All Things Considered

Le cool

Le cool is cool.

If you live in one of these busy, energy bursting, cosmopolitan cities, or are perhaps planning on visiting Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Amsterdam, London, Istanbul, Milan, and Roma in the future, then I highly suggest you click here now. 

Once you have signed up, you will receive a weekly, graphical email informing you of some select exhibitions, gigs, clubs, films, restaurants and bars that are going on in your chosen city.

If you would like to see what the Le cool team have sourced for this weeks cultural activities in London, click here.

Also available to buy, is a linen covered red book devoted to each of the above cities.

Julie Arkell

I can't believe I hadn't seen Julie Arkell's work until a few weeks back, when her beautiful dolls jumped out at me from the cover of Embroidery magazine.

The uniqueness of her dolls and creatures lie in her ability to mix medias such as stitch, knit, ephemera, vintage fabric,and papier mache so effortlessly.  She is known as a contemporary folk artist, which conjures up mystical images of fairy tales, folk art and legends  - all perfect when you see her work.

Julie says, "I am able to make pieces that express my feelings, thoughts and ideas, bringing past and present together".

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out where you can buy Julie's work or even where she is exhibiting next. I have also failed to find her website but perhaps she doesn't have one.

Julie has had a book published, simply called Julie Arkell: Home, which features her work and studio. You can buy this from Amazon.

Illustrations

I tried to find a translation  online, for the Polish words Pan Tu Nie Stal. Returned, were two quite different meanings; 'Mr. Herein Not Steel' and 'You has not stood here'. It seems that the online translation tools are not exactly in agreement on this one.

Pan Tu Nie Stal a Polish design blog, covers a variety of excellent images and illustrations taken from food labels and packaging, transport tickets, stickers and various books during the communist era in Poland.

If you like these bold, simplistic illustrations as much as I do, you may also appreciate this collection of images of children's books at Bloesem Weekend Read. Author Irene, has a fantastic sense of style and puts together an excellent blog, full of work from inspiring independent designers from around the globe.

I have been enjoying reading Bloesem since Irene began the blog a year ago, and I have now started viewing her new blog bkids - full of enviable items for little ones.

Flotsam

We took a walk from just outside Stiffkey to Wells Next The Sea and back yesterday. It was a perfect January day - a clear blue sky and a lazy winter sun just taking a edge off the chill.

I guess that in common with lots of people who have fallen in love with a part of a world and then relocated, as work life etc. takes over it's easy to forget exactly why you made the move in the first place.

Yesterday was a perfect reminder. Although we live closer to Norwich now, I'll always have a soft spot for Wells where I spent lots of time as a child.

Along Well's East Quay we found this stack of brightly coloured boxes discarded from fishing boats in the North Sea. I'm assuming they're flotsam (items that haven't purposely been thrown into the sea) as opposed to jetsam (which have).

3191

One of the first posts I made on All Things Considered, was about the photo blog 3191 of two artist friends, Mav and Stephanie, who have spent the last year capturing an image every morning, to later post side by side.

December 2007 brought an end to their year long set of beautiful sunrise images, and in 2008 they will bring us a year of evening shots. I'm intrigued by this new project, mainly because I fail to take a good photo with a flash. So I am looking forward to seeing how they will capture beautiful pictures without the flattering morning light, in the gloomy, dark months. But my curiosity will soon cease, as photo snapping will resume on the 18th of this month.