The Eternal Magpie

easily distracted by shiny things…

Painted Shoes.

Jan 28th, 2008 by Claire

For health reasons which are far too boring to go into, I am currently selling twenty-one pairs of shoes. I am saving up to buy a pair of custom-fitted orthotic insoles, which basically restricts me to flat, boring, sensible shoes for evermore.

Of course, I am now seeing nothing but fabulous shoes, everywhere I turn,true religion knock off jeans! This month’s Elle magazine arrived with a “shoes & handbags” supplement. The newest issue of Simply Knitting (where I thought I would be safe!) has a picture of some amazingly-decorated mosaic shoes. And now Hannah has been painting on her shoes.

Hannah also links to more painted shoes and clogs:

Åsa Westlund has a range of beautifully painted high-heeled Swedish clogs. Even if you’re not keen on the style, there’s no denying that the artwork is absolutely beautiful.

I used to have a little collection of swedish clogs (the flat kind), until an attack of mould in the hideous basement where I was living infiltrated the wooden soles, and rendered them all wet and irreparable. Now, of course, I wish I hadn’t looked for pictures of clogs. I miss my patent purple pair (which all my friends kindly referred to as “those sawn-off wellies”), and I didn’t know they were now available printed with dinosaurs, cartoons and skulls!

I’m not allowed to wear clogs any more,true religion jeans cheap, so clearly I need to be looking at painted shoes instead. Etsy has some beautiful work, from two sellers in particular.

Hippy of Doom has the most beautiful ballet pumps painted with a Hokusai wave design. She also has an adorable pair featuring the tree spirits from Princess Mononoke.

Miss Bunny‘s hand-painted shoes often have an Alice in Wonderland theme. My absolute favourites were these “Eat Me, Drink Me” shoes,discount true religion jeans, which some lucky buyer must now be wearing with great joy.

Friends keep telling me that I should paint my own shoes, to make my disappointing orthopaedic future a little less dull. (Somebody in the USA has had this idea already!) I have painted Doc Martens, baseball boots and leather jackets in the past, but taking a paintbrush to a pair of extremely expensive shoes seems a bit scary. Mind you, it can’t be more intimidating than reproducing an album cover or a photograph on the back of someone else’s expensive leather jacket.

Maybe I should grab an old pair of shoes and a paintbrush, and give it a go.

Tags: inspiration, shoes

The Eternal Magpie

easily distracted by shiny things…

Knitting and photography.

Jun 15th, 2008 by Claire

I’ve just been updating my projects on Ravelry, and apparently I have completed 40 projects since I started knitting in 2005. Does that seem like a lot? And that doesn’t even include all the things I’ve unravelled, or the things I’m knitting right now!

Here are my two most recent knitting photographs:

The jacket on the left is Murmur, from Rowan’s The Next Big Thing book. Sadly it’s another one of those unfortunate incidents you often find when knitting or sewing – you spend lots of time, money and effort making a thing, only to discover when it’s finished that you don’t like it, or it doesn’t suit you.

So, it fits chest 36-40″, and it’s for sale! £40, or I’ll happily trade for 6 balls of Colinette Point 5. Any colourway, I’m not fussy.

The purple scarf on the right is The Yarn Harlot’s One Row Handspun Scarf. It will shortly be going up on Etsy for $30/£15, unless anyone really wants to grab it first?

I appreciate that it’s not really scarf weather, which is why I also took some photos of my most recent little felted bag. It’s in the same colourway as the jacket above, but I could not for the life of me get a good photograph of it.

Paul’s gone off to America with work, and he didn’t want to take his SLR with him, so I’ve lent him my little compact camera for the week. To begin with I was quite excited about playing around with Paul’s Canon EOS 350D. And then I tried to use it. Ugh,discount true religion jeans, what a pain!

For a start off, it weighs a ton, which is not very useful when you’ve got a sore wrist. Then I discovered that Paul had left the 70 mm macro lens attached,true religion jeans sale, which is no use at all when you’re trying to take a picture of a whole jumper,true religion outlet! I managed to change the lens to a 55-200 mm one, and discovered that I still had to stand approximately eighty-seven miles away from the jumper if I wanted it to be in focus. I also have a headache from squinting through the viewfinder.

I think the only thing I liked about using this camera was the short depth of field you get from these particular lenses. I can only achieve that with my camera when it’s on the macro or super-macro settings, and then it won’t focus if you’re more than 20-100 mm away from the subject.

Obviously my little Pentax Optio A30 has its limitations. It’s fiddly to focus it manually, you can’t change the lens, and it doesn’t shoot in RAW format if you want to fiddle with your photos in an artistic manner after you’ve taken them. But I love the large screen instead of a viewfinder, I love that you can choose to use all of the settings manually if you want to, and the super-macro setting is very good. (The “face recognition” software is rubbish though.)

Paul and I went for another walk round the lake yesterday, and Paul took some more lovely photos of birds. I was feeling quite envious of his camera and photography skills, and went back through some of my old pictures to find ones that I’d taken with the film SLR. There were some lovely ones in there, but I think I’ve taken some much nicer photos with my little Optio than I ever did with my old SLR.

In fact, my old Olympus OM10 (Quartz) has been sitting under the bed, mostly unused in the last ten years. Perhaps it’s time to dig it out and sell it on.

Tags: knitting, photos