Olympic mascots become self-ware and go on a killing spree around London!

Wenlock - Olympic mascot

Ha ha, only kidding they do look like they were sent back from the future by Skynet though ;)

So finally the London 2012 Olympic Mascots by have been revealed. As you would expect from the 2012 committee, they are not really what we expected! Far from cute & cuddly they are cold & hard, more like a Henry Moore sculpture than a kids toy.

Designed by London agency iris, I read that they only cost “a few thousand pounds”, I think they probably cost a bit more than that! Probably just trying to play it down after the £400,000 logo fiasco.

Mandeville - Olympic mascot

I feel for it’s designer though, whatever you create you’re going to get people ripping the shit out of it (myself included, sorry..) It’s an impossible brief, design by committee jobs always are.. I actually like it quite a lot, everything from the neck down looks awesome, great proportions, clean lines, sweet as in my book. Problem is though, why oh why that eye Olympic Committee?

You can tell by the descriptions on iris’ design boards, that the eye was supposed to be a camera lens, but at some point they decided to stick a cartoon eye on there which looks totally at odds to the rest of the angular design. Pixar have already shown with characters like WALL•E, or even their original anglepoise lamp short, that with the limitations of something ‘less human’, you can get a lot more unique character out of it. Feels like it was almost good, but they fucked it up at the last hurdle..

I actually took part in the original pitch too!

My olympic mascot pitch

Only fair to put my own work up for comparison/criticism. My idea was unsurprisingly the sock monster route. Rather than selling preformed shiny toys to the kiddies, I wanted to make ‘kits’ which were essentially a pair of long sport socks with instructions of how to make your own mascot from scratch! Thought it would be nice thing to do in school as a crafty lesson, give them chance to be creative and add a bit personal flair to their own mascot. The agency I was working for poo poo’d it because it wasn’t ‘commercially viable’, said the committee would never go for it as they needed to pay for the Olympics through some mass-produced piece of Chinese plastic..

Vík Prjónsdóttir

Vík Prjónsdóttir Blankets

A while back I was repeatedly sent this Beardcap link, I never blogged about it at the time as it was all over the internet already. But the Icelandic company responsible – Vík Prjónsdóttir continues to knock out fresh stuff, in particular I’m lovin’ their new blankets.

The layering of this Shield of Wings (pictured) and the anchored Sea Blanket is mighty nice. Although the one that I really want to get shipped over from Iceland is Hidden World (bottom pic), it’s well wizard :)

Via: Coolhunting.

More cake action!

Cake baking

While I’m on the subject of cakes, I came across this Threadless Cake baking competition (now ended). Basically you had to re-create a Threadless t-shirt as a cake, my favourite was this You Are The Best cake by Leslie Evans. Look at the all the bloody detail on that lettering?! Everyone seems to be using ‘fondant’ though? Not nearly as tastey as marzipan, yum yum, looks like it might be a bit more sturdy to work with though.

Eleanor & Andy’s Wedding cake

Eleanor & Andy's Wedding cake

Just back from our wedding tour of the north, here’s some pictures of the Eleanor & Andy’s wedding cake that me & Nicky made!

Eleanor & Andy's Wedding cake

What inspired me to ask Eleanor if I could make her cake was the Eugene & Louise bakery art show. I blogged about it a while ago and have been itching for a good excuse to have a go since. Working the Marzipan was a bit harder than I had expected, not quite the same as plasticine.. Definitely didn’t reach E&L’s standards, but I think El was pretty happy with it none the less :)

Wedding Cake Marzipan Men

The best bit was making all the marzipan men for the top. So much fun in fact that ended up with so many that they couldn’t all fit on the cake. We had extra marzipan for all the kids to make their own, took them about 10 minutes to realise it wasn’t plasticine and start eating it!

Brightly coloured wedding attire

I think me & Nicky had the most brightly coloured wedding attire at the wedding! Although with everyone else on our row we almost had the whole spectrum.

Vintage bus ticket machine

Had to post a pic of this amazing old bus ticket machine, I was bus conductor on the way to the church and had to stamp the specially made tickets with it.

I’m afraid we were too pissed to take any pics of the cake actually being eaten.. but I’ve got a vague recollection that it tasted extremely good.

For those interested, more wedding pics and cake making pics on my Flickr.

Away for a week and a half

Away for a week and a half

No blog updates for a few days, going up to the lakes for a wedding. But after that me & Nicky plan to climb Scarfell Pike, Snowdon and Ben Nevis (in that order) before another wedding in Scotland the following weekend. So we’ll probably post a few pics of our progress to keep you going. If you’re not aware, those are the highest mountains in England, Wales and Scotland. The thing to do is try and climb them all in 24 hours, but we’re not doing that…

Above is the making of my first ever wedding cake, may well be my first ever cake for that matter… The cake was pretty easy, but the marzipan is proving to be more difficult than I had imagined to work with. I’ll not spoil the surprise by showing the finished cake, will post it after the wedding.