more than i ever have time for... sewing especially dresses from vintage patterns although i'm also trying to teach myself pattern-cutting, a long and quite painful process that has resulted in me owning quite a few weirdly shaped clothes. knitting on the top deck of london buses, mostly from 1930s/1940s patterns. dancing i'm in a dance group called the actionettes - check us out at http://www.myspace.com/theactionettes - we do crazy synchronised go-go routines to 60s soul and girl-group pop songs, i'm trying to learn the lindy-hop and charleston but that's pretty slow going, i want to waltz too... theatre usually the smaller and odder the better, although there's a lot to be said for the old-fashioned play too. gardening although you wouldn't know it from the state of my garden at the moment, one day i hope to have grass and borders and a proper vegetable patch, but right now all i've got is a scrap of mud with a few tufts of grass... and some random things i like: red lipstick and black liquid eyeliner, painting and playing guitar, rivers, parks (especially when the grass has just been cut), fishnets, train journies, making up cake recipes, burlesque dancers, mary jane shoes, dogs, rum cocktails, tea parties... ok, that's enough to be getting on with for now
dreamers, lost souls, anyone who loves cooking and sewing and knitting and swapping recipes and patters and tips, vintage shoppers, crazy dancers, theatre-makers, gardeners, people with gramophones and anyone sweet and kind i might have forgotten...
more than i can ever listen to: charleston dance songs, 30s ballads, 40s big bands (as long as they're not too cruise-liner-sounding), 50s doo-wop and pop, 40s/50s R&B, 60s girl pop and garage and soul... after that music went a bit wrong for a long time... 80s onwards, if it's indie-guitarry i probably like it, although indie has gone a bit wrong too lately... sigh... and i love love love opera, especially lulu and lady macbeth of mtsensk
oh how i love an afternoon matinee... i love film noir and b&w romances and pretty much anything with james stewart, cary grant or katherine hepburn (yup, the philadelphia story is probably the best film ever made), i'm also very fond of cowboy movies. the umbrellas of cherbourg is probably the other best film ever made, closely followed by john waters' cry baby and wong kar wai's chungking express. oh and i guess i should confess i have a terrible weakness for dirty dancing (shame on me!)
yeuch! no! unless it's a b&w movie of course... that said, i was pretty partial to green wing...
i studied english so i obviously own more books than it's possible to read in even three lifetimes... favourite books mostly seem to have been written somewhere between 1920-1965, although i'm also fond of a bit of middle english and malory's morte d'arthur is a cracking read. also, you can't beat jane austen (well, maybe nancy mitford can, but that's about it). and i'm obsessed with recipe books, old or new