The featured imaged is AI. The machine computed what my blog was about and created a picture with that massive light with feathers. It made me chuckle 🤣.There is another AI generated image at the end of the blog. However, all of the images in the middle were taken by me.
This week I had some time mid week to wander around my favourite interior trade suppliers in Chelsea Design Centre. Being a West Londoner, hailing from Fulham Lots Road is very familiar to me.
Below shows more images of things that took my fancy. They show trimmings or lighting features that either conjured up excitement or a sense of cosy familiarity for me…
I visited Wales this week and happened to drive by Cardiff castle 🏯.
Cardiff Castle
I first noticed all the Japanese business people walking past and admiring the different gargoyles and statues on the castle as they walked hurriedly in their smart business dress. I too thought about the makers of the stone and metal castings and carvings. But I wondered about their daily toil. I imagined the working conditions of those aged artisans who made their creative marks luckily lasting 100s of years.
I visited Covent Garden for a meal and did some shopping. There I also noticed how the artistic contribution features m in our everyday encounters. Sometimes we must look deeper to notice how the hidden artist gets to express their work through mundane things like our retail experiences and our eating out.
I had a pile of work to do and spent some time doing the housework, which felt cathartic. But I experienced guilt because I wasn’t doing the additional work I promised I would do to aid my 9 to 5. I looked up and caught a glimpse of a spider web that must have appeared recently. Seeing this gave me a moment to pause. I paused because I was strangely struck by the beauty of the spider web. The more I looked at it, the more I was intrigued by the amount of work that such a tiny creature might have to do to create such intricate patterns through its mastery of weaving.
I appreciated the thought (if spiders think) in designing the breadth and depth then the shape of the web. I also particularly admired how the sunlight captured what must be hundreds of little notes and intersections of the spider’s web, which made them glisten, emitting all the colours of the rainbow.
They looked like nanocrystals and reminded me of my love for the light in the vintage Swarovski crystals I used to use.
It really was a delight to behold. Seeing the spider’s web was a chance to observe natural beauty and the wonders of a world of creativity that does not come from humanity.
I was transfixed for some time. So took some photos of this incredible piece of installation art created by a spider.
Do not ask me what kind of spider it is. I suspect it might be the kind that enjoys the inevitable spider mite flies around my Calathea and Strelizia plants.
Later in the day, my reflections on the spider’s web produced some ideas for a new line of products. I thought of a way of fusing everything I love to do and weaving my artistic talents with my desire to finish working on those lampshades I had shamefully half made over a year ago. I had suffered from makers block and was dragging my feet towards completing them. But I got my maker’s blank unblocked by being mesmerised by the connections made in the spider’s web.
The sketch shows what the spider’s web gazing taught me. It is an outline plan of three types of new surface designs for lampshades painted with masking and dripping so that the original fabric appears as an underpainting. The masking can aid more graphical forms to appear on the upper paint layer to signify monograms, names or shapes.
Home Office Charm 
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