Sophie Smallhorn

Earlier this summer, when I took one of my rare strolls down our inner city walking street Strøget, a shop window really made me stop. Now, it was in a shop I usually check out, but this was different!

It turned out to be this really cool creative collaboration between British artist and visual concept maker, Sophie Smallhorn, and the Swedish fashion brand COS. 

In flagship COS stores in Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Seoul, London and Los Angeles, Sophie Smallhorn made site specific window displays with these stacked, geometric color forms - basically taking up a lot of window space and thus upstaging the clothes completely, but with such wow effect, that it had the exact opposite effect.

If you know a bit about COS's particular kind of colorful minimalism, the windows worked like an abstract depiction of the brand DNA. So brilliant and so beautiful.

Above, the shops in Copenhagen, Seoul, London and Honkong (couldn't find the L.A. one).

These displays are based on a series of small and quite delicate wall hung acrylic and aluminium sculptures - a theme she has worked on for a number of years - only in an enlarged version.

Her graphic and sleek style just makes me jump with joy, see much more of her work here, and she proves to me yet again, that playfulness and orderliness are not necessarily adversaries!

Here are a couple of examples of her 'Components' sculptures:

And here's a nice little story to end this post with....

I snapped a picture of the Danish window and posted it on Instagram. I saw a suggested hashtag in the window (check it out: #cosxsophiesmallhorn), and used it, to properly credit this fine work.

I actually didn't notice, or only vaguely so, anyway, that I entered a competition - and only found out, when COS contacted me, and told me I had won two Sophie Smallhorn prints!

Yayeee!! I am picking them up next week, and they look like this. Lucky me, don't you think?
Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets?

THAT window - because it's a tradition!

So, there it is, same as every year - and always something new.
I love it! Such a great tradition. Read more here!

A Christmas card: Snowflakes in New York

Dear readers! I wish you some happy holidays, however you celebrate them and whereever you celebrate them - here it will be done by winding very much down after some busy weeks, no months, for my little family, where work has taken most of our energy. Also some of the energy I usually put into my Christmas DIY postings, I'm afraid - but I hope you have enjoyed the couple I did manage - I have already gotten some very sweet feedback, and that really makes me glad! 

Here is a Christmas card, of sorts. This little story has been on my mind, since I saw a mention somewhere, many many months ago, but it was a winter story - so I forgot about it. And randomly got reminded again via Instagram, the other day! So here goes... 

Everybody knows the iconic Flatiron Building in New York - but you probably have to be around it, at street level, so to speak, to know about the activities in the small glass pavillion (the so-called 'prow') at the bottom. For some time, a local gallery - the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, has curated art shows in this small glassed-in space. Always colorful, poetic, spectacular and eye catching stuff, it seems. I discovered this via This is Colossal, a rather cool visual arts blog. 

In February 2016, a young New York paper artist, Chelsea Hrynick Browne, made the most fantastic installation of literally thousands of small kirigami papercut snowflakes, suspended on lengths of nylon string - to make the space look like a rainbow colored blizzard was happening. 

Here it is, in an actual blizzard - photographed by Michele Palazzo (more photo credits at the end).

I do have a soft spot for anyone who gets so obsessive with their scissors, as you may know. Check some of my other posts tagged paper artist!

I also love snowflakes in windows (discover some of my earlier mentions here!)

Chelsea Hrynick Browne is interested in mathematics, patterns and repetitions - and I can't imagine how long it takes her to complete a task like this. All the snowflakes you see, are double layered (apparently laminated in some kind of thin, shimmery film), and very detailed. They are all cut by hand, by her.

Here she is, at work, hanging the installation - and a couple of images from her Instagram shows some more detail of how her square motifs typically look.  

Photos: Street evening photos from: untappedcities.com.

Portrait and details from Chelsea Hrynick Brown's Instagram
Detail of flake hanging in window from: fibonaccisusan.com

Just for fun, I'll wrap up this post with a nice old photo: the Flatiron Building with it's distinctive prow, just seen at street level, at the 'point' af the building - looking probably much as it does today. 

Spring favorite # 2: The Flower Queen

Marianne Eriksen Scott-Hansen is a Danish fashion artist / designer / stylist / general creative explosion - known by anyone who has followed experimental fashion here in DK for the past two decades. She works in all kinds of media, but her almost superhuman ways with the scissors are somehow central to much of what she does. When you read interviews with her, she often explains how she works intuitively, with very few templates, work drawings or such. She simply lets the scissors do the talking, and incredible things happen. 

At the moment she works almost entirely in paper, and her wild, textural visual style has really taken off in her current project: doing enormous flower installations in cheap tissue or crêpe paper. She emphasizes how she insists on working in the standard materials her local paper shop stocks (although the amounts of paper that she uses are not quite standard - she must be a wonderful customer for that paper shop!!), and how she does everything herself and by hand. 

I am simply breathlessly impressed and full of awe and wonder! It is stunning and abundant. The workload almost incomprehensible - and, it's all from plain paper and a pair (or several pairs) of ordinary scissors. Paper truly is a magic material (as I keep insisting on).

Please enjoy these few pictures of Marianne Eriksen Scott-Hansens Easter decor in the Royal Copenhagen flagship store - and, I think, from a backdrop for the ELLE style awards (just two of her many, many supersize flower extravaganzas).

All photos are from her instagram, where you should follow her and fall in love with her work as well.

Those days in between

Christmas is more or less over, although there is still a certain holiday slacker atmosphere about our days, and now we are frantically Googling hors d'oeuvres recipes, as we are going to our usual everybody-bring-a-course dinnerparty on New Years Eve.

Yesterday I took a different route grocery shopping than my usual one, and remembered one thing I had completely forgotten: my friends down the road with the snowflake window - how did it look this year? Unbelievably, as they live about a five minute walk from us, I hadn't been down that end of the main street in our neighborhood all December.

But there it was, pretty as always!

(Readers of this blog will know that I have posted this window several times before. Every year, early in the Christmas season, my frinds have a party, where everyone is asked to cut white tissue paper snow flakes, while drinking glögg and eating sweets. They don't stop until the window is full, and I LOVE that window. Some years they jazz it up with a few red flakes, and last year - I think it was? - the flakes were square. But it always snows in Stine and Erik's dining room window!)

Hellig Tre Konger / Epiphany / Twelfth Night - and goodbye tree!

Today is the very very last day of christmas - Epiphany or Twelfth Night - and in Denmark we mostly remember this date because it is, traditionally, the last day you are allowed to enjoy your christmas tinsel. On January 6th it has to go! I guess lots of people get rid of it much sooner, and we too put away most of the elves and advent candlesticks and such, but I tend to stick with the tree - if we have one - to about this day. We always buy one just a few days before Christmas Eve, and christmas trees are ridiculously expensive if you life in a big city in Denmark (and cost next to nothing if you live in the countryside) so I cannot bring myself to throw it away. Plus, of course, it looks festive.

This is what ours looked like about three days ago....

It got stuck in a strange and messy corner this year, and does its very best to cover up our semi stowed away CD collection. 

Yesterday it got to the turning point of its lush looking greenness - it just kinda lost all of its needles at once, so today it just looks sad and creepy. I de-tinselled it this morning, and when my son is back from kindergarten, he gets to see it thrown over the balcony all of four stories down! Mustn't miss that.

Thank you ALL for following my blog this December, there were visitors from the most exotic places, from Egypt to Japan, hope you will check it out again. I just started on Pinterest, so you can find me there as well. Not much happening there yet, I have to say, but it will grow, I'm guessing.

The very last christmassy thing I will do this time is to show you this years edition of My Favourite Window!

I have shown you this window the two previous seasons - see the one from 2011, and see the one from 2012 - and this year my friends down the street, came up with yet another twist on their beautiful annual holiday paper snowflake window.

And it looks lovely again this year. With this I will wish you all a Happy New Year!

Flaky windows for the very lazy

The snowflake window, which I shared with you the other day here, and showed you last year here, demands that you put in some serious hours. But I found some alternative solutions for the lazy.
And it is so very, very okay to be lazy.

The first quick fix is from a Danish magazine, Alt For Damerne, using paper doilies.
The one in the middle is from Dutch sticker company Studio Haikje.
Tha last one I borrowed from the Danish blog Piger i Provinsen - the one with the masking tape.
I have seen this star in many versions around town, and I have seen fantastic, entire windows done
up in the most stylish way - very islamic architecture, very clever! See for yourself, here...

Making a quick christmas window is easy peasy. Nothing to it, as you can see.
I could easily see this tape idea developed a bit, with the zigzag scissors from the sewing drawer,
or simply cropping the ends diagonally, which would make the design even more starry or flaky.

And then I stumbled upon the Swiss designer Claudia Caviezel, a lady who has taken this media
to a completely new level.

She designed these patterns for room dividers in the Zürich airport business lounge.
And they are - masking tape stuck directly on enormous, layered glass panels! Cool.

My favourite window

Late yesterday afternoon I took my small camera with me out jogging, in order to document
if my favourite window in the local neighbourhood has gone into christmas mode. I have been
following it patiently, but missed it the last week or so - but I was not dissapointed yesterday.

And I love that they have added red and purple this year, that looks great, usually it's all white.
Really grainy and poor photos, but daylight is almost non existant here in Cph at the moment.

So, as I wrote last year, they do this every year - and it is a seasonal installation that gets completely refreshed every year, so you must imagine that all these exquisite tissue flakes simply gets scrubbed
down some time after New Year in a frenzy of window cleaning.
I like that, somehow. It adds to the elegance of the whole thing.

And since I had my camera with me, I tried to take some evening pictures of all the lights in the
windows - all the stars and fairylights people put up, here in the gloomy Scandinavian winter.
It proved almost impossible, with the small camera, and they got really blurry. But I kind of decided
that I liked that, since it was the greyest of foggy days, so I exaggerated a bit and ended up with these....

They captured the day perfectly.

Flaky - part three

Just a few blocks from here, some of my friends live.
And every year at christmas, they have this fine tradition: on one of the early weekends in the season
they get together and make paper flakes for this fantastic themed window. Every year it is the same -
and, of course, every year it is different!
So here it is - Stine and Eriks delicate tissue paper snowflake extravaganza!
To me, it is one of the more important local signs of christmas - and I keep an eager eye out for the
flakes from late november / early december - and if I think they are the least bit late, I will send them impatient emails.

It took me a while to do this post, as this window is so hard to show properly in a photograph....
Originally I wanted to take a picture at night, but that proved impossible, as reflections of the street
lights were all you could see. But I hope you get just hint of the fragile prettiness here....

A quiet start

I welcome you all to this seasonal pop-up-blog, in which I will be writing about - well, something,
I wouldn't be surprised - as I am sometimes prone to rantings.

But most of all, I will give you a little something to print and make every day - usually woven hearts,
but sometimes not. The hearts are my thing, though, so you can expect a few of these. I make them
every now and then, so some of them are not necessarily christmas-like. But you will see....

No cheating, though. No advent calendar downloads until December 1st.

Last year Copenhagen was covered in snow, at this time. I love snow and everything about it and,
contrary to popular belief, it is not that common to have two months of snow, as we did last winter.
It was glorious.
I so hope we will have some this year again. Piles of it, enough for skiing, enough for us to get really
used to it, and just relax and enjoy it.

The only sort-of-slightly christmassy decor I have felt inclined to do, is perhaps a bit inspired....
The flakes are made of Hama-beads, and these I will definitely be mentioning later.
As I have a bit of a fetish. And, as you can see: foggy, wet weather. No snow.