Last Friday evening I went to ‘Scribble Dublin’, which was hosted by Designist a design store on Dublin’s South Great George’s Street. The ‘Scribble Dublin’ event showcased product design company Klickity’s scribble frame. The Klickity scribble frames are exactly what they say they are; frames to scribble on, or indeed as the mood takes you to decorate in whatever way your imagination decrees.
Category Archives: Dublin
Scribble Dublin: Klickity at Designist
Filed under Designers, Dublin, Sustainable/Green
Irish Writers’ Centre
A couple of Saturdays ago when I was in Parnell Square visiting the Dublin City Gallery I popped into the Irish Writers’ Centre, which is a few buildings down from the gallery, to pick up a leaflet giving details of their creative writing classes. Such was the pull of the place that there and then I signed on the dotted line for membership.
A Day in Dublin
I have been thinking wistfully these past few weeks that it has been some time since I last visited Paris. The thing I most love to do when I go to the City of Light is simply to wander around at a leisurely pace stopping as the mood takes me to: look at pretty courtyards, admire magnificent historic buildings, visit a museum or to lunch at a favourite café. So I decided this Saturday to do a version of my Parisian wandering in my native Dublin.
Lost Weekend
Every time I visit Lost Weekend, a design store on the main street of the south Dublin suburb of Blackrock, my curiosity is piqued by the enigmatic name. When I was heading to Lost Weekend on Saturday I had in mind that I must find out why it is so called. As it happens I clean forgot to ask the question. So with poetic licence I have decided that it might just be because it is the sort of space that one could all too happily be totally lost in for a whole weekend.
Continue reading
Filed under Designers, Dublin, Shops/Shopping
Coffee in Dublin//Six: Urbun
Urbun is a café in the heart of Cabinteely Village in South County Dublin. The name is a play on words; the owners Katie and Niamh choose it because their inaugural project together was making cakes to sell at a market stall and because when they opened the café they wanted to bring an urban vibe to suburban Cabinteely. Katie and Niamh both have food related backgrounds; in a previous life Katie was the food editor of Totally Dublin and Ballymaloe trained Niamh cut her foodie teeth working in the London café scene.
♥ Last Minute Christmas Shopping
This is the last of the pre-Christmas shopping posts. I won’t go through the whole preamble again but will just say, as a quick reminder, that the emphasis in this series of posts is on: craft, home/handmade items, and independent shops. If you are entering the final run up to Christmas with some present shopping left to do, it would of course be lovely to stumble on a shop where you could scoop up diverse items to match all the gaps on your list. The Irish Design Shop, which carries a large range of items spanning different craft disciplines, is that sort of shop. Below are a few of the items they stock that caught my eye.
Filed under Craft, Dublin, Shops/Shopping
♥ Christmas at Bow
This is the second in a series of posts showcasing items that I think would make very acceptable Christmas gifts. The emphasis in the series is on: craft, homemade/handmade items, and independent shops. My hope is that wherever you live in the world that the images might inspire you (if you don’t do so already) to check out locally made beautiful items that are far removed from the madding mass-produced crowd and independent shops that are a world away from the homogenous high street.
Filed under Dublin, Fashion, Shops/Shopping
♥ Light up a Life
Yesterday, Sunday, I went with my mum to Our Lady’s Hospice in Dublin for the annual Light up a Life ceremony. This remembrance ceremony has been held at the hospice every year, in early December, since 1992. From small beginnings in the early nineties it has mushroomed into an event attended yesterday by about 5000 people. Similar ceremonies are held at hospices all round the globe; because of the large numbers who attend it’s possible that the Dublin event is the largest Light up a Life gathering in the world.
♥ The School of Jewellery
I love jewellery. It’s not that I trip the light fantastic to high-end jewellery shops or high street chains to stock up on baskets of bling but rather that I am passionate about beautiful hand crafted pieces. I love looking at them in awe-struck wonder and appreciating the workmanship even if they are totally beyond my means. It is of course important that the skills that go into crafting these wonders tumble-down the generations, so as a lover of hand crafted jewellery I was pleased to learn that one of Ireland’s foremost practitioners of the art Deirdre O’Donnell is setting up a jewellery school in Dublin in 2012.
♥ Coffee in Dublin//Five: The Winding Stair
In an increasingly homogenous world what often best defines and sets a city apart (aside from architecture, ambiance, culture and language) is its collection of one-off shops which seek to echo some aspect of that city’s uniqueness. Dublin’s much loved bookshop The Winding Stair, which sells both new and second-hand books, is a gem of a shop that manages to evoke the ghosts of Dublin’s rich literary past and yet remain grounded in the 21st Century. The bookshop is on the ground floor of a building on Ormond Quay, in the centre of Dublin; the equally well-loved Winding Stair restaurant is on an upper floor.
Just Add Attitude
Just Add Attitude 