Tea Towels, Life, and the Oxford Comma

Firstly, hello! It's been a while, but for good reason. I'm hoping to revive the blog - but before I do, I thought I should probably explain my absence a little bit. As you might already know, my other half and I own a business called ToDryFor.com selling tea towels with design by some of the best illustrators / animators / graphic designers around. We were very quickly running out of space, so went on the hunt for business premises. We found an awesome little shop space not far from where we live, which we managed to get! The last 4/5 months has been spent setting it up and getting used to the life of shop owners. This has not left much time for anything else!

We called the shop Comma because Sally is a grammar geek, and we filled it with wonderous objects - mostly made by the individual artists that we were already working with. Our sign (see photo above) was painted by the incredibly talented Ben Javens, and we have a wall mural in the shop by the one and only Gemma Correll! It's such an amazing place to come to work every day. Here are some pics...

Going Dutch

We have just spent an amazing long weekend in Holland - The Hague to be precise. It's such a lovely city - not just criminal courts! I don't normally do high street shops as every high street in the UK pretty much looks the same. It's not until you venture somewhere special that you find interesting quirky shops (like Columbia Rd in London, for example). The nice thing about being in foreign climes is that even the high street shops are new and exciting! My favourites this time were Dille and Kamille and V&D. Dille and Kamille (the last two pictures) is a gorgeous shop that sells all the basics that you could possibly need for the home. It's a treasure trove of everything from gorgeous natural bent-wood chairs to kitchen utensils I didn't even know I needed! V&D is a department store, but the food counters had me drooling. The marzipan fruits (above) and the bizarre hog roast styled pigs (below) really did taste as good as they looked!