Archive for May 2010

Hadley Freeman on Sex and the City

In Uncategorized on 24 May 2010 with no comments

Had­ley Free­man on Sex and the City:

The dif­fer­ence between how the women’s jobs are por­trayed in the TV show and the films is per­haps the best example of how low the lat­ter have sunk. In the show, we repeatedly see Mir­anda work­ing in her office as a part­ner in a law firm and, yes, the job is hard and time-consuming but she loves it and her suc­cess is a badge of pride. Ditto Sam­antha as a PR. Even Car­rie, who works as a news­pa­per colum­nist, a job I can per­son­ally assure you is not phys­ic­ally tax­ing, derives real sat­is­fac­tion from her work, to the point that her will­ing­ness to quit it for her Rus­sian boy­friend in the last series is an omin­ous sign. There is a whole epis­ode about the women’s dif­fi­culty in accept­ing Charlotte’s decision to quit her job when she mar­ries, and boy­friends who don’t take work ser­i­ously are seen as imma­ture freeloaders.

Cut to the films. In the first one, not only do we never see Mir­anda work­ing (because that’s obvi­ously less rel­ev­ant to women’s lives than watch­ing Car­rie have an orgasm over her new walk-in closet), but her job is the reason for Steve’s infi­del­ity, because he wasn’t get­ting enough atten­tion from his wife, who was work­ing to sup­port him. In the second film, guess what? She leaves the law firm! How could she res­ist after Steve sug­ges­ted she could “be at home [more] and help out around the house”? Sorry, I think I just burned my fin­gers while retriev­ing my bra from the fire.

Testing the embroidery waters

In Uncategorized on 22 May 2010 with no comments

Ran­dom notion of the week, and some­thing I’ve spent most of the week fight­ing against, is the urge to take up embroid­ery. For a start, I don’t like embroid­ery, and I really don’t want to spend any time dec­or­at­ing table­cloths with pic­tures of little blonde girls pick­ing tulips. Then I spent a night sew­ing bind­ing onto my tiny quilt, some­thing that was strangely enjoy­able. And then last week I found this blog, fea­tur­ing this and this and this, and for the first time in my life real­ised that my life wouldn’t be com­plete without an embroid­ery hoop and a huge array of bright, multi-coloured threads.

One trip to John Lewis later, and I’m the proud owner of a hoop. And abso­lutely noth­ing else.

Ahem.

How­ever, the true high­light of the day was a quick visit to Paper­chase, just as they were clos­ing for the night. I only man­aged a quick whizz round, but DO YOU SEE WHAT THIS IS?:

Food friends! Back in stock! How could you not act­ively fall in love with the little orange guy on the keyring loop?

Spoonflower fabric gorgeousness

In Things on 20 May 2010 with no comments

While I’ve known about Spoon­flower’s fab­ric print­ing ser­vice for a while, I’ve never used it because I’ve never felt like I had any ideas worth print­ing. But until this week, the real bene­fit of it had never really sunk into my head– you can buy other people’s designs, too. And why wouldn’t you, when they are as beau­ti­ful as those by tro­is­mi­ettes?

Admit­tedly, the reason you wouldn’t, and the reason I haven’t so far is because I just gave all of my money to the won­der­ful Fab­ric­shoppe, but this will be my next pur­chase, along­side some of Heidi Kenney’s fruit and veg. See­ing as I fell in love with the Paper­chase Food Friends range just that second too late to actu­ally buy any, that fab­ric is the next best thing.