Skip to main content

Yuri Gagarin, dancing shoes, flaming unicycles and a bit of technology...





Its been a busy week, loads of lovely friends staying, fab weekend with  friends walking on the beach and nice sunday dinner at the Sun Inn Alnmouth - a birthday for Dr Fred, final hand in for the Dr Martens project (phew..) and of course the Yuri Gagarin Space party!!!!

If you've never experienced a Yuri party then you need to consider finding one for April 12th next year!!! This year we helped a bar in town Ernest's to host a most spectacular event, not just good space tunes with DJ Yuri Cosmos (aka Dr Fred) but space jesters on flaming unicycles - luminous space cocktails, good fun and lots of brilliant costumes.  This party celebrates Yuri Gagarin - the first man in space April 12th 1961... there are parties all over the world on this night and this just happens to coincide with Dr Fred's birthday so we always make a bit of an event of it and its great fun.  I never seem to have time to do my fancy dress - too busy making mirror ball suits and furry jackets for the birthday boy but this year I managed some funky dancing shoes - it was an excellent night and we carried on until the wee hours in the morning once we got back to base...

this is a 9 sec video of the dancing shoes (with loud music) - hoping it works... they were very fab in the dark...



All this was on top of a busy few days finishing up the DM stuff which turned into a major project at the last minute as stuff often does but I was pleased with what I finally put together - a mixture of some lovely woven and knitted old sea ropes and some collage work on hand drawn boots.. I worked right up to the deadline so I don't have many pictures of the finished objects until next week..


And then to finish of the week some really interesting training at Cragside - now I can make a model hydraulic crane and an Archimedes Screw .... not many people get hydraulics, water power and flaming unicycles all in one week!!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scotland part 2

The second half of the week continued in much the same vein.  We had one rainy afternoon which was actually quite nice to be holed up in the house with the rain lashing the windows.  It probably wasn't quite so nice for the two visitors that came on their bikes but they're tough cookies - and its only water- but I did feel sorry for them having to cycle six miles back down the track in the wind and rain, but given Scotland,  it wasn't as bad as it could be. The big quest for the 2nd half of the week was to find some deer antiers!  The chap that owned the house dropped in to visit - he was a very friendly fella and was chatting about how this was the time of year when all the Stags lost their antlers (he collected them and sold them) so after that we were on the serious lookout.   It's always been Fred's mission to find some dropped antlers....  The Monro baggers continued with the mission to bag the remaining three Monros... there is discussion as whet...
Post a Comment
Read more

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town.  Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now.  The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art....  Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...
2 comments
Read more

verdant lushness

Its a never ending island hop... today we hopped of the boat at Kingstown, on the island St. Vincents and Grenadine. Once through the usual port duty free - cheap booze and diamonds to go milarkey we were straight into the town... crazy noisy smelly chaos... refreshingly no tat shops for tourists, just local markets and street traders all vying for local sales.  Music blasting from everywhere, cars (very battered and often very pimped) all over the roads - parked in the middle of the street, loading, unloading, chatting seemingly oblivious to the total traffic jam caused behind them...  We walked through this mayhem - the temperatures were rising probably about 30 degrees - tourists evident by trying to walk on the shady side of the street - even when we turned off the main drag and there were less people it was still like carnival time with music blasting everywhere. Its very atmospheric and mostly promotes a good vibe although I have heard '3 little birds' everywhich way a...
1 comment
Read more