A linkful list

I'd said in my last post that I had some lovely links to share with you, and several are full of Liberty goodness. Last week, Nova emailed me and asked if I'd like to be involved in a Liberty Scrap Challenge whereby Jo of the Organic Stitch Company  would send me some Liberty scraps from which I could design a tutorial to share with you. Hurrah!

Liberty fabrics are so beautiful that they tend to speak for themselves (I feel you could almost just arrange them in a picture frame and you'd have an incomparable work of art), so the tutorial that I have planned in my head is relatively simple, but I'm so excited about it. I'll be sharing my offering with you in May. In the meantime, you can see the wonderful Liberty-inspired tutorials that have already been posted  for January, February and March, and join the Flickr group if you wish to play along or see what's being made.

I think I've mentioned Jo's lovely Etsy shop on here a few times already, but if you've missed it, then you'll find what always feels to me like an heirloom trunk full of nostalgia-filled Liberty prints, charm packs and even pre-cut binding. It's all delicious and it's all Liberty. Do go for a rummage.

Keeping with the Liberty theme, my mother-in-law recently gave me the book shown above about the history of the Liberty shop during the fifties and sixties. It's a beautiful book, full of glorious photographs and I've been enjoying reading it at bedtime. It's definitely worth investing in if you love Liberty, although, certainly the first half of the book, feels disappointingly written in some ways: slightly disjointed, offering up a sudden piece of slightly unnecessary minutiae in amongst a very general history that leaves you wishing for more detail. I'm guessing this isn't the fault of the author, but rather a lack of records from the period on which to draw upon in any other way. I'm yet to finish the book, but I'm hoping it improves as it travels into an era better documented.

However, one of my favourite aspects have been the brief historical references to the Silver Studio and their role in designing some of the fabric prints for Liberty during the first half of the 20th century.

My interest in the Silver Studio comes from the exhibition that the Museum of Domestic Architecture were showing at the Knitting and Stitching show last year. I've written at length about the exhibition here, but to precis, it displayed the artwork created for the studio by women in their own homes, due to their not being an accepted presence within the male-dominated confines of the studio itself. I was delighted to find when I checked recently that a book relating to this exhibition is now available.

It's a thin book, beautifully presented with snippets of information and some copies of the original records to accompany the artists' illustrations. It's a book that I've read as I've dried my hair each morning to facilitate reading it in tandem with the Liberty book. It's published by Middlesex University and you can find it here for £7.50. I think it's worth every penny.

Finally, some non-Liberty themed linkage! You may remember that I'd mentioned the Wiksten Tova pattern being made available as a downloadable PDF recently. I'm delighted to share with you, if you haven't already discovered for yourself, that Kerry of Very Kerry Berry is running a sew-along for the pattern, which would be super for anyone new to sewing who would like some hand-holding at every step of Tova-creation from fabric selection to sewing each seam! There is also now a Wiksten Flickr group so that you may oggle at all the beautiful Tovas that have already been made...it's obviously a super pattern as every single one of them looks wonderful.

I'm delighted that my blog has been nominated for a Dorset Cereal Little Blog Award. This is particularly lovely as I am a big fan of their cereals and the matt cardboard boxes they're packaged in, which, on an embarrassingly superficial level, make me feel happy purely because they make my cupboard shelves so pleasing to look at. Happily, my children love the contents of the boxes. If you enjoy reading my blog and you'd like to vote for me then you can click the icon above (and if you do, thank you, I'm really flattered and grateful).

To end, I'll leave you with a few quick links which speak for themselves:

A truism from Sew Tessuti; a suggested follow if you're on Twitter - it's totally un-sewing related, but every single tweet that @EasyLivingMag seem to put out there has something in it that I want to look at or that makes me want to reply (I refrain for much of the time for fear of seeming as though I have a tweet-crush on them); you know how I love a little pleaty-gathery goodness and so, naturally, I love this dress that Novita recently made; I've been enjoying using Lanolips 101 ointment this month after reading about it everywhere. I use the plain one, but my mother recently bought me the tinted version in Apples, which is also delicious!

I love it when people handpick links (often with amazing precision - a reader recently wrote to me with a list of freakily well chosen songs she thought I might like after reading that we were enjoying the Felice Brothers), so if you have any that you think I may enjoy then please do leave them in the comments!

Wishing you a happy Tuesday,

Florence x