A bit of Friday ampersandering

The arrival of the proofs from hell (I simply couldn't bear to look!) curtailed my working afternoon, so to cheer myself up I've been finishing off the week by sniffing out a few nice ampersands:

Like this pretty lavender-coloured glass ampersand from SpareRoomStudio on Etsy.

An ampersand pendant from luv4sams, also on Etsy.

This Ampersand t-shirt seems to be in men's sizes only, unfortunately, or I'd wearing one right now!

Here's a gorgeous ampersand from the Zapfino typeface .

This characterful 'wrought iron' one is from the website of Rustique Interiors - a very interesting looking shop in Dalkeith, selling 'Refab Furniture' and 'found objects of desire'.

This satisfyingly chubby ampersand is from the Pistilli Roman font.

And finally, here's someone else who's got a bit of a thing about ampersands.

Crafty ampersands for a Wednesday afternoon

More delicious ampersandery discovered this week:

First, it's the ampersand hat.

This is by Susette from Knitting Letters: A to Z, which is the most fabulous site, combining typographical erudition with gorgeous textile designs. Every post also includes dozens of design-history and other relevant links.

I am an Ex-Knitter. Knitting was something of an obsession 20 years ago but my enthusiasm petered out when I realised that knitting baby clothes was definitely Not My Thing. Exploring Susette's site, I found myself genuinely inspired, for the first time in ages, to take up my needles once again.

The Knitted Alphabet has got as far as M, so there will be plenty more letters emerging over the coming months, and I'm really looking forward to watching the project develop.


And here's a pendant to gladden the hearts of ampersand lovers - it's based on a wooden Scrabble tile and comes from BrownEyedPeas on Etsy.

And finally, also on Etsy, here's the Ampersand Clock by Infinity Arts.

Oh, and here's an interesting article on the history and construction of ampersands on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones website.

More Mersea sea glass comes home

Another two pairs of earrings have completed their circular journey from Mersea to Devon to Mersea again. (See here for the Mersea side of the story.)

And here is one of the last batch in situ.

This little sea glass arrow-shaped pendant is now a permanent fixture on my permanently affixed silver chain.

And those of you who've been following the sea glass saga will be pleased to hear that my mother loved this Mersea sea glass pendant, which formed part of her birthday present.

My parents weren't familiar with this particular strange obsession of their elder daughter, so I took along my copy of Pure Sea Glass for them to look at, and then they understood!

The Mersea sea glass comes home

Great excitement here today, with the return of the Mersea sea glass from Devon to its native shores . . . but how different it all looks now!

Michele has described in a number of posts on her Hedgelands blog the different approaches she has taken to transforming sea glass (not just mine from Mersea, but also pieces from Lowestoft and the Isle of Wight). After I'd seen the kind of ideas she was coming up with, I sent Michele some carefully selected pieces for specific commissions. And here they are. They arrived beautifully packaged in an attractive padded box, with a little draw-string bag for each piece.

I'm so pleased to have linked up with Michele in such an enjoyable and mutually beneficial way. And all because one day I landed on some comments on the poetry page of the Guardian book blog. (It's a long story ...)

You can see all my sea glass posts here. And just a reminder that my prize draw for a copy of The Story of the Seaglass ends on Wednesday 21 May, so if you haven't added your name and would like to, please feel free to add a comment to that effect.

The Story of the Sea Glass

Yesterday I washed and sorted all the sea glass.

Now let me say straight away that this isn't a boast, and Musings isn't suddenly turning into one of those Domestic Arts blogs which extolls the virtues of cleaning and polishing and celebrates my general domestic godessisity (? goddessness/ goddessdome/ goddessability ?). I was in fact performing this uncharacteristic bit of housewifely fastidiousness when I should more properly have been weeding, ironing or scrubbing the jam from the table - heaven knows those tasks have been awaiting my attention long enough.

But no, apart from sort of nearly making a belated birthday cake for my Boy (see comments to this post on Random Distractions for the full story, such as it is) and folding several loads of laundry but not quite getting round to putting them away, it was sea glass washing which used up my limited attention to domestic duties yesterday.

The reason being this. Having seen the wonderful things that Michele over at Hedgelands has been doing with sea glass (some of it from Mersea) - see here, here and here - I've decided that it's high time I acquired few pairs of sea glass earrings. My own career as a jeweller not having got off the ground quite yet - or at least no further than acquiring some silver wire (still in its packet) - I have commissioned Michele to perform the 'transformations' for me. She's also going to make a Mersea sea glass pendant for my mother's birthday. But first . . . the sea glass all had to be washed and sorted and some choice pieces selected.

When it's wet, most sea glass reverts to its former transparent state. It's only when dry that it takes on that beautiful frosty opacity. So once it was washed I found myself in the bizarre position of drying it all with a hair dryer! (You were right, this is turning into a post about 'how I clean things'. Sorry.)

For pendants I was spoilt for choice, but for earrings, which ideally (for me, at least, conventional old thing that I am) are best when roughly similar in size and shape, the matching process took ages. Far more difficult than I imagined.

What with all that and then the cake-making fiasco plus preparing (and clearing away) a rather protracted Chinese meal (Boy's special birthday request), I was only too delighted to slump on the sofa with SD#3 for a bedtime story. And this is what we read:

The Story of the Sea Glass by Anne Wescott Dodd, with illustrations by Mary Beth Owens, is a US-published children's book with a rather old-fashioned feel, although it was written only a decade ago. I wasn't quite sure about some of the illustrations - the artist seemed to be on more relaxed and natural territory with her still-lives and landscapes than she was with people, which were clearly painted from photographs and have a slightly stilted air. The theme is one which appealed to SD#3, however, as she's fast acquiring her brother's sharp eye for sea glass and making her own contributions to the collection.

Nicole and her grandmother visit the beach on a small island near the house where Nana grew up. They go beachcombing and among the things they find is a piece of red sea glass. Now red is one of the rarest colours to find, and Nana is convinced that it must be connected with a story from her girlhood which she has never divulged to anyone. When she was Nicole's age, she accidentally broke a precious red glass vase - a family heirloom which had captivated her. In an effort to avoid detection, she scooped up the shards in her dress, ran down to the beach and tipped them into the ocean. The coincidence is so strong that Nicole is as sure as Nana that this is a piece of the precious vase, transformed by the sea into a ruby-like jewel. The girl and her grandmother decide to make a 'sun-catcher' with this and some other pieces of sea glass, as a reminder of this special day together in their special place. The book concludes with a couple of illustrated pages answering the question 'What is Sea Glass?' and instructions for making a sun-catcher.

SD#3 (6 1/2) loved the illustrations because they 'look just like real life except with nicer colours', and she liked the happy ending, though the account of the accident (for which Nana was sent to bed without any supper) made her 'feel very sad and scared'. A sun-catcher is now on the list of craft projects for a rainy day - I'll post a picture of the result here idc.

Sea glass transformed

Oooh, the joys of the blogosphere!

In that exhilaratingly serendipitous way that these things happen, a chance visit to a poetry blog many months ago (no idea even what I was doing there) has gradually unfurled undreamed-of layers of bloggish consequences.

One result of which is that two pieces of my Mersea sea-glass are now reincarnated as silver-wrapped pendants in deepest Devon.

You can see them (and read about how they were transformed) here .

Isn't that wonderful?

It's all made me feel quite light-headed!

Before I go . . .

Just off with my girls for a few days at my parents' in sunny Berkshire. Taking some work (as always) but also a stack of books, and confidently expect to disappear for many hours between the covers of a good few of them, as well, no doubt, as dipping into random volumes plucked from the shelves in the spare bedroom.

I'll be off air for a while, but I leave you, gentle readers, with this fragrant [very] mixed bouquet of seasonal links to some sites which have caught my attention in the last day or two.

The test launch of BookRabbit – a new and different kind of interactive online bookstore, which hopes to inspire a more personal and user-friendly relationship with its customers and also encourages buying in local independent bookshops as much as it does ordering online. Every book details page will have a link to booksellers, so readers can check to see if the book they want is currently available from a local store. As Keiron Smith, MD of SamedayBooks.com and the Chertsey and Worthing Bookshops explains:


“real books should have a real presence - I love nosing at other people's bookcases, the weird juxtapositions of books people choose to keep and have gathered from many sources seems to me to be both a real window into someone, their passions, and also has the ability to make connections between books that couldn't be further from the 'if you love you'll like' manufactured link. Our simple idea was that people could upload bookcase images and display them as part of their profile, then make them browsable by clicking through the books on them into other books and other bookcases . . .”

It all sounds like a terrifically good idea and I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl when it goes live later this month.

Painful book-world contrast here with the sad, sad, awful stuff going on at The Friday Project ,which news has provoked some justifiably sympathetic comments from supporters who understand the knife-edge relationship between risk and reward, success and failure when steering a fledgling business, and some equally justifiably raw and venomous remarks from writers and freelancers who are wondering how, exactly, they are supposed to eat and pay the mortgage if they never get paid for the work they’ve done for TFP. Having been on both sides of similar fences (though thankfully not this particular one), my own sympathies are profound, but pretty much equally divided in this instance.

A reminder on Asylum of how intoxicating it was to read the complete novels of Carson McCullers, straight off, one after the other in my early twenties. I’ve never re-visited them but I feel it’s time I did. Ditto the 1968 film of her most famous book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I hazily remember from one TV viewing in the 70s as being excellent, but which annoyingly seems only to be available in Region 1 DVD format (and I don’t have a swanky multi-region player, grrrr).

Thanks to Diane for the link to these fab Woodland Trust Wellies £5 from each sale goes to the WT. I'm very tempted - they make my boring old green Hunters look dull, dull, dull.

I enjoyed India Knight's thoughts on Carla Bruni : ‘She is the kind of minx who might sleep with your husband simply to annoy you, or to amuse herself, or because she was bored. Worse, the husband would then be in some kind of desperate erotic thrall for all eternity . . .’

There's sumptuously illustrated typographical wallow over on the irresistible I love typography , which I insist that everyone visits right this minute, it's so good.

A previous Sunday Type post on ILT had alerted me to Holli Conger’s Type Junkie photos on Flickr. Holli’s typography photos can be purchased on Etsy .

And while wandering around inside the box of delights that is Etsy, here's GemmaBeads' quirky jewellery, which recycles old typewriter keys . Creates the same kind of ambiance as the work of Clare Hillerby, I feel - and equally perfect for people exactly like me (or similar). Santa please note.

It was a predominantly dull, grey (and occasionally white) old March, here in the UK, so how uplifting to the spirits to enjoy these vibrant images of Holi (or Phagwa), the festival of colour that takes place in March every year in India and Nepal, over on COLOURlovers (a great place to lose oneself for many happy hours, whether or not you can actually spare the time).

Finally, if you didn't catch this BBC iPlayer trailer on 1st April, you still have a few more days to view it.

Well that’s more than enough to be going on with. I’m off to tackle the daunting results of having washed and dried ten loads of family laundry without having subsequently folded or sorted – let alone ironed (as if . . .) – a single crumpled item of it. Ho hum.

Although I won’t manage to get online, I am taking a creaky old laptop with me, so hope to have some time to tap in a few musings on recent good reads – among them Waterloo Sunset, Talk to the Hand, After You’d Gone , The Memory Box and the novel that’s currently taking the bookblogosphere by storm, Daphne.

Short uncertain conversations for the ears

Just packing for a few days away in Berkshire with my girls, and felt inspired to share these - some of my favourite earrings.

They're made by Clare Hillerby, who is based in Edinburgh, and who specialises in mixing silver with fragments of paper from old printed books and vintage handwritten postcards. I love the allusive quality of her work with its hints of mystery and yearning. Clare describes the recycled snippets she incorporates into her jewellery as 'short uncertain conversations'.

I must have had these for three or four years now. You can see some of Clare's more recent work here and here.