Le Petit Jardin Vol. 1

It’s been a while huh?

As the temperature climbs from the high twenties to the mid-thirties here by the Montagne Noire, my motivation to function plummets exponentially.  And what would be a better project to tackle when the sun is hot than overhauling a garden full of concrete and dog poo?  It has been months in the making, but it seems that our outdoor space is finally taking shape despite of this heatwave holding Europe in its deadly grip. 

To say we had to start from scratch with this one would be an understatement; to even get to the concrete base covering the whole surface of our little gardenette, we had to clear away a decade’s worth of ivy and moss, dead leaves as well as heaps of general garden waste – all in varying stages of decomposition.  To utilise this half-putrefied mess, our first priority was to buy a composter unit.  As it stands, food waste is not currently collected in Mazamet, so having our own composter in the garden would help us recycle our scraps and provide compost for all our future needs.  

We also needed to get rid of a few pesky trees, including a London Plane that was mere inches away from the garden wall and destined to grow huge.  Another had already damaged the surface of the old concrete patio with its roots and thus it was getting on my tits.  In fact, I hated it so much that I took a dull saw to the bastard and spent almost an hour cussing and sawing through blood, sweat and tears until the tree was no more.  A bush, a shrub and odd patch of completely tasteless wild strawberries soon met the same faith.

Having gotten rid of it all, seemed that we had managed to eradicate every single piece of greenery from our garden either by chopping, scraping or pressure washing it…

…until the roses appeared from under the rubble.  Two old but beautiful varieties in fact, planted by our current neighbour who used to reside in our house in the 60’s with her family.  These were the only original elements from the old garden that we saw worth keeping – and to what results!  With a little pruning here and there, are these not two of the most beautiful roses you have ever seen? 

Other new plants include stunning bush of lavender, rhubarb, thyme and rosemary.  I also planted a selection of bulbs, none of which have shown any interest in blooming so far, but such is gardening: constant investment for the next season.  We chose purple slate as the filler for these beds, hoping it would slow down the snails and keep the area as weed-free as possible.

The old patio, completely broken up by a web of roots, was dug up and replaced with the help of Rusty the dog who loves digging.  We levelled the base with a few bags of sand, laid down the law some factory off-cuts of engineered slate in light beige and filled the gaps with specs of subtly rose-tinted marble that works well with the purple slate.  In time, this is where we’ll set up a table and chairs once the right set comes along, but for now, it’s a steady base for Rustys paddling pool when he gets too hot in his furs, a bbq or a set of planters.

Parts of the shallow wall separating the gravel from concrete was too damaged so it had to be replaced.  I made my builder-dad proud by fixing up my own from mortar and broken up specs of colourful cement tiles.  Small boulders of natural stone we had previously found were used to line the flowerbeds around the ring of the patio and as a dinky rockery.  Small details, but they add a little bit of cosiness to the otherwise plain concrete base. 

With all this talk about stone, you might wonder why we did not go for grass in the end.  I would have really wanted to, not least for the dog to use as his latrine, but in this climate it needs constant maintenance to look good in the summer.  Even with the diligence of the local gardeners tending the public spaces in Mazamet, the grass is yielding under the sun and there’s only so much watering I want to do on day to day basis.

So if the experts can’t keep it alive…  I’ll just stick to pot-plants myself, thanks.

Here you have it: even with most of the base work now completed, there is plenty to be done – we have a few more flowerbeds to construct and an old antique trough to be repurposed as a vegetable batch, but more about that later.  It’s simply too hot to even write about hard work!

Hey– and if you have tips on how to kill slugs without heavy poisons, drop me a line – the cherry tomatoes and our dog will thank you.

Happy gardening y'all!  

DIY Lightbox

I am about to take all the credit for it, but this DIY is really a creation of my darling James’ gadget oriented imagination.  In fact, it was he who salvaged this long forgotten print screen of mine when visiting family in Finland and thought about turning it into a light box.  The pattern, or more accurately, a negative of a pattern the screen was made for, would have looked nice enough on our wall without additional fiddling, but fixing an LED-system behind the frame really helped to bring out the beauty of this relic from my teenage past.

And making one yourself is dead easy; all you need is a frame of some description, covered with a material that lets light through and a strip of LED-lights.  We used a self-adhesive kit, but other kind of lights would do just fine.  

The light box in situ in our boho bedroom. 

Screens such as these are most commonly used in all sorts of printing from artist books to textiles such as T-shirts and tote bags.  This one, however, was a tool in producing large scale custom-patterned linen as a part of my Textiles and Printed Fabrics-course in the School of Visual Arts for Children in Forssa back in 2005.  My group was one of the first to use their brand new textile classroom and our mission was to design patterns inspired by the history of the area the school was based in - the grounds of an old Finlayson textile mill.

My pattern, depicting circular details found around the old spinning mill, manhole covers, factory lights and drains, was printed on linen in two variants; olive- and lime green.  I ended up selling some of the fabric, made a few tote-bags and, as most fifteen year olds would, forgot all about it until my mother dug out the last of it and turned it into a duvet cover set.  That turned out to be one of the most thoughtful gifts me and James received on our wedding day last December.

Our DIY lightbox made of a screen used in textile printing and our bed, made with textiles I printed as a teenager with this very same screen. 

The screen in its wooden frame, however, was forgotten a long time ago.  My mother did not want to throw it away – after all, it was rather expensive gizmo to buy for a fifteen year old at the time, and I am glad she did not!  Having finally found its home with us in France, we set out to find the best way to display it in our new home.  James thought we would have the best contrast of the blue (the medium used to transfer the negative of the desired image onto the screen) and white areas (the bare mesh where the ink would be able to transfer through) if we would light it up, thus he promptly went and bought a remote control LED-strip, normally meant to illuminate telly stands and the underbellies of cabinets.

As mentioned, the light strip was self-adhesive and attached easily to the back side of my wooden frame.  Although the strip could be shortened to length, I chose to wrap the whole 5 meters of it around the frame giving me almost 3 full laps of lighting power behind the screen.  For additional durability, I finished the job with a few staples on the corners and along the sides where the lights could come loose with time.  The kit set us back 15 euros at our local ACTION store, but you could find similar LED-strips either at a homeware store or online.  This model came with a dimmer and a remote controller which is a pretty nifty detail, especially as we both are proper lazy, but most importantly, so that I could hide the manual control panel, similar to those on common Christmas lights, permanently on the back of the frame.

The light box comes with a remote dimmer and an off switch - lazy sleepers dream! 

I am aware that printing screens are not that common to come by when searching for materials for your own lightbox, but a wooden frame covered with a loosely knit fabric such as lace would look pretty amazing too.  Holiday lights can be used as a substitute for the adhesive strip that I chose to use, but make sure you stick with the LED’s – old style bulbs, although tiny, heat up and can be a dangerous when installed too close to fabrics. 

Happy crafting! 

Les Nouveaux Bohémiens

Rant warning! The following content may not be suitable for hipsters or anybody who wants to be a modern bohemian.

Bohemian style, rescued from obscurity by Coachella going fashionable millennials and the pesky bike-riding hipsters of this world*, has been mainstream for a while now.  Despite of, in principle, being a movement of unconventionality, today the bohemian decor is available to buy in any home store near you. 

And frankly I think this is a bit of a pity. 

Bohemian interiors are layered, casual and quirky.  I stumbled on an old Buzzfeed piece on boho style whilst researching (procrastinating) for this blog and I think the writer, Peggy Wang, sums up the feel of typical bohemian homes better than I ever could: 

"Lush exotic fabrics, perfectly disheveled pillows, and overgrown foliage - these are the trademarks of the cozy yet eclectic bohemian aesthetic."

Being a visual artist as well as a walking talking stereotype, I have been invited to a few rather bohemian households and I can concur, this is pretty much true - aesthetically anyway.  These spaces, thinking about a beautiful home of a couple that traveled the world in love, a shared flat of young and curious individuals, or a conventional house full of un-conventional memories in the middle of the "Middle-England", were not decorated to be bohemian - they grew around their owners like a well maintained garden would, with care and time. 

Bohemian interiors from Buzzfeed

Sure, you can take Ms. Wangs advice and hit the charity shops and the flea markets for your own piece of eclectic cool, or you could wait and see what life brings your way.  The boho style has been hot enough for several years that all sorts of bohemian goods are available to be consumed, from the high end boho chic brands such as anthropologie to the offerings of the trusted opium for the masses-giant IKEA.  Lets look at the example of Moroccan wedding blankets, the readers of popular design blogs will know exactly what I am talking about, the ultimate bedding accessory of 2015 - I would be lying if I said I did not like them.  They are beautiful objects, trendy, expensive.. proper showcases, but there is just one problem: I already have a good blanket.

My blankie, as scruffy as they come, has multicoloured spots on a white background and I paid 3.99£ for it in Pound Stretcher right next to the Meadowbank Sainsbury's in Edinburgh about seven years ago.  It's made or 100% polyester and I wouldn't change it for the world.

My "incidentally" bohemian bedroom.

My relationship with decor has always been complicated: When I moved to my first flat back in 2006, still living in Finland, I had practically no furniture beyond my childhood bed.  My mum stepped in, teamed up with a few relatives and collected everything a young person could need to set up their first home.  I was almost sixteen and in my head a fully grown adult.  Four years later I moved to Edinburgh to study painting and my sister, in turn just about to move into her first apartment, inherited all of my furniture and the nick-nacks I used as decoration.

Like most students, I moved several times whilst in uni, sometimes living on my own, sometimes sharing with friends or befriending the strangers I moved in with.  Although I carried a suitcase full of things back from Finland to Scotland on each of my visits, I always purged away twice the amount when I moved house. By the time I moved in with my future husband I had two suitcases full of clothes and three IKEA bags of other stuff and this was roughly the sum of my worldly belongings.

Thankfully, he did have furniture of his own; very nice furniture, things that he had collected in good time, with pride and love.  He is a maximalist with more clothes than I have, a brilliant taste regarding antique pieces and he shares my appetite for drifting.  We have, successfully may I add, bought furniture together; done the IKEA relationship test, haggled in a depot vente (a sort of a flea market), and replaced some of our old things with new, some of which were expensive and some on a budget.  Our decor is an eclectic mix of old and new, high and low-end - a bit... bohemian. 

Interior details from our little old house, with raw plaster walls and pealing wallpaper. 

I never thought of myself as a bohemian before. Never. Not even in the middle of my art studies with the evenings spent in pubs discussing painting and sex with other fashionably artistic millenials.  Bohemians, for me, don't shop at Lidl and they certainly don't store their H&M undies in a MALM dresser and enjoy watching the Embarrassing Bodies or the Jeremy Kyle Show.  To be honest, I think the culprit is this house - there is nothing more romantic than the idea of a creative couple living in a crumbling old house with charming period detail in the middle of the most picturesque France.  

With a dog.  

We did not set ourselves out to become cliches of bohemian living, it merely crept up on us and I guess this is how most interiors loved by the people who live in them are born. Just like all good gardens, with care and time.  Once we get going with the plaster work in this house, paint the walls and patch a few not-so-discrete holes on our ceilings, our dwelling will start looking more conventional again.  I like the rustic boho look we got going for the time being, but I would never pay a designer to recreate it.  Just as one might walk to Anthropologie today and pick up a piece of exotic old world chic to crown their eclectic lives, I imagine it could never feel the same as haggling for it in the bazaars of North Africa.  

Avocados growing on an IKEA stepstool - is this what hipsters are made of?

I feel immensely privileged to be able to live where I do and it works for us well.  Part of our choice to live in the South of France is to do with the relatively cheap cost of living, especially the price of property.  Like many, we would have not stood a change in owning our home in the UK where the system does not exactly favour the self employed, especially those working in arts.  Just like the bohemian artists that flooded the quarters of the poor in Paris at the end of the 19th century - we are part of the cycle of gentrification that is more relevant today than never before.

This is why I am cynical about the boho-craze: nothing is ever as simple as it looks.  Les Bohémiens of the golden age of Paris were mostly an ideal constructed by themselves; Henry Toulouse-Lautrec, the epitome of a poor bohemian artist, came from a wealthy aristocratic family who supported their son financially enabling him to pursue his artistic merits and live the jolly good la Vie de Bohéme.  To appreciate the bohemian aesthetic is fine as is living the bohemian life, I am not trying to point the finger on anybody, but this style, like any trend, is also a gargantuan business venture.  Boho-chic enterprises such as Coachella in the States, to use an obvious example, look like great fun, but let's not forget the fact that the cost of tickets for the weekend is more than most people pay in rent each month. 

The cozy, laid back bohemian feel of these types of events and products is often just an illusion.  Using the undying words of Dolly Parton: "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap."

Raw plaster wall in our bedroom

An quick search of bohemian interiors on Pinterest reveals a never ending stream of beautifully curated eclectic interiors from all around the world.  On a lot of cases replicating a look like that would be a choice between a new decor or a new car.  A few of us can afford to complete a process such as furnishing a home in one blast, but worry not - the process can be just as rewarding when you take, yes I am going to repeat the punch line one more time, time and care with your choices.

Want to live like a new bohemian? Hit the flee market, anthro or your local asda - and get only the things that you need.  Focus on the stuff that reminds you of good times and good people or what you really, really love.  With this set of guidelines you can't go wrong.  Trends, they come and go, so you might as well do you.  This is what visiting other peoples delightfully eclectic, cozy and totally bohemian homes has thought me.  

*Drops mike - rant over*

*Disclamer: You might meet me driving around on my vintage Motobecane bike, rocking a sundress-winter-scarf-combo.  I grow avocados on my lounge, like craft beer and I have a degree in fine art.. So dear hipsters - don't hate me, I'm one of you.