Adventures in Letterpress- Craft Book Review

Posted on by florencegrindall

Adventures in Letterpress

Adventures in Letterpress is one of those beautiful books that I bought a while ago and don’t ever really look at.  Because it’s not instructional I don’t feel the need to pull it out from under 17 other heavy books to look through it.  But it has lots of incredibly clever, artistic, and eclectic examples of letterpress printing.   Many of them are political and/or rude which makes them more interesting imo.

Letterpress printing uses a printing press to press a raised surface (say protruding letters) against a continuous roll of paper.  Letterpress was almost obsolete, with other easier techniques of printing available.  But, according to the Adventures in Letterpress blurb, artists and designers have taken is upon themselves to rescue letter-presses from scrap yards. This kind of art has become nichely popular (if that makes sense), as an antidote to the crazy digital age we live in.

 

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Tofu Steak

Posted on by florencegrindall

I found this recipe for Tofu Steak on Pinterest, but tracked it back to this It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken, a vegan recipe blog.  I always want to cook with tofu because it’s healthy, but tastes quite bland and once you open a packet it goes off within days.  This was a bit of a trial, but here’s what I did.

Tofu Steak

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Sebastian Faulks- Where My Heart Used To Beat- Book Review

Posted on by florencegrindall

I loved the title.  It’s taken from a Tennyson poem, that Faulks quotes at the start of the book.  Anyway, it’s the reason I bought the book.  Faulks’ more famous work is Birdsong from 1993, in which a women in the 1970’s tries to understand her grandfather’s experiences of WW1.  I never read it, but picked this more contemporary effort instead.  This also deals with war, although more focused on WW2 this time.

Where My Heart Used To Beat

Set in the mid 1980’s our protagonist, Robert Hendricks is prompted to revisit old memories of his childhood, a lost love, and war time combat after receiving an odd letter from a man who served with his father in the First World War.  The death of Robert’s father in the war has left a hole in his life, like many children growing up in the interwar period.  There is a compelling moment when teenage Robert looks at his teacher, injured in WW1, and doesn’t realise he is looking at his own future. Continue reading “Sebastian Faulks- Where My Heart Used To Beat- Book Review” →

A Beautiful Mess- Craft Book Review

Posted on by florencegrindall

A Beautiful Mess

A few weeks ago I went through the stack of craft books in my craft room, and one of them was A Beautiful Mess.  It’s a blog by a few ladies who I think used to run a vintage store but now blog full time.  They cover food, crafts, and clothing and style.  It’s evolved in the last few years into a sleek lifestyle blog for better or worse.  It’s the type of hipster lifestyle that I think I want but will never have.  One where you can wander outside in a summer dress and dutch braids, where you do photo shoots against brick walls holding guitars, and where you spend autumn in pumpkin patches.  Well where I live, no matter the season, it’s cold and rainy, there are no attractive faux urban backdrops to hand, and pumpkins exist for 1 week in a pile at the supermarket… I wonder how representative the photos on A Beautiful Mess are of their lives.

They sort of specialise in photography and there’s a lot of info and tips on their website.  They also do sell some courses but I’ve never tried them.  The book I have is a photo idea book, which has practical suggestions of what you can do with photographs such as personalised gift tags.  It also has a lot of creative ways to take photographs, not so much with technical insight this is more about how make the picture interesting with backdrops and props.  So if you want a nice instagram photo then this might be the book for you 🙂

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The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov- Book Review

Posted on by florencegrindall

Isaac Asimov is probably the daddy of sci-fi writing right?  He was extremely prolific, writing or editing about 500 books.  He was known for ‘hard’ science fiction, a sub-genre of sci-fi known for its scientific accuracy.  He wrote some of his most famous works in the 1940’s and 50’s though, so now it’s less about detecting scientific accuracy and checking whether his view of the future has actually come true.

I read Foundation a while ago, part of his famous Foundation series, which I enjoyed.  It begins with the Galactic Empire falling and a subsequent 1000 year dark age.  The book moves through subsequent generations trying to rebuild the galactic empire.   There are actually 7 books in the Foundation series, including some prequels added later on, but I stopped at the second book which was a little too confusing my little brain. Continue reading “The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov- Book Review” →

Analogue Photography

Posted on by florencegrindall

Here’s a few shots of near my house, with a moody grey sky.  These were taken with my Canon Ixus and 35mm APS film.  I am quite impressed with the clarity of the image and the depth of field.    I don’t have any really exciting to add to this.  Not much is happening in the shots as I was just using up the roll!

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Book Review- Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Posted on by florencegrindall

Ah, another author whose name I can’t pronounce, Chimanada Ngozi Adichie.  The Nigerian author is more famous for ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’, but that was 448 pages and ‘Purple Hibiscus’ was 336 pages so…It’s my thing to look up great books, and then see what else that author has written that is shorter!

Purple Hibiscus

This is the story of Kambili, a 15 year-old girl living in Nigeria who fears and reveres her father (I think the two can weirdly co-exist quite well).  He’s a leader of the community, extremely wealthy and well respected for his acts of generosity, his piety, and his determination to speak out against corruption in the country.  He is also a violent patriarch at home, regimenting his children’s lives and enacting extreme punishments for any indiscretion. Continue reading “Book Review- Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie” →

Film/Analogue Photos of Edinburgh

Posted on by florencegrindall

I used my Canon Ixus camera, which is an electronic film camera when we went to Edinburgh in July (for that classic Scottish summer weather…) The film is APS 35mm, which is super easy to put in but pricey, hard to get hold of, and not that many places can develop it.  But it’s easy to use and fairly reliable.  This is Arthur’s Seat, an ancient volcano about 250m above sea level.  You can see the great view over Edinburgh, and all the little people having a trek around Arthur’s Seat.

And this is the Edinburgh Botanical Garden, well worth a visit.  I love how the colours have come out in these photos.  It was a much sunnier and brighter day so the camera handled it a lot better.  I was also very impressed with the clarity of the images that came out, normally they are much grainier or blurrier.

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Craft Books

Posted on by florencegrindall

My craft ‘room’ is actually about 1/4 of a room as it also functions as our guest room so most of the space is taken up by a bed.  We also don’t really have enough storage space so my craft stuff ends up getting quite messy quite quickly.  So I was spending my second weekend tidying it up when I came to my stack of crafty books.  There’s a mixture of sewing, paper craft, knitting, and photography books. Continue reading “Craft Books” →

Book Review- The Stolen White Elephant by Mark Twain

Posted on by florencegrindall

This is one of those £1 Penguin classics, that offer a cheap chance to read classic authors without having to commit to read an entire book.  I’m not sure it entirely works however.  This was my first Mark Twain, and I didn’t find it particularly mind blowing, but maybe you need to sit down with a novel of his to ‘get’ him?

The Stolen White Elephant is the main and best story in this little collection, with a couple of others just there to fill up the extra space I think.  The Stolen White Elephant is the story told by a man who was to deliver a gift of the eponymous white elephant from the King of Siam to the Queen of England- because that’s how things worked back then I guess….

Twain is renowned as a ‘humorist’ which is an interesting tag, not funny but humorous…There was only one exchange really that seemed amusing to me:

‘He would not care if they were fresh of not; at a single meal he would eat five ordinary men.’

‘Very good; five men; we will put that down.   What nationalities would he prefer?’

‘He is indifferent about nationalities.  He prefers acquaintances, but is not prejudiced against strangers.’

So if that broke you out in raucous laughter than maybe this is for you.  But it’s hard to recommend as it’s just a short story.

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