Award-winning Scottish publishing and design
The revival of my eighteenth-century balloon-o-mania was inspired after some recent walks around Clachan of Camspie and Milton of Campsie (just north and east of where we live) during which I discovered that that balloonist, Vincent Lunardi, landed in Campsie Glen at the conclusion of his second flight from Glasgow in November 1785. After wowing…
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Hello, it’s Michelle here, with a post about Marianne North (1830–1890), a Victorian traveller and nature artist who left an extraordinary legacy. Painting 684. North painted the sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) from a garden specimen in Java. For almost 140 years North’s paintings have been on permanent display in the gallery she established at the…
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Here, at Carbeth, we live in a landscape underwritten by many rich and complex human stories. Neolithic people lived and travelled through Carbeth many thousand of years ago and, since these early settlers, this landscape has many stories of passage to tell, from seventeenth-century cattle drovers, to nineteenth-century railway navvies, to the walkers on today’s…
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I sometimes feel that I’m unusual in my love of ends. As a project draws to completion, and especially if it has involved a lot of different shades, I really look forward to sorting all the ends out. I don’t find this process onerous. It’s just a question of setting aside enough time and being…
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Hello! It’s Michelle here. Today I’d like to share some words and images about suffrage spectacle and visual identity, a topic that recently came back to my mind through Kate’s writing in her Wheesht essay ‘Elevate’ on Ann Macbeth’s collaborative suffrage quilt. Anne Macbeth’s suffrage quilt as a suffrage banner. © Museum of London The…
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Good morning, and happy Friday, everyone. Thanks so much for your comments on yesterday’s post. I’d especially like to thank Vivienne Richmond, who kindly shared the booklet that accompanies the exhibition she curated about the darning and needlework collections of Whitelands College. Like many samplers, those in Vivienne’s exhibition originate in the classroom – eighteenth-…
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Good morning! Are there garments in your wardrobes from which a particular event or association is difficult to shake? I have friends, for example, who after wearing a certain dress at a funeral, have found that putting it on again becomes difficult. I’m a particularly garment-attached person, and there’s perhaps no garment to which I’m…
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After we published my oatcake-inspired cardigan, Land o’ Cakes the other day, Tom reminded me of his favourite oatcake recipe that he’d included in our Buachaille book some years ago. This is a great recipe for whipping up a quick bread-replacing staple (and as long as the mill producing your oatmeal doesn’t also make wheat…
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Have you been following Claudia’s pattern reveals from Colour Moves on Ravelry and her blog? The designs shown in recent days are some of my favourites from the collection, and include: Gradient Mesh – a fabulous beanie-and-gauntlet set featuring a wash of colour across a neutral background . . . Velino – a simple mitt-and-slouch…
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Morning, everyone. Hope you are all very well and looking after each other. The whole team here is fine, and we feel extremely grateful for our internet connections and well-established methods of remote working. Sam is at the warehouse, in happy solitude, and will continue shipping anything you order, both locally and internationally, as long…
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You may remember that last year at KDD, we celebrated International Women’s Day by designing and knitting a commemorative blanket together with our good friend, Felicity Ford. Celebrating 30 diverse creative women, our blanket was created with the central aim of using our crafty skills to educate each other about the many different ways in…
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Today’s post is inspired by a visit to a local art and craft exhibition and reading a chapter in Kate’s recent book: Wheesht
Post by Sam
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