I had the very lovely honour of designing Cliona and Paul’s wedding invites. I created a set of acrylic stamps for them to customise every paper-related aspect of their wedding. Hard work but everything had a nice, hand-applied feel to it. It was one of best weddings I’ve been to; a supercool gospel choir, lovely folks at our table, tear-inducing heart-felt speeches, a gorgeous setting and a great atmosphere. And they also happen to be some of the most talented people I know. Good luck for the future you two!
Street Feast is a brilliant concept. It’s one day in the year where neighbourhoods across Ireland host a lunch in their streets, local parks or front gardens. It’s a great excuse to share good food and meet interesting people who live nearby.
Samuel and the Street Feast team asked us to help them get the word out so I developed a friendly, illustrative look and feel, a custom typeface and a downloadable guide to running your own feast. If you’re in Ireland hop along to streetfeast.ie and join the party on the 18th July.
We (Atto) hosted a sugru HACKquarium on Tuesday night at the Black Box and invited 40 chums to come and hack their old stuff better. We’ve been working with Jane (sugru inventor) for about 3 – 4 years now and we’re totally in love with the product. They’re the best people in the world to work with too. Long live sugru.
If you’re a bit of word geek like me (I have a file for collecting good words – sad but true) then I hope you’ll love Artwiculate. It’s a twitter-based Word of the Day competition that helps clever people look clever and helps the rest of us learn new words.
Pete came up with the idea at the start of summer and we teamed up with coding ninja, Stuart to make it all work. It’s early days yet, we just launched it this week but so far people seem be enjoying it. I love it when a good plan works out.
Follow @artwiculate on Twitter to play along and celebrate your inner word geek.
Dear-oh. So much has been happening I’ve neglected you, my dear bloggy friend of mine. I had the excuse that I was writing for another blog for a while so I didn’t have time but that justification exists no longer. So there’s a lot of catching up to do and much fun to be shared.
Here’s some hollybob photos from our Grand European Road Trip. This has to be one of my most favourite hols ever and I get itchy feet when I think about it. We drove through the UK, Germany, Switzerland, France, UK and home again. Truly epic. I have discovered that I may secretly be Swiss, am so in love with those big sleeping, toblerone shaped giants that populate the land. The colours are so crisp and people are lovely.
We discovered that:
- People will trip over themselves to help you if you’re Irish.
- German people are lovely and are great at being very helpful.
- Switzerland is terribly expensive but absolutely adorable.
- You should not try to drive through the Tour de France, despair and lostness will soon ensue.
- The south of France is a bit crap (sorry) but La Dordogne is a river lover’s dream come true.
- Trying to speak different languages at every opportunity is scary but fun when people actually understand.
I keep seeing sausage dogs everywhere these days. I think they’re totally great, they look so full of personality. I petted one at the weekend for the first time and he was so lovely. I think his owner was a little terrified by my enthusiasm though.
I’m so excited and and very proud to present the Good Little Company. We’ve been working with the lovely bunch at Finnebrogue over the past couple of years to create a new brand of super-sausages for families.
I could waffle all day about this but to cut a long story short, they’re the best sausages you could buy (85% outdoor bred pork, no artificial nasty chemicals, gluten-free, the list goes on) AND we’ve worked out a great plan with Christian Aid so that every time you buy one pack of Good Little Sausages, someone in a country like Malawi gets a meal every day for 2 weeks.
We worked on every part of the brand which was so satisfying to create a really complete look and feel. The characters are actually a bit of a spin off from the Bark Nugget animals I used to draw in art college. I even got to produce an animation to show off Meal for a Meal. We’re so chuffed, this is the best job we’ve got to work on in a long time and we get to make a bit of a difference in the actual real world!
Go look and join the Facebook group or follow the Twitter and the Good Little Company will donate a meal on your behalf. Even better – go buy the sausages in Tescos (they’re great with mash and onion gravy).
Wow it’s been a long time. In the gap we’ve been to Amsterdam, I’m finally facing my fears and learning to drive and I’ve gone sock monkey making mad. Here are some skully dudes that were the by product of a brand job I was working on recently.
2009 sounds futuristic n’est-ce pas? I hope you had a lovely break. We had a Kerr/Sloane Christmas day and then we jetted off to sunnny skies avec la famille. Lots of reading (LOVING the Time Traveller’s Wife) and food and poker and swimming in the sea.
This is something we’ve been working on for a long time now and we’re pretty excited. We love the thought of spreading the Mrs P joy in classrooms around the world (cheesy I know). If you’re a teacher or a parent, please spread the word. Get on the forums and start chatting. Mrs Pancake’s ever-so 2.0 – you can find her on Facebook and Twitter too.
Just a quick note to let you know about our wee project for Kiva (Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, you can lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world – it’s a super cool charity that we want everyone to know about)
We’re great believers that “the best place to store food is in someone else’s stomach” so we came up with Build a Beard Workshop. You’ll see for yourself, but basically for everyone who posts a picture of themselves with one of our free beards, we’ll put $1 in a Kiva account, probably forever.
If it’s massively successful, we’ll try to find other partners to match fund, or to make sure that the money stays in Kiva forever, but we shall see. It’d be lovely if you could do yourself a beard and post it! Plus if you have a blog, stick it up and we’ll link to you – help us go bankrupt and spread the word ;-)
The second part of our holiday was super relaxed. We lived with our chums Shane and Alli who have similar tastes to us when it comes to having fun. Plenty of good films and good tv series, hilarious fancy dress partays (Big Lebowski Night 2008) …
… eating lots, exploring,
learning (pete and I learnt to knit! Thanks Alli!) big chats/debates/arguments (boys), swimming in rivers …
making cool stuff (girls) and generally having big laughs :-) Thanks to the wonderful Magees for being good chums.
This is such a ridiculously late post I’m a bit embarrassed. NY and Canada were bundles of fun in very different ways. Thanks so so much to everyone who gave me tips for places to visit. Swissmiss gave me loads of lovely advice and Rosemary Travale‘s google map was amazing – the KinoKuniya bookstore opposite Bryant Park was the best! I could have spent severe amounts of moolah there. I did buy a great inky brush pen which I’m still getting to grips with but I think it’s big winner so far. I’ll post up some tests later.
We ate well. Most of our plans were based around food. We had high hopes for Katz Deli and it was certainly an experience. I discovered I wasn’t a big pastrami fan but it was a pretty cool place to eat. I still don’t think my stomach’s forgiven me though.
We also drank copious amounts of extra shot iced caramel macchiatos and frappucinos to keep our little legs going. Pizza and bagels lived up to expectations. My big whinge is that you can’t get everything bagels here.
Our special birthday meal was at Sushi Yasuda which blew us away. We sat at the bar and got master Yasuda san himself and were slightly terrified and in complete bliss. We got the Staten Island ferry afterwards and talked about the sushi the whole time. What geeks!
Pete also got his beloved Macbook Air after much deliberation and wrangling with the uninformed staff at the Apple store.
I loved New York. We visited Kid Robot, Bronx Zoo, Top of the Rock, MOMA, lounged around Central Park and loads more and there was so much that we didn’t get crammed in. There’s a lot of fun to be had there methinks.
We’re back! The jollies were super duper fun but I’ll tell more about that later. We got some great news while we were away. The BBC have given us the page impressions stats of the Sesame Tree website and it looks like it’s making a lot of people smile. Here’s some figures to ponder over:
April 14,654
June 253,232
August 2,662,160 (wowees)
We worked so hard on all the illustration and animation and we’re chuffed to bits that it’s a big winner. Big thanks to the lovely folks at FRONT and BBC NI for collaborating on this.
This one’s dedicated to my dear salty sea dog of a dad who could quite happily live on the sea and never touch land.
Completely off-topic, has anyone got any good tips for must-see things in New york? We’re going on our jollies on the 23rd August and spending 4 days in New York and a fortnight or so with our lovely chums Shane and Alli in New Brunswick, Canada. I AM SO EXCITED.
Big love and hugs to Ben & Sarah Behzadafshar :-)