Skip to main content

Olympic London

I am failing at the Rav Games as I am too busy enjoying Olympic London. The atmosphere here is superb - friendly and polite, welcoming and quirky.

On Sunday myself and a few friends went on tour visiting national houses. Some countries have commandered buildings in London to showcase their culture. Most of them are free and they are good fun.

We started off in Casa Brasil aka Somerset House, where we saw some artwork, plus plans for their games in 2016. I think I'll go back in the evening and enjoy a caipriniha or two and pretend I'm on Copacobana beach.

To keep this linked to the fibre arts they had this fabric wall

Casa Brasil - fabric wall

and these freaky crochet dolls in part of an art exhibit.

Casa Brasil - freaky crochet dolls

We watched a little bit of the women's marathon

Marathon

which to be honest was a little tiring so we mooched along South Bank, stopping off at the Tanks at Tate Modern, taking a break from sport and enjoying some culture

Tate Tanks

I think Swiss House was my favourite as it had cheese and chocolate

ALL THE CHEESE

and we got to see a Master Choclatier from Lindt at work and sample his wares. A cunning move as we all bought some chocolate, I went for their new wasabi flavour.

Master choclatier

This loo door sign amused me in Swiss House

Loo door in Swiss House

I'm collecting photos of our mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville (or Stevenage and Mildew as I like to call them) and spotted a fair few, though apparently there are 83 of these all over London. Good job they're not like Pokemon.

City Hall Wenlock

We finally saw Tower Bridge with the iconic rings...

Tower Bridge

and then headed to Denmark where there were beautiful people, good design, and Lego

Lego Olympic Park

Plus I think we ended up on Danish TV. Tak. (I went into Sara Lund mode though I couldn't remember any useful Danish)

Denmark house

Lou and I were then going to head to Austria house for some thigh-slapping wurst but MrG phoned as he managed to get two tickets for Greco-Roman wrestling. Luckily we were next to a DLR station so we headed to the Excel Centre where we saw a sport that baffled both of us.

Olympic London

Nevertheless we enjoyed ourselves and the atmosphere. Plus I bumped into two twitter friends on the way out. Marvellous. London, I salute you.

Comments

mostcurious said…
I am, as a US citizen, horrified by the awful crochet dolls. HORRIFIED.

Also personally I'm insanely jealous of the LEGO in the Denmark house. FYI I am trying to vicariously enjoy the Olympics more through you. :)
Anonymous said…
Pfeh. that was me up there.

Popular posts from this blog

Champagne Bubbles

We went for a stroll this afternoon along the Seine where my MIL lives to work off the champagne and cheese from New Year celebrations and build up an appetite for our postponed Christmas meal. It was a good opportunity to take some photos of my latest FO, Bubbles hat by Woolly Wormhead . Compulsory Catalogue Pose I've met Woolly at several shows over the summer and we sat together at several meal times at the infamous Knit Camp as well as getting tipsy at Knit Nation. She's ace and also a great designer. She leads a pretty interesting life, living in a converted double decker bus in Italy. Take a look at her blog which is a good mixture of her day to day life on the bus with her partner and young son and loads of great knitting tips. The Bubbles pattern was great fun to knit and worked up pretty quickly, the cables providing just enough interest to make this a great knit while watching Agatha Christie mysteries on TV in between eating festive leftovers. I used Araucan...

Just beet it - part II

Here it is. The beetroot dye experiment results. I had read that beetroot turns a disappointing orange colour when the dye is set. The most saturated end turned a beautiful burnished orange however the far end of the skein, which had been a delicate shade of pale pink before cooking was a mucky yellow. The cream/mucky yellow colour dominated the skein and wasn't as graduated as I'd hoped for. I decided to redye the cream section, leaving a small section of the Naples Yellow (mucky yellow) for contrast (I actually like the colour in small amounts and looked up a nicer name in my Artists Colour Manual). I added a few drops of pink food colouring to the beetroot vinegar just to see what happened and over dyed the mid portion of orange with more beetroot vinegar with a few drops of red food colouring. This is how it looked while drying... ...ta dah ! Here it is reskeined . Well half the skein anyway. I was in a rush as I wanted to enter it in a dip dyeing competition on Ravelry w...

Picture this

I was surprised to see that visitors to London's galleries and museums are down as the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), cited as having the largest drop in numbers, was busy when I visited earlier in the week. The busiest part was the Portrait Award exhibition and while the pieces were technically brilliant only a few grabbed my attention. People often get hung up on art, what should they like, what's the correct way to talk about it. I say ignore all that and look with an open mind. If something takes your fancy, great, if it doesn't, move on. Someone else will like it. If you can't make it to the NPG you can see all the entries online . Here are a couple I like. I'm not going to say anything about them. It's up to you what you think about them. If they intrigue you there's more info on the gallery website. Patchwork   by Paula Wilson  © Paula Wilson The New Religion   by Conor Walton  © Conor Walton It is disheartening to see visitor...