Hermes Festival des Metiers at the Saatchi Gallery - Part 1

Hermes is holding a special artisan festival at the

Saatchi Gallery in London until the 27th of May.

This event is to showcase the tradition and artisanal skills of each "metier" or craft.  If you are in London or this event is coming to a city near you then I must strongly urge you to go.

I adore porcelain of any type let alone Hermes.

One of the few collections I have is of Hermes porcelain so this section interested me no end and I could have stayed for hours!

This artisan was Christine and she was originally a drafts person for architects and was very adept at drawing which led her to hand painting her niche which is porcelain trays.  

She explained that each color painted on the tray is put 

in the kiln for at least 7 hours.  

She said that each color takes on a unique temperature 
according to the dye.

For those of you familiar with Hermes porcelain, 

Christina is the one who makes all the tiger series!

She says that the platinum used on the trays is so costly that only the top experts are allowed to use it as a small bottle costs about 3000 euros so wastage is not encouraged.

She hand paints that freehand!!
Each tray takes about 10 days to produce.

The different stages of the evolution of a porcelain tray.

This is for those who can't be there so I have taken 

some extra photos to demonstrate.

Drum roll please! The final Liebster and the winners are ...

My last but definitely not least Liebster blogger 

is Heidi from Adelaide Villa.

She is one of my favourite bloggers out there.  

She is both a trained architect and Inchbald trained interior decorator who really knows her stuff when discussing home design or showing fabulous pictures of her home renovations.

But she is an excellent writer who also discusses fashion to those seemingly light subjects in life that caused a stir for instance when she discussed socially appropriate dressing.  

So do visit and say hello to Heidi.

I want to quickly say a thank you to Heather from Lost in Arles for giving it to me so that I could pass it on!

Laotian sunsets and sunrises plus a few more Liebsters

Before my post, I would quickly like to introduce three more of the  six bloggers to whom I forwarded the Liebster award.

Jenny has a delightful blog called the The Lime Walk. 

She moved from South Africa to Australia but also spends time in her house in France.  She has got the travel bug like I do but writes about a wide range of interests.  She is a lot of fun!

Ruth from Clothing Fixations is a Brit who moved to Sydney and gives me my dose of the good life down under with a healthy helping of fashion and well edited outfits.  Her posts always make me have pangs for Australia and it makes me laugh when she now thinks 18 degrees Celsius is cold!

Chinwags and Tittle Tattles is a London blog by MsMadge that covers many topics and you never know what she is going to write about next.  She has varied interests and writes meaty posts so I am sure she will have something for you to be curious about.

All the ladies are super friendly so do pop in for a bit of a gander.

I think you will really enjoy the ladies' answers as well!

Don't forget that my giveaway ends Tuesday morning so let me know if you want to be entered in either the scarf or perfume raffle.

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The last time I left you in Laos, I was hypnotized  by the sunsets.

The sunrises seemed far too ambitious at the time but the reason I had to get up early was to behold the legendary sunrise alms giving that Luang Prabang is known for.

Mad Men Season 6, Episodes 6 and 7 plus a few Liebsters!

For those of you who are not watching Mad Men, may I just introduce two of the 6 bloggers I forwarded the Liebster award to?

The first in alphabetical order is Kelly from A Soulful Home.
She is a new blogger like myself and has a lovely blog based in Sunny California.  She is an attorney who now turns her dab hand to creating lots of little elements that make her home so soulful; 
by name, by nature!

The second is Colleen from Forcailini 
which is Gaelic that means for the girls.
She is a fashion / nutrition blogger.
 I love her style and the items she picks out and models for us.
But she also "sneaks in a few vegetables" and writes informative posts about nutrition and health which comes naturally to her because she is a professional nutritionist!

They are both super friendly so please visit 
and don't be shy to say hello! 

So now on to Mad Men.
  Things are going back to the way things used to be.

People are back to work. 
Back to creating and conniving and scheming!

I love the period of growth.  

Even SCDP was getting a bit stagnant wasn't it?

I am worried that the car itself might be a dud...

Everything and everyone in it was getting so stagnant except perhaps Roger.

I finally won something.

The multi-talented Heather from the blog Lost in Arles kindly bestowed the Liebster award to me last week.  For those who like to read, I would highly suggest a visit. She writes beautifully and those who think it is only to do with France and all things French - it's not.  France is purely incidental on her blog.

I was rather chuffed about it and more than happy to accept the baton from her.

It was quite good timing as well as today is the 6 month anniversary for this blog.

In some ways, I can't believe it has even lasted this long.  Time has just flown by and I can't believe how much I have learned since I started; not only technical things like RSS ( still don't know what that means but at least now I know it pertains blogging ) but also blogosphere anthropology.  Truth be told, there have been quite a few times when I was going to quit but I realized I wouldn't be proving a point to anyone or anything so I kept going even when my stats were 0.  But I have "met" and discovered so many wonderful and interesting writers out there that I am so happy I decided to start my own blog.