Crochet Lesson 1

So we heard you, we will now be making videos for how to either knit or crochet or any other weird new craft we try, we are starting with crochet because it has become one of the most popular crafts in the last 20 years.

Hope you learnt something cool and forgive any odd bits in the video, it is my first time attempting something like this.

Love Chandré

P.S. We know we were horribly quiet for a few weeks, we had exams and evaluations, so we hope that the next few weeks of content will make up for the radio silence.

5 ways to get into watercolour painting

Watercolour is, so I am told the most difficult of all the paints to master. I used to think they were wrong, it had to be acrylic which dries so much faster and always felt far more unforgiving than watercolour. Recently I have been experimenting with watercolours for my artist book in painting and even mixing my watercolours with my other major which is printmaking. Though my obsession with watercolours is visible with the blogs design, Clara and I both like watercolours but I think I might be the more hardcore fan of it (Can one be hardcore about watercolour?).

Birthday present for bestie, testing watercolour illustration

Whilst I am far from an expert, I realise that in the two extremes of art mediums for painting that we do at Varsity I find calm in oil painting and extreme creativity in watercolours. I think I am more willing to experiment with different looks and feels in art when using the humble watercolour and paper as opposed to the hardcore dedication of the oils. This said, I love movies and BBC Historic Dramas about the Austen period where women paint utterly beautifully dainty watercolours and not being good at watercolours as apposed to cooking made you less of a woman. Seriously it is delightfully funny in a purely feminist way of oh how upper middle classes and the upper class where at that time. I don't remember ever reading these statements in an Austen Novel but I could have missed it.

Linoprint on watercoloured paper with hand stitched border

Through a lot of research (okay I mean a lot of Pinterest), I have been seeing some utterly amazing watercolour paintings and wonderful techniques on how to get started. I thought I would share the top 5 tutorials of how to get started and basic equipment.

5 ways to get into watercolour Painting:

1. The Alison Show has well written beginner tutorials on watercolour, go check it here
2. This seems to be a printable with some basics that are useful. 
3. How to do calligraphy with watercolours.
4. Mixing watercolours, a pretty and useful tutorial 
5. For pure inspiration of modern watercolour work

5 ways to tie a scarf

Okay so today is the first day of 5 ways to... it is our new series with cute and easy tutorials made either by us or our many hours prowling through the internet and best tutorials we can find. With tutorials, it is going to be either quick and simple with 5 steps or 5 different ways of doing something most of us do every day.

Clara and I wear scarves a lot, she wears them for slightly different reasons than I do but in the end we are both scarf obsessed and it is odd to see either of us not wearing a scarf at least once in a week so I figured why not share all the wonderful ways we like wearing our scarves with you.

What do you need to follow these tutorials?

1. Square scarf preferably a smooth fabric such as silk, satin or very fine cotton.
2. Normal scarf pashminas work wonderfully
3. Superlong scarf 

PinUp Hair scarf:

I love the pinup scarf look, it is a great way for me to get my curly bob under control when the weather is rainy and my hair just won't listen to anything that I say or want. I use a silk scarf because it helps smooth my hair and doesn't dry my hair the way cotton would. 

Steps:

1. Fold scarf in half then fold till it makes a funny sort of rectangle.
2. Have the broadest part of the fabric at the back of your head, the ends facing forward.
3. Tie into a knot
4. Either tuck the ends back into the scarf or tie a bow if your scarf is long enough. 

The Bow

Is there anything that makes one feel more like mini Mouse than a bow?

Steps:

1. Using your normal scarf, drape it around your neck with the ends hanging in front of you.
2. Knot loosely more or less where you want the bow to end up (This takes practise to get the distance right).
3. Carefully tie it into a bow, wither by knotting to loops together or by doing the bunny in a burrow method. 

Too infinity: 

Sometimes your favourite scarf really just needs to be infinite for a little while.

Steps:

1. Tie the end of your scarf, again pashmina or shorter length works well.
2. Knot the one end to the other end, either both ends directly to each other or just a corner of each end, this is personal taste.
3. Be bold and wrap this around your neck a few times. 

My Favourite: 

Whether the weather is wintery or summery this is my usual go too, the perfect casual but oh so smart way to a scarf. 

Steps:

1. Fold the scarf (Longer the better the drape of the fall) in half.
2. Loop the half around your neck so the loop is on one side and the ends on the other side.
3. Push the ends through the loop and pull tight. 

The Summer Sunner:

Pretty over a basic top or dress, this one is a pure statement.

Steps: 

1. Fold a giant triangle,  out of your widest scarf.
2. Putting the triangle over a shoulder, carefully pull the ends tight so that it hangs around your neck. 
3. Tie into a simple knot and voila.
4. If your scarf is superheavy, you can use a fun broach just to secure it onto your clothes. 

I used rather bright scarfs as they are the easiest to see what I was doing on a photograph. you honestly don't have to go buy bright scarves, these look just as wonderful with more neutral scarves. 

Breakfast of yum and chubby thighs

One thing about me and Clara is that we are both foodies, which means we spend way to much time in restaurants and a lot of our money on food. So when we or one of us finds a good place that makes us go oooh yum, we feel the need to share it with the world.

The model, since I forgot to take a selfie or have him take a picture of me, is Fluffy (Stephen).

We went to Craft in Parkhurst, they have a wonderful breakfast menu and have a few Paleo or banting options , so fairly diet friendly unless you are on an insane diet, they even have fruit and muesli. Though Fluffy and I didn't do diet friendly, we seldom do when it is the two of us.

Fluffy likes a good burger and when they had a breakfast burger including any two coffee based drinks of your choice for R90, we both decided cool deal. This was still fairly on budget since 2 cafe lattes work me out on average R45 when I go out and a decent burger is roughly R70. This means although it isn't cheap it still is fairly affordable in a weird way.

So want to see the amazing burger that tastes like 3000 calories in one bite but is so good you land up licking your fingers?
Yes?
Cool, here the breakfast burger:


Oh did I forget to add the best part of it? Scrambled eggs instead of chips, makes it feel more breakfasty.

Here is their website, address and contact number is on it.

Crochet Block Challenge

I love crochet, I knit as well but the instant feeling of gratification one gets from crochet can not be ignored. So after being out of it for a little while, I saw this morning a facebook group for crocheters were starting a block a day blanket. After carefully reading the guidelines, I figured why not do one?

How it works:

1. Pick a yarn (Colours and textures).
2. Pick a pattern, there a thousands for free on raverly, including this one.
3. Pick a hook that works comfortably for your hand.

Note, I didn't buy all the yarn, I have two balls of I love yarn French Affair that I had gotten as a present. So using them and then will be getting a the next colour. I am thinking of muted greens, blues and white for the colour scheme.

I also got a puppy for assistance, he is very keen and a great use-my-moms-foot-as-a-pillow, assistant. 

The aim of this is to have a wonderful blanket by the time the year is finished, I am honestly going to be keeping an eye on how big this gets so that I don't land up with a blanket bigger than my room.

Dress my imaginary house

I am starting to nest, that stage in life where planning the future home is getting important, to be able to put up any curtains I want and to have a say in the couch.

My need to nest is not helped by the internet and certain pc games that allow me to build whatever home I want to build. I am fairly sure my fiancee is getting sick of me dragging him into furniture stores and sending him pins of things I am convinced we will need when we live together.

I may or may not have bullied him into letting me decorate his sort of flat, (Its part of his folks home but has a kitchen and own area so I am counting it as a flat). He teased me that I will be using the special box of stuff I am collecting of cute fun stuff for when we have our own place but somehow I doubt my owl teapot will be of much use in his area.

Things I learnt from  months of crawling through the internet:

1. White paint, is nearly 1000s of different shades and how to take the light you have in account with the shade of white that you chose, learnt this here. Not that we will be painting his room, but future home yeah.
2. The layout of the room is probably more important than what we often think.
3. Figure out all the thing the area needs to fill and then what you need in order for the room to work.
4. Sometimes you can do small things that have a big impact, for cheap.
5. Organise your space, seriously just that can make any place look better.

Ode to the little black dress

We all know the Iconic little black dress, most of us have at least one in our closet for a night out or a special event. Little Black Dress and purples or little black dress with Doc Martens, depending on your look, we love it and you in it.

Dress from YouMeWe

So one of my best friends (I have 5 of them), is getting married and wants the bridesmaids to wear black dresses, this caused the great, oh wow I don't have a black dress anymore that fits moment. This week is the pop up shop of SAFashion week, Clara will tell you more about it. We went and walked around just to see the dresses and whats new and hot. I found myself obsessed with their dresses and the prices are really good for what you get. Best part, they do custom tailor dresses to any body shape and size, no diets needed.

What I am happy about is their two main deigns for dresses are multi purpose, the way you tie it or the way you wrap it changes them from tops, skirts to dresses, the one has 12 ways to tie it and the one in the picture has 8. So basically you have a black or any amazing print you want, item of clothing that fills a huge gap in your cupboard without taking a lot of space.

If you want, you can contact the girls behind YouMeWe and go to a wonderful day in their studio trying on dresses and giggling while figuring an outfit out.
Hopefully we will be posting a lot more about them in the near future.

How to contact them:
Facebook
Twitter
Website

Please note this was not a Sponsored Post.

Happy dress shopping,
Chandré

Green Beans and Coffee, I say I am

Sometimes amazing artists walk with flair and an in your face attitude of I am so amazing that you should bow down and kiss my feet. John Robbertse does not do this, he is great, on the verge of becoming famous and yet walks with a quiet humbleness and openness about him that is far greater than his amazing art.



So Clara (The Ginger) and I, did a quick and easy interview with him. Well how hard could five questions be?

1. The ice-breaker or calm down question of ours, if you could chose would you rather hug an honey badger or a grizzly bear?

Honey Badger [I did a happy dance in my seat about this ( Honey badger 2-Grizzly bear 3)] because
you can cradle it like a baby.

2. What is currently your biggest inspiration?

There was a few seconds pause before he answered, The Sea, Van Goghs' tragic life, Dali and fairy tales. The eccentricities of how life works and (I think the most current one) his own heritage as an Afrikaans person, the culture and the society of it.

3. Tell us about Spoons:

He is fascinated by spoons and the stories they have to tell. A spoon is an object that has been used so many times and so many hands have touched them as spoons are one of the most commonly used items. he loves found objects and up-cycling by giving new life into old things, his entry to the Sasol New Signatures art competition is evidence of this (pictured above), he likes giving almost human qualities to inanimate objects, a comment about the positive and the negative parts of society.

4. Favourite medium?
"Oil paint definitely, it has such a rich history in art. it is the motherboard or mafia of all art mediums. It is the rockstar of all mediums." Which is cool since John is an amazing glass artist as well.

5. Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
1 or 2 solo exhibitions as well as travelling around the world and hopefully lecturing art somewhere.

If you want to get a hold of John, he is on facebook. We will be following him and hopefully having more to do with him in the future.

Books to Read before the end of the year

I used to be one of those people that if you saw me, there would be a book in my hands. my favourite way to spend the day would be on my bed, under a soft warm blanket reading with a cup of coffee and a grouchy cat.



I would love to say that I am still that girl but I really am not. I still want to be but life and hobbies and studies have gotten in the way of how much I read. Sadly unless you are studying English Literature and really love reading the classics sometimes reading a lot won't help you pass varsity.

The problem is I miss reading a good book and having that moment when your toes curl because the story is so good or crying because your favourite character died, always a fan Dobby. So I made a list 5 just 5 books that I really want to read before the year is through. They aren't studies related or even on the list of soon to be classic literature but they are books that I do want to read and hopefully will have me happy to have read them.

1. Helen Fieldings- Bridget Jones, Mad about the boy
I have heard it is a going to be classic, I have been meaning to read it for months, the problem; I hear it is very different from the first two Bridget Jones books and that makes me sad as I love those books so crossing fingers that the book will be good, for me that is.

2. Robert Galbraith- The Silkworm
JK Rowlings' other pen name, I really enjoyed the first one in the series, they were beautifully written, just a tad dark and the lead character Cormoran, is amazing, so as soon as I can get a copy that I can afford, I am buying a copy.

3. Robert Jordon- A wheel of time
The Ginger is the worlds almost biggest fan of these books, I have yet to read more than 5 pages of these, so obviously I am hoping that they will be as amazing as she keeps making them sound.

4. Eleanor Catton- The Luminaries
Everytime I walk past this book in the book store, I hear it calling my name, whilst I am fully aware not to judge a book by it's cover, surely when the cover calls you, one must respond? After all would they put a bad book in such a beautiful cover? 

5. Neil Gaimon- Coraline
It's a children's book but it looks amazing, it looks like what every child and child at heart should have read or be reading really soon.

Happy reading and many cups of coffee,

Cinnamon

Dying to colour wool

I love yarn, I spend way to much money on it and find myself obsessing about spinning and weaving, both crafts I do not yet do. A while back, I wanted to learn how to dye yarn but my access to dying yarn and knowing what I was doing is limited. After a lot of research I figured it out.

Clara aka the Ginger will be able to tell you all the fancy names of the dye processes, she mentioned them over coffee today and I completely forget what she called it. I think cause we were both so tired, printing is hard work.

So what you need:

• 1 Ball pure wool yarn
• 1 cup of Vinegar
• 1l of water 
• Gel food colouring
• Container

Steps:

1. Soak the wool overnight in a container, in the mix of vinegar and water. please note in this I soaked the entire ball after unwinding it and tying it into a large loop.
2. Carefully lift the wool out of the container and add a few drops of the food colouring to the vinegar water, intensene as desired, the more colour the darker the wool. 
3. Put the mixture in the sun for a few hours or a warmish place. 
4. Carefully remove the wool from the container, and rinse it clean. 
5. leave to dry, in order to dry it faster, I wrapped it around the back of a chair and put the chair in the sun. 

For the ombre effect, I put more food colouring in with every ball and added darker colouring as well. The exposure to the food colouring if you used enough viniger, results in the dye being picked up fairly fast by the wool. 

Steamworks

There is a restaurant in Johannesburg, called Steam works, they are very, very Steampunk. They are also amazing so we went there with a group of friends. So if you are looking for ideas of where to go soon, look here. Oh and you don't need to dress up.

We all dressed up, some of us wore goggles, some of us went all out insane. (Mostly the girls went insane, corsets were worn and rocked.) I am sharing some of the photos' my camera didn't like how dark it was and some of the photographs are unusable.

Sin, Ginger and Cinnamon

What makes Steamworks amazing, is they really do have amazing food and a mouth watering amount of craft beers, the bar area is amazing. It is a huge clock... 

Really is worth going to the place and having an amazing time there.

Zak

Fluffy

Hardus, Sin & Sias

Clara & Nico

So if you want to check it out and you are in Gauteng, here is their facebook page.

While the place is amazing and I can't even say for a pub the food is good because but for anything, the food is amazing. There was a bunch of foodies and beer lovers at the table and everyone sat comparing it to some of their favourite places or even the Capital Beer fest, if there is one next year we will review it.  

So here is the rankings:

Value for money 4/5 (They are expensive for students)

Variety of food 3/5 (Quite hard to eat here if you have dietary requirements)

Variety of drinks 5/5 (Would have been higher if they had better tea, they are after all steampunk)

Overall (8/10) just for it is amazing and we will definitely go again but not this month, we need to save again. 

If you are wondering where a lot of the steampunk stuff comes from, not all of it, go check out the amazing Sin's website and facebook page.

Inside story and burnt coffee with the Ginger

We have a ritual on Tuesdays, actually almost any day we both are on campus. We get coffee and sit and chat for a while, this can be quick or a lazy period of time. Sometimes we are having moments when we both wonder why the arts was a good decision, when we are tired and broke and hitting a wall, or we just compare pictures of cats and corsets, we haven't found cats in corsets though I am sure we would compare those too.

We have red benches on campus, outside of the cafeteria, if the weather is nice, the two of us and a lot of our friends, can be seen there when we aren't in class. I think; a lot of our lecturers think we are each others partners in crime. Don't worry we will be giving tours of where we work on campus soonish.

So here is the lovely Clara Jansen, the textile designer of our little duo or The Ginger on the blog. Clara is busy with her BTech in Textile design and an amazing dyer of fabrics. She and other designers and Arts have a Stall at DecorX in Johannesburg soon. 

What makes you giddy with excitement about your field? 

A room full of brightly coloured textiles e.g: indian fabrics. A lovely wallpaper or fabric, I will die for a scarf. (She wears one pretty much everyday, between her pixie cut and scarves, she has a signature look that is amazing.)

Are you inspired more by local design or more internationally?

Traditional crafts excite me, especially traditional textiles. Internationally crafts a craft unique to its country holds its own fascination. Locally the boom in hand printed textiles is also a source of different inspiration.

Are there particular countries that you want to go too?

Unsurprisingly the first thing she said was Scandinavia, she loves vikings and folk art of these regions. Eastern Europe and the Middle East, were also on the list of places to go and people to see.

What is the difference between a conceptual textile designer and a technical textile designer?

"Design for me doesn't have to be conceptual based, so that is a difficult question." Conceptual textile designers do more once off pieces and they do more art pieces or statements. Where technical designers will be more geared towards industry and the world of more mass produced textiles or textiles that are more towards the needs of people.

Would you rather hug a honey badger or a grizzly bear? 

"Grizzly bear," was replied with a huge giggle.