Katie Does

Kinetica Art Fair

2010-02-07T11:01:00.003Z

I popped over to the Kinetica Art Fair yesterday, armed with my E-P1 and crazy little CCTV lens. I figured the nature of the exhibition - motion-based installations mostly utilising light as a medium - would be a nice match for this cheap but fast little lens.

My favourite exhibit were these holographic light sculptures by Rosaline de Thelin. They are made with fibre-optic cables and apparently inspired by 'astronomy, scientific theories and quantum physics'.

I love these abstract bokeh photos; the unusual spiral characteristics of the lens really made some interesting results.

This was a cool little kinetic sculpture of a broken-up pair of glasses with motion driven by cogs; every so often if your point of view was right, you'd see the glasses reform into a what appeared to be a whole.

An installation of hundreds of LED lights which pulsed according to levels of sound in the room. Video of it in action here.

An interesting setup where a sensor traced the outline of a sculpture of a head and drew it onto paper on the floor.

This sweet installation entitled Flutter, by Cinimod Studio, shows the motion trail of a butterfly's wings on several 'video fins'.

Today is the last day of the exhibition, so get over there if you want to see it! Lots more photos on my Flickr.

Japanese cooking class

2010-01-27T20:07:00.000Z

Ever since getting back from Japan, one of the (many) things I've been pining for is the food. Simple, light, fresh and nearly always delicious, it's a fantastic cuisine. I've read two books on it in quick succession and have attempted a few dishes using tofu and miso paste. The results have been nice and tasty - with the bonus of being very quick to prepare - but probably not very authentic.

Luckily Josh bought me a course of 5 Japanese cooking classes at Atsuko's Kitchen for my birthday, so I could learn how to do it properly. The first class was last night and it was so much fun.

It's held in the lovely Grocery store in Dalston and taught by Atsuko, who has travelled all over the world teaching classes. Her enthusiasm really came through as she talked through all the ingredients and processes at the basis of Japanese cuisine.

Guess which are Atsuko's egg rolls and which are the students' attempt!

She expertly showed us how to make sticky rice, miso soup, egg rolls and wakame-sesame salad - and we got to have a go ourselves - then we sat down to a delicious meal of the results at the end of the class.

Finally we made a rice ball each to take home in our bento boxes. I can't wait for the next class.

What Katie Eats

2010-01-26T13:56:00.000Z

I go through phases with cooking.. sometimes it's a dull chore when I get in from work, I'm uninspired as to what to cook and usually end up with packet pasta with jarred pesto. But at the moment I'm finding it really fun and exciting. I signed up to the BBC Good Food site which has loads of great recipes and lets you add your favourite ones to a folder so you can check it for quick inspiration. You can also search by ingredient which is great if you have some random things in the house and can't be bothered going out. For the mushroom Wellington (above), I only had to buy in the field mushrooms, everything else was in the storecupboard or freezer, and it tasted great.

I just started a tumblr site of my more successful cooking adventures (along with a few nice meals out), mostly to serve as a reminder to myself for the next time I'm feeling uninspired. Check it out here.

I'm also really excited because tonight I start the Japanese cooking classes that Josh bought me for my birthday. Big post on Japanese food - with a review of my class I'm sure - coming later this week!

Fffflckr

2010-01-20T11:29:00.000Z

Ffffl*ckr is a really great new site for finding images you might like on Flickr. It loads in your favourited images and by clicking one you can see the favourited images of that user - the idea being that if you like someone's photo, you'll probably like what they like too! Much better than the Flickr Explore channel which generally contains overdone faux-vintage Photoshoppery and horridly chesy HDR style landscapes of mountains. Have a play and see what you find.

Kidioms

2010-01-15T11:18:00.000Z

A fantastic set of idioms (figurative expressions of speech) as drawn by kids. Some are literal, some are kind of cryptic and some are plain weird - but they're all adorable. See if you can guess what phrases these represent.. answers under the jump. And see loads more drawings on the site.

1. Sweet tooth
2. Falling in love
3. Bright eyed and bushy tailed
4. Chasing rainbows
5. Cat got your tongue

Cramique

2010-01-10T20:42:00.001Z

Until recently, I thought that Cramique was something dreamed up by my Belgian great-grandma, a delicious treat of slightly sweet, crumbly bread that my grandma still bakes for breakfast every Christmas. But actually I realised it's a national Belgian dish. Similar to a brioche but more buttery and with a denser crumb, it's delicious with a slick of butter eaten with tea or hot chocolate. It traditionally has raisins in, but our family recipe is done without.

My version is of course not as good as my grandma's - it didn't rise much - but better than my last attempt at baking. I might get booted out of her inheritance for sharing this, but here's our family recipe (click to enlarge).

Hype Machine Music Blog Zeitgeist

2010-01-09T12:00:00.000Z

I love this project by music-streaming site Hype Machine. They asked 50 graphic artists to create a piece of work inspired by their most popular 50 artists of last year. Here are some of my favourites.

Chromeo by Julia Sonmi Heglund

Friendly Fires by Jaime Calayo

Miike Snow by Blake Suarez and Steph Davlantes

The Big Pink by Noah Kalina and Staynice

Check them all out here.

Christmas!

2009-12-30T15:50:00.000Z

Happy Christmas - I hope you all had a lovely holiday. I definitely did; nothing better than being spoiled at home, champagne and snacks at 11am and a pretty dusting of snow outside. Here are a few snaps of my time at home.

My lovely main pressie from Josh, an Erica Weiner letterpress necklace - she uses vintage letters re-cast in silver to make these.

It's always customary for my sister to force the family to play loads of games over Christmas. She got this one - the Great Penguin Bookchase - for Christmas after I saw it on notcot - no better gift for a board-game loving English student. It's like Trivial Pursuit but all literature related and with tiny books instead of pies to collect. So cute.

One of my favourite presents, the hefty and beautiful Fat Duck Cookbook. The illustrations by Dave McKean are truly gorgeous making this a dream to flick through, even if I'll never try any of the recipes.

My other favourite pressie is a lens adapter for my E-P1 so I can use a ton of interesting vintage lenses on it. I'd already bought an old Wollensak projector lens and these are my first few shots with it. I love the super-pronounced vignette effect and it's surprisingly sharp for such an old piece of kit.

A few more photos on my Flickr. Oh, and happy New Year!

Favourite photos of the year

2009-12-22T17:18:00.001Z

I guess this time of year is always ripe for remembrance of the year just gone, so I thought I'd do it visually with one favourite photo from every month, plucked from my Flickr archives..

January
Flowers on Columbia Road market. It was also my birthday, and we moved into our new flat.

February
Snow on a bench - London's had the snow again this week, though it didn't look as crisp and white as this photo.

March
I started my new job at Poke, in Shoreditch. This is a pic of nearby Spitalfields Market deserted at night.

April - I had to pick two for this month. Went to Cornwall on the Poke weekend away...

..and we got our little Yoni kitten, who we can't imagine life without any more.

May - Enjoyed the early summer sun in Holland Park

June - Got my new camera, the Olympus E-P1!

July - fun times at the V&A Village Fete

August - a rather soggy Field Day festival..

..and a sunnier long weekend in Amsterdam

September - a trip to Greenwich Market

October - A visit home with a new-old camera before heading to Japan..

November - back from an amazing holiday to Japan, with hundreds of photos and memories.

December - Christmas dinner with my lovely knitting group, which I've been going to every Tuesday since the summer.

I might not post again until the New Year now as we're off on a jaunt to family all over the country, so I'd just like to say a big thanks for my small but loyal readership, which has grown a little this year. I write this blog because I love it and it's so nice that it has a following, and I love the feedback and comments I get - so thank you! Happy Christmas and New Year to you all xx

Failed crafts

2009-12-19T23:15:00.002Z

Despite being seen as a generally 'crafty person', there are two things I can't do well at all: bake, and wrap presents.

Baking, I suspect is because it's a very precise practice more akin to science than art, and I tend to be a little slapdash in everything I do which doesn't fare well with baking. I'll substitute baking powder with bicarb of soda, or leave it in the oven until I think it looks ready, or run out of flour and think 'oh, 100g less will do, I'll just put in a bit less of everything else too'... predictably, the results are usually fairly disastrous. Viz my failed entry into the recent Poke studio bake-off:

I had visions for a charming little gingerbread house decorated with iced gems and silver balls, but my dough was too crumbly to even stand up and no amount of squeezy icing or melted chocolate (and icing sugar to hide the damage) would convince it otherwise. In the end I got too angry to continue and forfeited the competition. You can see some of the more successful bake-off entries on my Flickr.

The other sticking point, wrapping presents - I think again because it requires the kind of precision and attention span I don't possess. I can never get corners tidy, the tape curls up and sticks to itself, ribbons and bows are liberally applied to hide the damage.. the whole thing generally looks like I let the cat wrap it for me.

So this year I went for a purposefully 'rustic' look with handmade wrapping paper and tags. Even the rubber stamps are handmade (at the Make Lounge class I did last month), and just stamped onto brown parcel paper and manila tags for a rather pleasing lo-fi look.

Poke hack day - tastebuddi.es

2009-12-16T14:11:00.001Z

Last week, Poke threw their first Hack Day - we downed tools Wednesday lunch, got into teams, and were set the brief to create a 'web thing' on the theme of FOOD in 24 hours.

Several manic hours later fuelled by crazy sandwiches and Angel Delight, each team presented their ideas to the judges - chef Yotam Ottolenghi, writer Russell Davies and editor of New Media Age Nick Howell.

Our team created tastebuddi.es, a website to inspire new unusual flavour combinations. Just keep hitting the big blue button to pop up two random ingredients, vote on whether the combo is a hit or miss, and share your best results on Twitter.

There's a running tally of the most popular combos and in February we'll announce the overall winner. We also plan to extend the site to allow users to add their own favourite combos and share them. Follow us on Twitter to keep up with changes to the site.

Here are some of the delightful combos we made to try during our presentation - orange and curry, strawberry and balsamic (a hit), olive and nutella, and Marmite with shortbread.

We didn't win the first prize as voted by the judges - that honour went to the World's Tallest Sandwich - but there's another prize for the site with the most visitors by March, so please use and share tastebuddi.es as much as you can - hope you like it!

Rifle Paper co

2009-12-15T14:19:00.000Z

If you haven't yet discovered the beautiful Rifle Paper co store, I urge you go to have a look. Super pretty cards, prints and other paper goodies all with a distinctive muted colour palette and naive charm.

I especially love this stationery set personalised with an individual portrait by the illustrator behind it all, Anna Bond.

Anna's blog is well worth a look too, for inspiring posts along the vintage-nostalgic-handmade theme.

Embroidered Christmas cards

2009-12-13T11:45:00.001Z

After my first attempt at paper embroidery I decided to try the same technique to make some Christmas cards this year. Here's how they came out:

If you'd like to have a go, here's a small photo tutorial.

Create your designs, either hand-drawn or on the computer. If you want to use mine, you can find them here. Make the designs fairly simple and don't put lines too close together as the holes might tear when you punch them.

Tape to the front of the card, then you need to pre-punch the holes before stitching. I found the easiest way was to stick my needle into a rubber eraser and use that as a kind of handle. Punch holes about 3-5mm apart - not too close or the paper might tear.

Here's the whole design punched. Keep the drawing as reference..

And get stitching! Simple outline backstitch works best here.

To finish, cover the messy stitchwork inside with another piece of card.

w+k Advent Calendar

2009-12-09T09:52:00.001Z

I love wieden+kennedy's Christmas Advent Calendar. They've placed real-life Christmassy 'art installations' around their Shoreditch office and made the calendar into a cute map, illustrated by Hennie Haworth. I might go have a poke around and try to find some of them at lunchtime...

Cushions

2009-12-07T13:47:00.000Z

I made these cushions at the weekend using some of the fabric I bought in Japan. Very happy with them, they brighten up the living room! They're simple envelope style like in this tutorial, if you fancy making some too.

Sausage, pepper and lentil casserole - recipe

2009-11-30T15:03:00.000Z

I've been steadily getting more 'into' cooking lately - rather than it be a end-of-day chore I try to find some interesting and fun things to cook, especially on lazy Sundays. I have a chunky folder full of recipe clippings from magazines, and most of the things on my Christmas list are kitchen accessories! Being a vegetarian you often have to be a bit more creative with cooking so I've been using lots of pulses and seasonal vegetables lately, and I'm a big fan of herbs and spices to add flavour.

I've been photographing some of my creations for a while, mostly to remind myself what I made, and thought I'd start writing up some recipes in case anyone else wanted to try them out, too. Here's the first, a spicy lentil and sausage casserole, perfect for winter nights.

Sausage and lentil casserole

Ingredients
Serves 2 with leftovers

4 veggie sausages - I used 2 sundried tomato ones and 2 leek and cheese ones (you could use meat ones too, I suppose)
Tin of puy lentils (I used Merchant Gourmet)
Tin of plum tomatoes
2 sweet pointed red peppers
1 red onion
1 garlic clove
Oregano, thyme, paprika, dried chilli flakes
Spoonful of pesto (I used a delice from Brussels but sundried tomato pesto would be good)
Teaspoon of wholegrain mustard

Method
Chop the onion and slice the peppers into rings. Fry in olive oil until starting to go soft, add half a teaspoon of each of the herbs and spices and a crushed garlic clove. Chop the sausages into inch chunks and add to the pan, frying until browned. Add the tomatoes, lentils and pesto and bubble away, covered, on a low heat for half an hour or so (or you could pop it into the oven, if you have a casserole dish). Stir in the mustard and serve with salad and bread.

Make Do Mend - craft workshops

2009-11-27T10:27:00.000Z

Last night I went to the launch party of Make Do Mend, a new crafty workshop venture started by knitwear designer Claire and crocheter Bee. As well as those crafts, they also offer classes in sewing, jewellery, and cupcake decorating - to your own home or in a pretty venue.

The launch party was held at the beautiful 40 Winks in Stepney, a 3-storey townhouse restored and decorated by interior designer David Carter. After bubbly (or tea), nibbles and a good poke around the building, we got to try a few crafts out ourselves.

Sewing workshop; we made a big mess in the lovely drawing room as well as some corsages and peony Christmas baubles.

Festive cupcake decorating class in the cosy basement kitchen; these are the wonderful work of instructor Melen.

Here's my effort with buttercream piping.

It was a lovely evening of cosy crafting. If you want to try it out yourself, you can find out more about Make Do Mend on their blog.

Vintage vs modern infographics

2009-11-26T14:10:00.002Z

Nice article in this month's Wired magazine, which takes infographics from vintage textbooks, illustrated by Roy A Gallant, and updates them with all the extra information we now know. Got to say though, despite all the scientific advances packed into the updated images, I much prefer the simpler old ones.

The effects of an earthquake tremor, then and now:

And a diagram of the Earth's atmosphere, then and now:

Read the whole feature here.

Golden half - two cities

2009-11-23T09:54:00.000Z

Sorry for the all the slightly self-indulgent photography posts lately - I just spent a fortune getting tons of films developed and now they've all been sent back. Much as I love the precision and control you get from digital photography, there's nothing like the excitement of getting a roll of developed film back - especially when you might have forgotten what's on it and it brings back nice memories.

These were taken on my little Golden Half with Fuji slide film (straight processed). Some of our little August jaunt to Amsterdam and some just out and about round London.

Street art around where I work in Shoredtich

The art car boot fair on Brick Lane back in the summer

Amsterdam. Happily in this film the two photos in the same frame often matched to to create a nice diptych - for example, both these shots have flowers in.

Analog also teaches you that sometimes a ruined frame looks good too!

OM10 and Diana+ in Japan

2009-11-21T12:03:00.003Z

Here are yet more Japan photos, from my old Olympus OM10 camera. It's so exciting getting old-skool films back in the post, and it brought back all the good memories of the trip looking through them.

I was a bit distraught to find 2 of my 7 films had somehow got jammed and not advanced properly between shots, so I have 24 images all multi-exposed in one frame. I'm trying to pick out all the would-be images from the jumble...

And here are a few from the Diana+. After all the precise metering and focussing of the OM10 I found Diana a bit frustratingly unpredictable and uncontrollable, but I still like these shots. I've put the prints into a little album I bought in Tokyo as a nice alternative memorial of the trip.

Lots more on Flickr.

Marina and the Diamonds photos

2009-11-20T11:39:00.003Z

I blogged about Marina and the Diamonds back in June and I finally managed to see her live on Wednesday night. She's a fantastically charismatic performer with a gorgeous voice, and I reckon she'll become massive next year.

I was also excited to try taking some 'proper' gig photos - well, slightly less amateurish than my usual attempts anyway - so I got a good spot at the front (next to Marina's mum and dad!) and gave the E-P1 a go with my 50mm OM lens. I'm really happy with the results, except the lens's crop factor made them just a little too tightly-framed.

Here's a video of 'I Am Not a Robot':

Listen to Marina on her Myspace page or this handy music-streaming-box. Her album's out sometime early next year.

Make Lounge - Rubber stamping

2009-11-18T11:33:00.000Z

I took my second class at the Make Lounge this weekend - a festive rubber stamping workshop led by Louise Best.

Like the first class, it was a heap of fun as well as being very informative and creative. The process was easier than I expected, using the special tools to carve our designs into the surprisingly soft rubber, then mounting the stamps onto wooden handles.

I left with four hand-made rubber stamps and the beginnings of yet another new hobby. I'm going to use the stamps to make all my gift tags and wrapping paper for Christmas.

Check out the Make Lounge's website if you fancy signing up yourself.

Fantastic Mr Fox concept art

2009-11-16T21:05:00.002Z

Aww, I love this beautiful concept art for Fantastic Mr Fox and Coraline from production designer Chris Appelhans. See more Fantastic Mr Fox artworks here and the rest of his portfolio, including Coraline and Alice in Wonderland, here.

Via Drawn.ca

Edit to add: The Vanity Fair website has a fascinating look behind the scenes at the painstaking process of making the puppets, and more nice concept sketches.

Kawaii Japan goodies

2009-11-13T21:55:00.001Z

Shopping in Japan - especially Tokyo - was so immense. I'm going to be paying off my credit card until next year, but how could I fail to stock up on all this cute stuff?

Sweet notebook

Mini toy camera stickers, what could be cuter?

More stickers. Can YOU understand this variation?

Notepaper that folds into a papercraft cat head. This little San-x character, Kutusita nyanko, is so cute and I haven't seen any other stuff with her on in the UK.

Stacking Russian dolls teapot, isn't it precious?

Kitty cat socks from Might Soxer, a Japan spin-off chain of Tabio.

Japan travelog

2009-11-11T09:44:00.001Z

I'm back from Japan! It was - as expected - totally amazing. I'm still on comedown. It's a bit overwhelming thinking of all the things we saw and did, but luckily I wrote a daily travelog out there to remind myself. I've just cobbled it all together into a website, so click onto katiedoesjapan09.blogspot.com if you want to have a look.

I'm also slowly adding all my photos to Flickr - there are a LOT of them and I still have ten rolls of film to develop, too. I'm so happy with my E-P1, I love how all my digital photos turned out.