I just can’t wait to be king

Last weekend we had a fantastic time. Not only did we get lovely weather in Manchester (no rain at all!) but we also had a visit from my sister and her new(ish) husband. We had arranged this visit months ago when we bought tickets to go and see the super smash hit musical the Lion King at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. When buying the tickets last summer it felt like the day would never come. At first I wasn't that bothered about going to see the Lion King, as it was never one of my favourite Disney films (FYI, Aladdin is my favourite). But, having seen the musical version of Beauty and the Beast a few years ago, which is still one of the best shows I have ever seen, I thought I would give it a try. I wasn't disappointed!

The whole show from start to finish was completely magical. The way they had translated the animals into a combination of both puppets and humans was fantastic. Their eye for detail and the amount of animals featured in the starting scene was absolutely incredible. It's easy to see why it has become so popular. I would have to say the puppets and costumes were my favourite element of the show. However, the fact that I wasn't a huge fan of the film really added to the whole experience. I hadn't seen the film since I was little so found myself on the edge of my seat (not remembering the story and what was going to happen next). More importantly, during the bits that I could remember, I couldn't have dreamed up how they could possible recreate it for a live stage show, but they did it successfully in every scene. I would highly recommend it to everyone. I will certainly be going to see it again when it comes back to Manchester. I was unable to take any photographs during the show for fear of being strongly told off/chucked out of the theatre, but here is a Youtube video which shows how fantastic it is, much better than I could write about it. Enjoy!

Borås

Since September I have been studying towards a Masters in Digital Library Science from the University of Borås. As part of the course I have to go to a study week once a year in Borås. Last week was my first time there so I thought I would write a post about some of the bits of my week that don't involve boring library things that no-one wants to read about.

Borås is a small town that used to be where a lot of the Swedish textile industry was based. It is around an hour by bus from Göteborg. One of the Swedish students on my course reckons that Borås is known for being one of the most boring towns in Sweden, so hold on to your hats, this blog post is going to be absolutely thrilling.

There are loads of sculptures and things around Borås. Some of them are quite nice, some of them are a bit baffling though.

I have no idea who this chap is or what he is doing submerged up to his shoulders in the water. There is also a giant Pinocchio statue in the town somewhere too. The word on the street is that one of the first people to illustrate the book was born somewhere near Borås, but I haven't done any actual research into whether this is true or not.

You might be surprised to learn that Swedish people are incredibly fond of pizza. There are pizza restaurants absolutely everywhere and the Swedes have put their own twist on them. For example, the kebab pizza is a particular Swedish delicacy. I had an amazing kebab pizza from a place called Funky Town and it looked like this:

The swirly stuff on top is Kebabsås, which was incredible. The kebab meat wasn't like the gross donner meat you get over here and actually resembled meat! I am going to try and make one of these at home at some point I think! Other Swedish special pizza toppings include banana and curry and banana and pineapple. Hmm. Not sure about that.

On Shrove Tuesday, while we're tucking into our pancakes, the Swedes are eating semla. Instead of pancake day they have 'Fat Tuesday', and they eat loads of these. A semla is a kind of bun that is flavoured with cardamom and the top scooped out and filled with whipped cream and almond paste. I enjoyed the bun and the cream element, but the almond paste grossed me out a bit. I'm not a particular fan of almond flavoured things, but in paste form it isn't very tasty. It didn't ruin the whole experience for me but I think I might prefer the Finnish version, which has jam in it instead of the almond paste.

One thing I like about Sweden is their very blunt warning signs. When I visited Stockholm I remembered seeing these amazing signs in elevators, warning against the risk of getting killed in a horrifying way if you take a wheelie bin in with you. I also enjoyed this sign warning against thin ice, which looks like some kind of lady of the lake style apparition trying to claw its way out of the water.

I think that is enough low quality images for one blog post! Maybe some time next week I will try and make a Swedish kebabpizza and post the results on here. Talk to me about Sweden! What are your favourite Swedish things?

Hej då!

Steve

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

Landbaby!

Exciting news, everyone! Over the Christmas period we received an order from the amazing Landbaby shop in Liverpool. I spent the entire Christmas holidays working away to get the order ready to take over for them and last week we delivered the first load of stuff. Here's the entire order!

Landbaby has been selling wonderful handcrafted stuff at the Bluecoat since about 2008. It is definitely worth a visit. I have been going in there for years, so when Claire got in touch to place an order for my things it was like a dream come true!

Landbaby tweeted this photo of the shop earlier and you can see our mountain cushions on the top right shelf and our little mountain brooches hanging just below.

So the message to take away with you from this post is a) GO TO LANDBABY and b) SPEND SOME DOSH!

Bye!

L x

Not Even Doom Music

Just a quick post to say that you can pre-order the 10" of the new Mat Riviere album Not Even Doom Music NOW. When you pre-order you get to download it straight away and then you'll get your record some time in April, apparently. Buy buy buy!

I am not going to try and review it or anything but it is proper good. Breathtakingly good, even. It has been on a constant loop here since pre-orders became available a week ago. I'm proposing that we now treat December 21st as Not Even Doom Music day from now on, an annual celebration of a flipping great album. And if you buy it in the next couple of days you get some free stuff too. Click on the album title up there for more details!

Here's a trailer for the album that Mat posted on Vimeo a while ago:




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

Cheesed Off

I have this amazing idea for a restaurant/bar type place that would specialise in cheese boards and other cheese related foodstuffs (Welsh rarebit, cauliflower cheese, that kind of thing). But that's not all. Borrowing slightly from Meatball Shop in New York, the premise would involve people ticking off the cheeses they want on a betting shop style coupon and then handing it over at the bar. Then their chosen selection of cheeses (or other cheese related foodstuff) would be prepared and taken to their table. If anybody wants to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds into this extremely niche and unprofitable business idea, let me know.

Until then, I'll have to make do with ordering my cheese boards in non-specialist eateries without being able to use a coupon to make my cheese preferences known. Bakerie, on Lever Street, does a pretty good cheese board. We went there a while ago and you get three cheeses (from about six different options), mini gherkins, pickled onions and some dead nice bread and it is flipping great (grate?). They do a meat board too, if you don't like cheese very much. Although if that is the case I'm not really sure why you have bothered to read up to this point.

Recently we went to Marble Brewery's 57 Thomas Street. I have decided that developing a penchant for real ale would really round off my 'look' (cringe). Still, no matter how hard I try, it always tastes a bit gross to me. So the fact that they do a cheese board gave me the opportunity to simultaneously try and make myself like beer while enjoying some amazing cheeses.

I can't remember what beer we had, but I actually quite enjoyed it! I think if I persevere I might actually develop a taste for it. Fingers crossed. Anyway, as the photo above clearly shows, they have a pretty massive collection of cheeses to choose from.

We went for the 9 cheeses for £10.95 between us, although I can't remember for the life of me what we ordered. Some kind of brie, the blue Cheshire, a crumbly Lancashire of some description and uh, other ones. The Bath Oliver biscuits were incredible, as was the pickle that came with it. My mouth is watering as I type.  We had a kind of smoky flavoured cheddar amongst the nine, and that was probably my favourite. They were all absolutely delicious though. Cheese!

Feel free to share your favourite cheeses below, don't keep your top fromage tips to yourself!

See yer!

S