thorsten van elten

So apparently my moon is in aquarius today which is the opposite side of the zodiac (I read that in the newspaper I found on the tube this morning). They advised me that this will slow me down and and I might not be very productive today. Damn, what excuse am I going to use tomorrow???

As my first contribution here, I thought I’d share this beautiful series of matchbox covers this designer collects.Via 37signals.

Although on paper I might appear middle-aged (haha, middle-aged, me!!) I’m not completely past it, there is life left in the old dog yet.  I went to see The Cold Bloods doing a gig at the Metro Club on Oxford Street in December. Well, there was  a good reason for it as Richard who works with us is on drums so I thought I’d better go down there and support him.  Now check out their video. Rock’n Roll!

Now that I have re-discovered the joys of Saturdays off, I have also noticed that morning TV just isn’t the same as it used to be. Ok, admittedly I am a little (ok ok, a lot) too old for Kids TV but it sort of did the trick on a Saturday morning with a bad hungover last time round I had weekends off. I look back on the days when Ant & Dec did SMTV and I found one of my favourite clips thanks to the wonder that is You Tube. So, have a look at Ant & Dec and Brian (from Westlife). You can skip the first 30 seconds but then…classic TV. Yep, I know, I’m still a big big kid!! Enjoy, I watched it about 15 times over the weekend and it still cracks me up.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German authorities were able to pin a burglary committed in April on a suspected serial thief after he left a half-eaten slice of salami carrying a sliver of his DNA at a crime scene, police said Thursday.

The 37-year-old Romanian man is accused of breaking into a workshop office in the western city of Darmstadt, stealing cash and two locks and causing damage worth around 3,400 euros, Suedhessen police spokesman Ferdinand Derigs said. “He didn’t bring the salami with him — it was just lying around in the office,” Derigs said.

The man was already wanted in connection with 19 burglaries and had been taken into custody in January after a routine police road check, he added. Investigations are continuing.

You don’t honestly believe I’m going to tell you how to make your own Pigeon Light.  I just needed a header for this entry and this was the best I could come up with.

I just thought I’d give you a little insight into the high-tech world of thorsten van elten products. Firstly, take one high-quality wooden clothes peg. Not any old clothes peg but top-of-the-range clothes peg. I used to buy them from John Lewis on Oxford Street where I regularly cleared them out of pegs, until one day to my horror I discovered they changed suppliers and the new pegs were just not up to our high standards. So we ran around London like headless chicken looking for any John Lewis related shop (Peter Jones, Waitrose etc) to see if anyone anywhere had some left. We found some but thought we’d better get to the source of said pegs which we discovered was Denmark. I think last time we bought about 80,000 pegs so we should be ok for a while.

Anyway, so we have the peg, now get one pillar drill (mine was about £ 29.95 from screwfix direct) and start drilling. In the image you can see a very high-tech jig, produced by the very Ed Carpenter himself when we first started making the Pigeon Light. I think we might have glued it back together a few times but otherwise - still the original!

Last but not least get some fine grade sand paper and sand the edges of drilled holes until nice and smooth.

That’s your first part completed! We’ll do step two in a coule of weeks when you all had time to go out and find some top of the range clothes pegs.

Free  free free at last!! Not that I regret ever having opened the shop, in fact I am very happy I opened it but now I’m equally as happy to have closed it. And we did close it in great style. Thank you for all those who came and made it a fantastic evening and I did what I always wanted to do…grabbed a few things (ceramics work a treat!) and smashed them against the wall, well, the walls were made of plasterboard so they didn’t smash until they hit the floor. Nevertheless…it felt fantastic!!!

Now I have my weekends back I’ll definitely write more entries to the blog as I will occasionally venture out of my 150 square metres (shop - pub - supermarket).

I’m ever so sorry for having been so lazy recently but I promise you I will write more often.

Occasionally I get sent links to websites that look quite similar to my very own website. Without accusing anyone of anything we put it down to “great minds think alike” or how we like to call it “Separated at Birth”. I think this deserves a whole new section on here so if you ever come across anything that you think…hang on, that looks familiar, I’d like to hear!!

So here is mine: 

And here is Matteo Thun & Partners:

Yes, I think it’s time again for a little bit of shameless self-promotion. Our new World Map Rug by Barnaby Barford (featured a little further down) has been nominated for a UK Elle Decoration Design Award in the Flooring category. Now this is where I will need your help. This year for the first time everyone can vote … . so, do I need to spell it out??

5 years in business and we are definitely getting the hang of doing trade fairs, especially in setting it all up and taking it down. This year we have outdone ourselves in terms of speed. After showing at Maison & Objet in Paris just a month ago we managed to take down the stand and load up the van and were on that motorway in a record 1hour and 15minutes and at 100% Design in London (see picture above) we managed to be in and out (this time setting up) in just under 4 hours!! Well, it’s now a difficult target to beat….but we will start training soon to set new records in the new year.