Post Comment Love 21 - 23 March

Hello there, and welcome back to this week’s #PoCoLo - a relaxed, friendly linky which I co-host with Suzanne, where you can link any blog post published in the last week. We know you’ll find some great posts to read, and maybe some new-to-you blogs too, so do pop over and visit some of the posts linked, comment and share some of that love.

Please don’t link up posts which are older as they will be removed from the linky, and if older posts are linked then please don’t feel that it’s necessary to comment on those. If you were here last week it was great to have you along, if you’re new here this week we’re pleased you’ve joined us.

We had a great evening in Newark last Friday hearing from the gardener Adam Frost about his garden and the songs that have inspired the design in different parts of it - and it made me think that this is something I’ve never thought about. I haven’t thought about it for my own garden too much since either if I’m honest, but it was an interesting insight into how designers ‘trick’ themselves into designing.

Maybe it’s something I’ll come back to and think more about as we progress our garden, who knows - but I am now kind of wondering what music would be right for the greenhouse planning post I’ve linked up this week!

Indoor growing is clearly a theme for me this week as my photo is from the beautiful conservatory at the Belton Estate, one of the closest National Trust properties close to us. We chose to visit on a glorious day, and it was great to be out in the sun and without a coat - but somehow the conservatory still pulled us in, and the 22.5 degree temperature was just as lovely as these flowering amaryllis. I need to find some space in my blog schedule to share more from our visit.

Have a good week.

Planning a greenhouse

At Gardener’s World Live last year one of the things I was keen to look at, apart from all the show gardens and beautiful borders, was greenhouses. We don’t have one here yet, and I’m missing it - pottering about at the greenhouse staging in the garage is ok, but the garage isn’t ideal for germinating seeds, and I really could do with a light, sheltered space for some of our plants to over winter to give them the best chance.

Not too big, not too small

I don’t want a huge greenhouse, though I’ve already doubled the size I first thought of! And I do want to integrate it into our overall garden design.

In our previous house I had the standard 6x8 aluminium Rhino greenhouse, and it was great - but as I’ve said my plans for this garden are a bit smaller. Originally I was looking at a 2x4 patio greenhouse, but given that it needs to be two foot from any boundary for maintenance, that seemed a lot of space for not very much greenhouse at all.

And so I upscaled my tentative plans to a 6x4 - but also preferring the black frame, rather than aluminium. Of course, all of this is just plans at the moment - though I did come dangerously close to buying one of the show greenhouses in one of the sales, but in the end I resisted as I wanted our plans to be a bit more developed first.

Testing it out for size

So would a 6x4 greenhouse work in our space? Well as there’s nothing else really in our garden, apart from the trellis around the heat pump and the small crab apple tree, the answer is clearly a yes, But would it work how I wanted it too, where I envisaged it - or would it dominate the garden?

I decided to try it out using bamboo canes and string. So this visualisation spent a fortnight or so in place in our garden last summer, and no doubt any neighbours that spotted it clearly must have thought we’d lost the plot.

But it worked, well visually of course, not as an actual greenhouse!

It was easy (and easier than it looks in the photo) to see its footprint, how high it would come up the wall, how far it would come into the garden - and most importantly, how dominant it would be from the house. Putting it directly opposite our lounge windows might not seem the most obvious positioning, but I’m hoping it will also help keep it tidy and on the prettier side. I fully intend to retain the greenhouse staging in the garage for the real functional work, and use the greenhouse for what it does best - providing a sheltered growing space.

Of course I spent the time that it was up, looking out of every window to check what it looked like from that vantage point - and I was happy, until of course my temporary structure collapsed a little. But by then it had done its job and confirmed this is the size and location for me.

Now only if the rest of planning the garden was that easy - but more on that another day!

The Biba Story: Fashion Illustrations

As you know when I pop down to London for a visit I like to combine the primary purpose of my trip with a bit of culture. Sometimes that’s a walk around the shops in Regent Street, and sometimes if I can I like to combine it with visiting an exhibition. Last summer (yes, I know it’s taken a while to share these) I was able to do just that and dragged MOH along to the Biba exhibition at the Fashion & Textiles Museum in Bermondsey. Which despite growing up and living in London until a year or so before I’d never been to, but that’s how it goes sometimes isn’t it.

It’s a great museum, and one I’m sure I’ll be back to in the future. If you’ve not discovered this already it’s ‘the only UK museum dedicated to showcasing contemporary fashion and textile design’ and was set up by Dame Zandra Rhodes in 2003, and is housed in a very distinctive, and very Zandra building - it’s definitely easy to spot as you approach it!

I’d heard of Biba, the shops and the clothes, but didn’t really know much more as in the mid-seventies I was under ten years old, which is a pretty good excuse I’d say! But I knew how iconic it was, and was keen to learn more - and while it wouldn’t be the number one thing that MOH would choose to go to, he was happy to come along, which was just as well as I’d got him a ticket!

The exhibition shares the Biba story from 1964 when the first Biba Boutique opened to 1975 when the legendary Big Biba closed its doors; it explores how Biba blossomed to become the world’s first lifestyle label which ‘sparked a revolution in how people shopped’ and how Biba became the brand that epitomises the 60s and 70s fashion.

In this post I’m sharing some of the fashion illustrations by Barbara Hulanicki who established a mail-order company selling affordable fashion appealing to a new generation of young women. I’ll share more of the clothes and the lifestyle brand in future posts next month.

Barbara had a natural aptitude for art, and that became her refuge following the assassination of her father. She studied fashion at Brighton Art School (now the University of Brighton) and started her first career as a fashion illustrator in 1957 where she covered the Paris couture shows for publications such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as working on British newspapers.

The show notes said that ‘as one of the most in-demand fashion illustrators of the period’ she had close contact with those putting on the couture shows, and their collections and she realised ‘how out of step they were with the emerging world of youth culture and the lives of young women’.

What’s interesting to me is seeing how the illustrations change, the earlier ones which I assume are from the couture shows are of designs which are much more formal - and very reminiscent of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ even though the film wasn’t released until 1961, based on the novella published in 1958, so I may need to revise my thoughts on who influenced who!

The illustration on the left below from circa 1963 still retains some of that formality, but the other two images are much more informal - and the central one especially includes bold colours and patterns.

It was in 1963 that Barbara established Biba’s Postal Boutique whilst continuing with her career as a fashion illustrator - and what’s also fascinating to me is how many of these styles, both the formal and more informal designs, could still easily be worn today - and in fact probably are!

My favourite illustration from this part of the exhibition is the one above. Doesn’t the colour and the design just sing out, and oh to have that much talent for designing and drawing these too.

It was truly a fascinating exhibition, and looking back over my photos, it was great to be able to go along and see so much of the story first hand - I’ll share more next month of the clothes and the Biba lifestyle brand, and I’m sure some of the clothes influenced clothes I wore growing up as even though I wasn’t yet in double figures the styles were very familiar.