the sourcerer: Liberty Lawn

Showing posts with label Liberty Lawn. Show all posts

Friday, September 30, 2011

Doing that thing that I do.

I love it when my sourcing takes me out Kalk Bay way, on a breezy sunny day.

The roadworks continue to frustrate, but there are so many treasures along the way. I wondered around the Sobeit Studio for a while, they have umpteen beautiful things to covet. Angels and lions, paintings and furniture... a bracelet made of small interlocking silver skulls @ R 9 950. Sigh.

Just downstairs is David Bellamy's fantastic fabric shop. The Liberty lawn always fills me with desire. (there are quite a few pieces in my fabric chest). Today I bought the starry clouds for some pillow slips. Bbellamy & Bbellamy also stock a dizzying array of Sanderson Linens, Japanese indigo linen, cotton velvet, crewel work, etc.

Kwagga Books has a sixties edition of Elizabeth David's "French Cooking" in the window. Sometimes it's so hard to obey those pesky commandments.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Makes me feel like sitting on the lawn with my Pimm's no.1

Thanks again Miss T, for the fabric shopping trip to Liberty's. I'm saving the purple satin ribbon.

My dear Dad's recipe for Pimm's no.1 Cup:

One and a half tots Pimm's

Half tot Grenadine

Dash of Bitters

Cucumber Peel (one in glass &; one for decoration)

1 Slice of orange

1 Slice of lemon

1 Maraschino cherry on a stalk

Shake and top up with lemonade and ice.

How I miss him.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Red Procrastination

Finally finished. It hung half-heartedly on Shirley (my dummy) for almost three months. All because I hate making buttonholes. Then I had an epiphany: press studs! So now red has one button, no holes and drucknopfe. Bouton pression. Snap fasteners. And for anyone wondering - it's Liberty Lawn, from David Bellamy's shop in Muizenberg. I love that shop.

You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.