Category: Travel

  • The crocheted wharenui

    A few months back the blog featured Lissy Robinson-Cole and Rudi Robinson-Cole’s crocheted sculpture: Wharenui Harikoa. A wharenui is a large building for people to gather in and is usually on a marae. They are usually lavishly decorated with symbolic artworks and the various parts of the structure have particular relevance, which you can read…

  • Rata

    New Zealand’s native pōhutakawa is probably the best known of its trees, particularly because of its flowers of red that appear at Christmas. It has a relative, rata, that also flowers at the same time of year. Every few years the rata flowers in profusion, causing blots of red amongst the gentle hues of the…

  • Touring the South

    Over the Christmas period we took a tour of the South of the Te Waipounamu/ the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. The trip took in the West Coast route to Haast with an overnight stop in Ōkārito, another in Haast (specifically to have a fish lunch at Jackson Bay at the end of the…

  • Happy New Year

    Welcome blog friends, old and new. I hope you have had a good festive season, wherever you are and whatever you did. This year we are going to be opening the new textile studio in Greymouth Māwhera, and starting our workshops. The weaving equipment from the UK will be arriving in Aotearoa New Zealand in…

  • The last blog for the year

    Hello, dear readers, It is the end of another year and the last posting for 2024. What a year it has been. We have been lucky enough to travel and also fortunate enough to have stayed home. It has been a year of creativity, a new studio space, singing in waiata groups and with choirs,…

  • The Spotify playlist

    This week’s Spotify playlist features, as always, audio that relates to the articles on the blog. In addition there are some extras, it being the festive season for many across the world. To listen to the playlist click on the player above or go to Spotify on the Web or in the app and search…

  • Shooting fashion in a slum

    In November this year, an NGO in India released an Instagram video of a fashion shoot with a difference. For 41% of India’s urban population “home” is a slum. (A slum is defined by the World Bank as a group of individual people who live under one roof and lack one or more of the…

  • Waving at fairies

    At this time of year when magical things happen for many people across the globe, what could be more apt than this…? https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1037478179768402 or this…?

  • What’s on Spotify this week

    This playlist features: Songlines by Nyoongi and Rüdiger Oppermann Australia meets Europe in Songlines, a piece that combines plucked strings with didgeridoo. Songlines are the walking music that Aboriginal people memorise to travel safely and to pass on ancestral routes. In a Landscape by John Cage, performed by Alexei Lubimov American composer, John Cage, is…

  • Baboon

    Baboons, those Bad Boys of the Old World, have a reputation… Wily, cunning, vicious… these are all words that are used to describe our primate cousins. Baboons are seen as pests because they plunder houses, and farms, and take food right out of tourists’ hands. They roam freely, seemingly wherever they want. After all who…