At the end of August I went on a short trip to Sligo on Ireland’s west coast – it was a super relaxing.
Tag Archives: Ireland
Kenmare Trip
I don’t lead a multihypenated fast-laned life. That’s fine as life in the slow lane suits me well. However when life slows to a pace that would, in comparison, make a snail’s progress look like a Usain Bolt sprint, that’s not so good.
To Kilkenny City via Jerpoint Abbey
What with a soft blue sky filled with sportive fluffy white clouds which were backlit by sunshine and some real warmth in the air, last Saturday felt like the end of the current glacial age had finally arrived. The meteorological deities had, for once, come up trumps as last Saturday was also the day I planned to make a return trip to Kilkenny. It’s less than two months since I was last there so I wouldn’t normally have returned so soon except that I needed to collect a ceramic tree I bought, on my recent trip, at the Future Beauty exhibition in the National Craft Gallery.
Waterfall Farm Shop
I think that shopping for food as close as possible to where it is bred or grown and/or in a retail outlet where the owners can give you chapter and verse on the provenance of all the items they stock is an eminently sensible idea. The Waterfall Farm shop is a place that melds the close to source ideal, as it sells lamb from Waterfall Farm direct to the public, with the wished for good product knowledge as the owners are totally au fait with the origin and other details of the hand-picked range of mainly artisan foods that they sell.
Filed under Healthy Living, Ireland, Shops/Shopping
Baking: Porter Cake for St Patrick’s Day
I am Irish so therefore I like Guinness. Right? No, wrong. I don’t like it at all. I believe it’s an acquired taste but no sip of it that I have ever had has encouraged me to try to acclimatize my taste buds to what’s known locally as the black stuff.
Filed under Cake, Celebrations, Ireland, Recipes
Design Week 2012: Living with Design
Designers shape their creations out of nascent ideas in their fertile imaginations. Imaginations that have themselves been configured not just by the sparking of the creative gene but also by the objects, people and place that impinge on their lives and, of course, by a wealth of aesthetic and design history. The designs they conceive shape the lives of the rest of us: good liveable-with design enhances our individual worlds in so many immeasurable ways .
Dublin: Vintage Photographs
One of the things I like about the photography class I recently enrolled in is that the subject is taught in the round. By that I mean the class is not just about the technical aspects of photography but instead takes an overview of the subject. For that I am truly grateful as in truth two and a half hours of tech detail every Tuesday evening would rapidly turn my brain to a mushy pea consistency.
Filed under Dublin, Ireland, Photography
Ursula Celano Notebook: Girls on Bikes
The weather on Monday was ark-appropriate: for ark-appropriate read insanely wet, wild and windy. So, I was in need of something cheering to take my mind off the incessant rain and the ubiquitous grey mist. And I found just the thing when I called into the Irish Design Shop’s branch in the RHA (Royal Hibernian Academy) and bought an Ursula Celano notebook which has an utterly charming cover a bit of which you see in the image above.
Filed under Craft, Designers, Ireland, Musings, Shops/Shopping
Makers and Brothers
It is so very seldom that I walk into any sort of retail space and think to myself wow this is just so right. But I did when I went to see Makers & Brothers pop-up shop the weekend before last. Makers & Brothers is such a good name because it so perfectly describes the enterprise. Mark and Jonathan Legge are the brothers: the makers are a selection of craftspeople and designers whose products the brothers sell.
Filed under Craft, Designers, Ireland, Shops/Shopping
Irish Craft: Hands On by Sylvia Thompson
We live in a highly mechanized and technologically driven age where the degree of separation between us and those who make most of the things that we use on a daily basis seems as vast as the count of numbers to infinity. Distant industrialized manufacturing is a relatively new fangled thing: craft in contrast is almost as old as the oceans and is deeply embedded into the community where a craftsperson works.
Just Add Attitude 