Half the year over already!
Fave 5 from the blog
- A visit to two local cottage gardens
- 1000 sales!
- My Peapod pouch from Redbubble
- A look around my house
- How I do my product photography
New Stuff
- Happy Gingerbread Man Wooden Brooches
- Bath mats, spiral notebooks and iPhone power cases
- Sunflower paper cuts
- Trays, backpacks and skirts
Links I Loved
- Really enjoying Kenji’s food-heavy China travel diary series at Serious Eats.
- Also great: their series of posts about tea. I am learning a lot.
- Abby Glassenberg has a couple of eye-opening articles about the fabric design industry – working without contracts and how much designers earn.
- A fun look at what astronauts have been eating in space throughout the decades.
- Related: The Martian finally has a trailer and I cannot wait.
- Enjoyed these photos of creative folks’ pencils, mainly because many of them are knife-sharpeners. Pencil sharpeners are for losers.
- David Lebovitz visits the Le Creuset factory to see how it’s made.
- The Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer spin-off looks so much fun.
Reading
Yay, I finished re-reading the Wheel of Time! 3.5 months is not bad for 14 enormous books. I’m really glad I did this as it was so much easier the second time, when I could mostly remember who everyone is and could skim all the boring chapters (sorry Perrin, you are 80% tedious). I hope they sort out all the legal issues and get the TV series going because it could be really fun.
SUPER looking forward to reading something else now.
Unread books update: 0 down, 2 added, 13 to go.
Watching
Jurassic World
I hadn’t even seen Jurassic Park all the way through until a few years ago, but I was pretty excited to see this and it was pretty awesome. I loved all the park stuff and would totally go, even if they just had animatronic dinosaurs. I also hope they’re making a Rollercoaster Tycoon with Dinosaurs videogame. The plot was kind of silly, until I realised it has a lot in common with my second-favourite idiotic film Deep Blue Sea (my favourite is The Core), and then I forgave it everything, even the frustrating sexism (this review is 100% on the money, and hilarious. Seriously, no-one in the entire universe would wear high heels while encouraging a T-Rex to chase them through the jungle).
Japan: Earth’s Enchanted Islands
If you missed this three parter then get ye to iPlayer pronto (actually, you have another 3 weeks left to watch it). It’s your usual high standard BBC nature documentary, but focusing an episode on each of the three big islands with barely a shot of Mt Fuji, let alone geisha or Akihabara. It’s heavy on the animals, but also some interesting stuff about the people and plants and weather. I still really want to visit the southern islands.
Parks & Recreation
Since Lovefilm have been ignoring P&R on my rental list for years now and sending me literally anything else, I have had to resort to other means. I thought I might as well go back and rewatch the whole thing, and I’m so glad I did as it was still hilarious and now I get to watch some new episodes.
Game of Thrones
Bit of a patchy season that was generally pretty exciting and fun, but also a bit too grim in places and with a lot of plotting that doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it too much, especially as a longtime book reader. I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying the move into unpublished stuff though and not knowing what’s going to happen, particularly since some characters are so far removed from their book plots that it’s still going to be fun to read those later. I am still Team Stannis, until I see what he does in the books.
Girls
I’m never sure if I even really like Girls that much (and the characters are certainly all awful people), but it’s always doing something unexpected and is generally entertaining. Season 3 might be my favourite yet.
The Game
This looked like my kind of thing, but I had to wait and catch up as I thought it might be too confusing to watch another 80s cold war drama alongside The Americans. I needn’t have worried though as a) it was actually set in the 70s and b) it was total fluff. It was extremely pretty to look at though – the actors were all overshadowed by the interior of Birmingham Library. It reminded me a lot of The Hour, though the plot was even more ridiculous and I guessed every single twist.
Plus a lot of tennis. It’s one of the few things I really enjoy working along to. I plan to do a lot of writing during Wimbledon.
What Did Lovefilm send me?
The rest of 24: Live Another Day, which was great all the way through and would probably be in my top 2 or 3 seasons. I’m very tempted to do a rewatch next time I run out of things to watch. Also The Monuments Men, which was pretty terrible for such an interesting story. Maybe I should read the book.
Listening
I haven’t listened to anything new this month, though there are a few things I want to check out soon. In the meantime, here’s Mito Natsume so you can get this stuck in your head too. Choki choki!
How was your month?
