Passementerie

Because it's raining...

2009-07-08T16:10:56+02:00

.. I spent some time browsing on Twitter. Less futile than I thought, it quickly lead me to some quite fabulously interesting people and goings-on, such as The Uniform Project, a year long enterprise in which Sheena Matheiken has undertaken to wear the same dress every day for a year as an experiment in sustainable fashion and to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation, which aims to provide education for slum children in India.

This is a video on The Daily Candy (also discovered on Twitter) where she describes the project.

Shabby Scandi

2009-07-07T11:15:45+02:00

When I decided to get a Stokke high chair for the baby, I didn't think I would end up with one as fabulous as this wonderfully worn-looking blue-washed one, from a line of colours sold about six or seven years ago, now discontinued. John chose the lime green baby rail for it and together they go fantastically in our connecting sitting and dining rooms with our lime green couch and grey blue armchairs.

A few days ago I featured this picture below of a brightly painted flight of stairs spotted in World of Interiors:

Well, look - more!

These stairs are in the terribly chic and welcoming home of Jim and Chloe Read, owners of Newgate clocks (The Times Magazine, 04/07/2009). You didn't know this, but I am descended from a long line of horologists (on his more fraught days, my husband threatens to abandon Oxford and apprenctice himself to my uncle), so it is no surprise to me that a the house of couple that spends its time designing, making and selling clocks should beckon to me like the Reads' house does.

In case you had been wondering, shabby scandi is where it's at these days. Shabby chic is gone, straight scandi might have peaked, but the worn, stripped look of wood washed rather than painted, the pairing of bold textiles with Victorian furniture... I'm looking out for some suitable fabric to make cushions for my lime green Victorian chesterfield sofa at the moment - they have to be blue, ideally with a touch of green. Maybe this Agapanthus cushions from Northlight are what I mean?

Remembering my wardrobe

2009-07-04T12:03:26+02:00

As I breastfeed my baby, I tend to wear clothes that make this as straightforward as possible - tops and skirts or sometimes trousers, dresses that open at the front, or my gorgeous nursing dress. Of course, I have oodles of clothes from TTBB (The Time Before Baby) but I usually forget that I have them. Yesterday we were going out for the afternoon sans enfant and I reached out for a top and skirt and paused... wait... I can wear a NON-breastfeeding dress. Gosh.

With deference to my current favourite blog, Academichic, I am wearing the following:
Short navy linen dress - Topshop,
Sandals - Birkenstocks
Bag - Mulberry Bayswater
Headscarf - Hermes (Les Clefs pattern) a
Sunglasses - Gucci (prescription)

Less glamorously, I still wore a nursing bra underneath all that because I have no non-nursing bras that fit.

Oh, the decadent life of the Mum-about-Oxford.

A walk in the park

2009-07-02T19:05:31+02:00

Today being as blissfully lovely as every other day this week, we packed a picnic of sandwiches, salads, a bottle of sparkling rosé, a flask of coffee, chocolate éclairs and of course, a punnet of strawberries.

Duly equipped, we took ourselves, the baby and my father out to the Harcourt Arboretum, the rural extension of the Oxford Botanical Gardens for the afternoon.

There was eating and a rare photo of the Passementerie family.

There was a baby on a rug.

There were trees.

There was even a peacock.

And last night (because I know you all love my cakestand so much) there was a cake.

So. It turns out that the sun does shine in Oxford.

2009-07-01T11:14:33+02:00

This week in Oxford we're having a heatwave. Now, by heatwave I don't mean to get you all excited (unless you live in the British Isles) because my idea of a heatwave and the idea held by people in most of the rest of the world... well... shall we just say that there's a difference? But still, it's hot by *my* standards, the sun is shining and the baby is quietly passed out upstairs.

So far as domesticity is concerned, it's 10am and I have stripped the bed and have the washing machine on, which I think is really rather virtuous, so I can sit down, guilt-free, with a cup of tea and write here for a few minutes before starting on a little work.

The danger with a PhD is that you can while away weeks on what *seems* like academic activity, but which actually boils down to nothing more than establishing that two or three books are of no use to your research. Having wasted some time like that, I sat down and wrote out a little schedule of targets and bit-sized topics of about 2,500 words each to meet every ten days or so and as this approach is working out quite succesfully, I am feeling quite good about that too.

So I'm feeling good about the weather, the baby, laundry, tea and work. Not bad for a Wednesday morning, is it?

It was a murky, ominous evening in Oxford...

2009-06-29T12:20:49+02:00

The lanterns swayed in the wind under a darkening sky as we arrived at the most glamorous Oxford ball of the season...

Gradually the main quad filled up with people as we emerged from dinner - black tie, white tie, long gowns, cocktail gowns, saris and kimonos - whatever people had chosen to wear for the evening, everyone looked exquisitely elegant.

After a heavy rain shower, the warm air as you passed through the doorway leading from the Shelley Memorial to the Fellows' Garden was filled with green smells and a tropical atmosphere.

As the sky gradually became darker with clouds and the coming nightfall, the lanterns strung up over every quad became more and more dramatic.

Earlier in the evening I joined my husband and his friends in the garden of a house on Merton Street before going on to the ball. I wore a rose pink duchesse satin gown from Coast with a cropped oriental-style embroidered jacket from Topshop - any balls I have been to in the past have been earlier in the year and have resulted in freezing to death by midnight. In fact, when I went to the Trinity Ball in Dublin many years ago I had the good sense to wear thermal leggings, a warm camisole, wooly socks and boots under my gown as well as a full length fur-trimmed evening coat on top and was JUST ABOUT warm enough. God that was an awful night, now that I think of it. Not glamorous AT ALL.

As it happened, though, we are heading into a bit of a heatwave here in Oxford now and the jacket wasn't necessary in the end last night. I was planning to wear a heavily embroidered shawl from Himachal Pradesh over my gown, but the threatened rain made me stick with the jacket and I'm glad I didn't expose the shawl to the risk of grass-stains and rain after all.

Almost every corner of the college had some sort of entertainment - a Killers cover band in the Rad quad, a capella in the Dining Hall, card tricks by the library and laser battles in the Fellows' Garden. Wherever there *wasn't* entertainment there was food and drink - tents devoted to gin cocktails or champagne, sushi, wok treats, Ben & Jerry's ice-cream, Krispy Kreme doughnuts and more...

Strapless dresses and I have always had a complicated relationship, but I was brave...

...although in true Passmenterie style, when I made a quick dash home to feed the baby halfway through the night (devoted motherhood, no?) and the heavens opened to a tremendous deluge and thunderstorm, I decided that a full-length gown might lead to difficulties at largely outdoor ball, and so I changed into a vintage-style raw silk ivory cocktail dress, ivory umbrella and slightly more danceable-in heels. In the end, the night seemed to get hotter and hotter and I might have died in the heavy gown in which I started the night, so I was very glad of the lighter dress.

Luckily, the weather had done its worst so far as the rain was concerned and the rest of the night stayed dry, which meant that my coiffure survived admirably (not least because it was the sort of style that could be let down and put up again in under a minute if part of it came loose after over-enthusiastic dancing.

The next morning saw my husband leap out of bed at a most uncivilized hour to make coffee and pick up croissants at a nearby bakery in order to go punting for the morning with all his friends. I ignored this ridiculous behaviour and went back to sleep so as to conserve energy for our afternoon walk by the Thames for Sunday lunch at the Trout.

So never let me say that Oxford is less than fabulous again, right?

For something very different today, go and read My Marrakech. If you're not already a fan, you should be.

I'm pathetic.

2009-06-26T11:47:35+02:00

I used to love living alone. It was so peaceful and quiet and I could come home at the end of the day and be completely sure of a nice evening curled up with a book with nobody to bug me or interrupt me. Then I got married and it all went wrong. Not the part where I have the company of my husband in the evenings - I *like* that - there's nobody else I would rather spend every hour of the day with.

No, my problem is what to do when he's NOT there. My routine is completely flung out of kilter and I don't know what to do with myself.

I waste (even more) time on the internet, procrastinate about food so that I end up not eating until 9.30pm, knock over and break my glass of wine and spend twenty minutes scrabbling around under the couch for the stem of the glass (it never turned up - where *is* it?), watch twenty minutes of a Richard Gere film (why?) and then, with the profoundest relief, see that it is nearly 10.30pm and I can give the baby her night feed and slink off to bed in mortification at myself.

Adventures in the Sun

2009-06-24T19:52:01+02:00

When I got in this evening from a little shopping excursion my husband put his arms around me and nuzzled my neck.

"You smell of the sun."

"That would be my sunblock, my love"

"Aha! I thought you smelled like adventure..."

Our adventures are almost always in hot countries so wherever we go, a bottle of Shiseido SPF50 face and body lotion comes too. Bicester Village may not be a very adventurous destination (it yielded a fabulously retro-looking turquoise Le Creuset frying pan for £30 today, though), but it certainly warranted my adventure sunblock today.

Yesterday was warm too, but still needed a cardigan and trousers... we had ice-cream from George & Danvers and a very long walk in Christchurch Meadow and by the Thames.

Getting on with life

2009-06-23T10:54:29+02:00

For the last week or so, the baby has been waking up just once during the night, a development which has had a spectacular effect on my energy in the mornings. My response to this new-found matutinal vigour is a desire to seize this month's World of Interiors and deposit myself in the garden with a cup of coffee for the morning while Beatrice has her two-hour morning nap (did I mention how marvelous my offspring is? For those of you without babies, you should know that a sleeping infant is a good infant).

However, I am being virtuous and sitting at the Victorian oak dining table in my front window, a vase of spikey white stock before me and attempting to make productive academic work a part of my new morning routine.

Wish me luck.

My visiting cards from happygirlgreetings on Etsy arrived yesterday and they're fabulous! Thank you Laura Beth!

Photo above (and don't you wish you had stairs as fantastic as these?) from the guest house of Muriel Brandolini, photographed by Eric Boman, in this month's World of Interiors, with thanks.

Bicycle baskets and babies

2009-06-22T17:17:49+02:00

The first thing my husband did when he attached the basket to my bicycle was to pop the baby into it. She looked very sweet but I think this Cambodian baby, photographed for National Geographic, looks even more impressive in his makeshift, but probably quite comfortable, bicycle sling...

Photograph with thanks to National Geographic, from here.