Super Sunday

1. I am quite a fan of this new band, Friends, partly because the name choice is hilarious and will reclaim the word from the decade-long sitcom, but mostly because the song is rahlly good.

2. The East London Green Jobs Alliance has funding for the next year! Woop!

3. I downloaded Summer Camp’s debut album, Welcome to Condale. It is brilliant, is inspired by 80s bratpack films and teenage angst, and has a song on it called Brian Krakow. WHAT COULD BE BETTER?

4. I am back in the saddle again. This morning I cycled in London for the first time in well over a year. Cycling and walking around Brighton has been a bit of a luxury this past year, so today I decided to investigate the quieter cycle paths around my new house and I reckon that I can piece together a nice long, chilled pootle to my offices. Image from weheartit.

5. Massive win this week for the No Keystone XL Pipeline campaign over in the states! The proposed pipeline would have been a huge boon to the very environmentally destructive Canadian tar sands industry. It was basically a done deal, but 3 months of incredible campaigning has resulted in Obama delaying the decision – yay! You can read more about it here.

“Yes, the Spice Girls were created to cash in on “feminism” and “girl power,” at a time when those things were popular. Yes, the “Girl Power” slogan ripped off Riot Grrrl—although, actually, the Spice Girls ripped off girl groups like Salt-N-Pepa or TLC far more than they did Pacific Northwestern indie culture. But do you know what it looks like when someone “rips off” girls being empowered? Well… it sort of looks like… girls being empowered.”

6. Great great great post – In Defense of the Spice Girls. Now I don’t feel so bad about going to see them when I was 14!

7. I am feeling a bit depressed about the fact that it looks like I’m intolerant not only to dairy, caffeine and alcohol, but also wheat. It’s hard to be a good baker when you can’t use wheat or dairy! It would be SUPER if anyone could point me to any good recipes / websites / or cookbooks that are friendly to a positively MONKish dietary requirement, and that actually taste good. Thank you!

hanna ♥

On the road

Rides A Bike

Thanks to Casper ter Kuile for alerting me to this amazing tumblr – Rides A Bike – featuring old Hollywood stars and their steeds. I am just dying to make like Grace Kelly and ride a bike side saddle. How ridiculously impractical and yet SUPER COOL.

Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

Audrey Hepburn

And speaking of bikes, applications for the 2011 Otesha Project cycle tours are now open! Sign up for the most fun (and most challenging) 6 weeks of your life!

hanna ♥

4 Simple Goals – mega update no. 2

Okay, so one of my second goals was to craft more. I definitely haven’t done as much as I wanted to (that curtain material is still, well, material) but I did sew my friend a birthday present and I made another one an ipod cover, so not tooo shoddy. I did have big, mega plans to stock my folksy shop full of goodies, but that will have to wait till next year and after my 3 HOUR CLIMATE SCIENCE EXAM in January.

BUT. If people do want cute christmas decorations or stocking fillers I will make them to order! Visit the Shop tab at the top of the page, or click here! I’ve got two designs in the shop at the moment, but if you have anything special you want it to say, I can do that too. I can do anything!

hanna ♥

ArtCrank – a poster party for bike people

Last Friday night I went along to ArtCrank to support Laura from Otesha who was organising it and to purchase some posters! It was at the very hipster bike cafe Look Mum No Hands, so I didn’t feel too much of a plonker getting my camera out and taking these pics.

The guy in these end pics is the Director of Milltag who make very exciting jerseys, such as the one he’s sporting here. Much better than what’s at Evans, innit. Wish they made them for girls though… hint hint!

hanna ♥

Giddy up!

Good god I want one of these! “Horsey” by Eungi Kim from Korea is one of the shortlisted design entries in the Seoul cycle design competition. Kim says, “‘Horsey’ is an attachable bicycle ornament/accessory which makes one’s bicycle look horsey! The ‘horsey’ package includes wooden ornaments (horsey shape body), metal parts, and screws. The manual is very simple so that anyone can easily arrange it according to one’s needs. Through this ‘horsey’ project, I wanted to give a special look to bicycles so that people would care about cycling not only as transportation but also as a lovely pet.”

I would like to care about transportation as a lovely pet.

hanna ♥

Crank your craftivism

If you are in London this week then let me point you in the direction of these two wicked events. Laura from Otesha is helping organise Art Crank, “a poster party for bike people” at super cool bike cafe Look Mum No Hands in Old Street. Um, yes please. Posters are all limited edition and priced from £20. Take a sneaky peek at one below, although I’m not sure if personally I could deal with seeing a bloody knee on my wall every day, but that’s just me.

Next up, we’ve got ‘Craft for justice with the Craftivist Collective‘ at Paper Dress Boutique, 114-116 Curtain Road, Shoreditch on Thursday. It’s from 6.30-8.00pm, entry is free but a donation of £3 is encouraged! You’ve already met Sarah from the Collective in the Girl Swoon series where she laid out her plans for craftivist world domination, and she’s at it again with this event…

“As part of our ongoing commitment to exposing social injustice, the Collective will be contributing to Norwegian artist Lise Bjørne Linnert’s current project, entitled DESCONOCIDA UNKNOWN UKJENT. The project uses the art of embroidery to highlight and protest against human trafficking and femicide, specifically in the city of Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican border. Since 1993, 800 women have been brutally murdered in Ciudad Juarez and hundreds more have gone missing, while the Mexican government turns a blind eye. Prostitution in the region has increased 400% in the same time period.

We will be embroidering the name of one murdered woman on each label alongside the word “unknown”, in remembrance of the hundreds of unidentified victims of similar crimes worldwide. The project is a mass act of solidarity. So far, 2100 individuals in 27 countries have embroidered more than 4000 labels. The Craftivist Collective will add to that figure and help to spread awareness of these atrocities.

The venue is a lovely vintage clothes shop/cafe called Paper Dress Boutique. So come and support a local business by crafting in her cafe with a cup of tea or coffee.”

I’ll be at both so pop along and say hello!

hanna ♥

Super Sunday

I made it! I am alive, in Brighton and successfully finding wifi access in my new, absolutely wicked local, The Open House. Hoorah. So here is my sweet selection of favourite things from this week.

1. A homage to my home for the last 8 months, Flat Irresistible, that I’ve been sharing with Anna Collins. It’s been grand. The late night chats, broken windows, listening to Miike Snow on repeat, the too-many-bikes in the hallway, the smell of spray paint, even the horrible boys upstairs – I will miss you!

2. And onwards to my new home – Brighton! Yay. I don’t think it’s going to sink in that I’m not just on holiday for a long while yet. I’ve been wandering around the North Laines today with my family and it’s all just rather… AMAZING.

3. General bike lovin’. Check out this beauty I saw when popping out for lunch earlier this week.

4. My mum is a big Michael Ball fan (and if I’m honest so am I, hello, he was in the original cast of Les Mis). So when my friend Cress said she was working on his new chat show and could get us tickets we jumped! We sat right in the front row and saw Richard & Judy, Dom Joly, McFly, one of the Corr sisters (just one), Simon Callow to name but a few and it was hilarious. Clapping and whooping nonstop for 3 hours was a bit less hilarious, but we threw ourselves into it as you can see (that’s my mum, brother Jamie and sister Lauren).

5. I already blogged about the video I made with Josie Long but I didn’t tell you how much I loved doing it! She is ridiculously nice and game for anything, even filming in the pitch black at the very top of a possibly-structurally-unsound-rhino-siege-tower with a police cordon round it and a bike light flashing in her face. So thank you Josie!

6. My friend Lewis (the one that isn’t Tom Hanks) was my saviour yesterday. As one of only two Brighton based friends, he picked up my house keys yesterday, helped me unload the van when I arrived, and then took me out to an amazing 80s night. It had some choice tunes, Big, Back to the Future and The Breakfast Club playing on a projector and vintage clothing stalls. Note to self: do not go vintage clothes shopping again when drunk.

7. How weird is that?

Picture from weheartit