Sailing Through the Trees

Apparently we have mentioned Caroline Dowsett in passing twice on this blog, but this post is going to be completely about her and Alex T Frazer's joint illustration exhibition at Common in Manchester. It's called 'Sailing Through the Trees' and we have been meaning to pop by and see it since it opened at the start of April. The poster gives you a little of taste of how good the exhibition was!

The illustrations in the exhibition tell the story of a wife launching a rescue mission for her fisherman husband who has somehow ended up in the belly of a whale. The series of illustrations are available to buy as prints or as part of a comic (There are prices and things up on the wall!) from behind the bar. We're very tempted. We'll probably pop back and pick up a couple of prints before the exhibition finishes at the end of September. It'd be good if we could grab a copy of the comic for Salford Zine Library, too.

The exhibition is proper ace, with the two artists' work complimenting each other perfectly to tell the story. We'd definitely recommend making a trip to Common, sitting in the 'Club Room' (I think that's what they call the room at the side, anyway. EDIT- it is actually called the 'Kestrel Suite'!), ordering some chips and spending a bit of time enjoying the lovely exhibition. Here's a couple of photos we took while we were at the exhibition (Complete with that annoying reflection you get when you take photos of things behind glass):

The point to take home from this blog post is that you should definitely go and see 'Sailing Through the Trees' at your earliest possible convenience. Okay!

What a Hoot!

We have a couple of zine/print fairs coming up at the end of the month. The first is at Manchester Art Gallery on the 31st of this month. It's free entry and there's all kind of other things going on, so it'll be worth popping along for an hour or so! What else are you going to do on a cold Thursday evening?

Then we're going to be at the second ever Inprint fair at the Shipping Forecast in Liverpool. That's on February 3rd and we're going to be sharing a table with the super duper Today Zine. The last one was really good (One of our favourite illustrators Caroline Dowsett was selling stuff, so we hope she's going to be there again this time!).

We've been dead busy recently so we haven't quite had the time to do another issue of Young Explorer. As a compromise, we've put together a mini owl-based zine called 'What a Hoot!'. You can have a look at it if you like. 

It's got some nice owl illustrations inside and some words that you can read and it's been hands stitched and that. I think we're going to be selling them for £1.50 or you'll be able to buy them with a set of four owl badges for £3. Bargain!

See yer!

S

Handmade Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! We hope you had a dead nice Christmas Day and that the rest of the festive season is just as enjoyable for you. This year we made a conscious decision to try and buy a few more handmade Christmas presents than we have previously, so we thought we'd fill you in on the things we picked up. Sadly we were so impatient to get things wrapped up and ready for Christmas that we missed our chance to take photographs of them. As a result, all the photos in this post have been stolen from the internet.

We sold some things at the Inprint Fair in Liverpool at the start of December. We shared a stall with the amazing zine/comic maker Stef Bradley who we mentioned on here a while ago. She has an exciting new blog now which you should definitely have a look at.

One of the other sellers at the fair was Caroline Dowsett, who is pretty flipping great too. She does all kinds of neato illustrations and she is based here in Manchester. I bought one of these 'Murray Christmas' cards for Liz's mum from her. I'm not sure Liz's mum really knows who Bill Murray is, but her surname is Murray so I think she appreciated it on a different level. I also bought Liz a notepad with cats printed on the cover, which is also absolutely amazing.

When I got home I looked at Caroline's Etsy page and decided that Liz would probably also like a print of Woody Allen too. I had to stop myself from buying everything in her shop! If you like Bill Murray or Wes Anderson films, you should have a look IMMEDIATELY. You won't be disappointed.

After buying the cat notebook, I decided to get Liz some ace cat tattoos that she'd been eyeing up on Etsy for a while. They are made by super duper illustrator Harriet Gray who has an Etsy shop full of wonderful things like these and this. You can get one for £2.50 or you can choose 3 for £5.50, which is a pretty sweet deal. I also bought a pencil case with cats on it which is also great.

Carrying on with the tattoo theme, we bought our friend some tattoos from Laura Gee's Etsy shop. She has a whole range of lovely prints and cushions that are definitely worth a look too.

So what did you get for Christmas? Between us we received a truck full of sweets and generally unhealthy things, I got loads of socks (Which is good, because I can never be bothered to go and buy my own socks) and Liz got me a copy of Dead Snow on DVD, the plot of which, on IMDB, is described as: "A ski vacation turns horrific for a group of medical students, as they find themselves confronted by an unimaginable menace: Nazi zombies". I am very excited about watching it. FYI, the zombies in this movie are fast zombies, not your standard shuffling ones. Apparently the speed that zombies can move at is a contentious issue. Terrifying.

Happy New Year!

S