Fab new product just in time for Christmas!!

Looking for that last min stocking stuffer? Dragging yourself through town to the end of finding nothing original or interesting let alone eco friendly!
I have a new product hot of the press just in time for the Christmas fairs Ive been doing.. the up-cycled tea towel at just £8 its a perfect stocking stuffer and as a up-cycled product it has the history of the old and the illustrations of the new cake and tea check it out below and links on where to buy... Merry Christmas!
www.esthercoombs.etsy.com

Shop your socks on with Esther's Holiday season events!

Hi!!
I have some great events coming up for Christmas shopping events which are almost upon us! They are well worth a visit if your in town! Flyer's, tickets, PV invites and entry offers below..
Esther :)

Illustrated Fiction Post - Coffee

Another cracking little story from the misstess of fiction Ms julia F Green..

As she walked along Maiden Lane from the subway to her office building, Nell had to jab the fingernails of her right hand into the palm of her left, just to have something to concentrate on besides the cups of coffee that were glued to everyone’s hand, and the dense, lush smell of those brewed beans that sat like a thick blanket atop everything in lower Manhattan. The coffee—its smell, its presence, its phantom taste on the tongue—was everywhere, and Nell thought she could almost feel the dried ends of her hair trembling with the desire for it.

It had been four days since she’d consumed caffeine, and in the panicked haze that had settled in during that time, Nell could barely recall what her original motivation had been. The words clarity and purity and health flitted around her mind in animated thought bubbles, like in a children’s TV show. As she passed yet another coffee cart, Nell closed her eyes halfway and visualized the herbal tea she’d been drinking since Sunday. It tasted vaguely like dishwater.

Nell clung to the hope that soon the fog would break, and she would emerge renewed from the depths of her being, each cell revived and remade, ensuring a long, long life and none of the wrinkles that usually go with it. Until then, she would stumble through her days, protected by the image of her future self, a clean, efficient machine that ran itself on water and air and sunlight, like a big green plant on a fire escape, its healthy vines creeping along and embracing the ironwork whose years of rust softened under the green lattice.

Illustrated fiction post..

Sorry I've been so notably absent, so much to do after the Design Week shows so without further ado!...
A eargerly awaited illustrated fiction post from Julia F Green.. here it is..
Just a note.. I'm thinking of combining these cool illustrated fiction post into a zine, what do you all think about that good idea? Id appreciate your thoughts.. :)

Est


When Clarice turned the corner, she said shit. Somehow, overnight, two cranes had appeared in the middle of the block of 20th Street she walked down each day to get to work. As everyone in New York knew, cranes were falling out of the sky and to walk under one was to look God in the eye and tell him to go fuck himself. That dude was not going to laugh that one off. Kaboom, and they’re digging for your wallet in five feet of rubble.

She could have turned back—she could have gone back to 6th Avenue, walked up or down a block, over to 7th and then cut back to 20th. But what a waste of fucking time that would be. Who lives in New York and walks around in circles just to avoid danger? Clarice murmured the only prayer she remembered from her mandatory early childhood church attendance, opened her umbrella to the clear blue sky, and strode toward her destiny.

Prep prep prepping!!

I am madly squiraling away in deepest Hampshire getting ready for the big fab design week for me a trade fair and a little retail fair in the big smoke, so sorry about absence of new posts!
Thought you might like to see what im up to..
The first show is a one day designers sale at craft central info here.



And the big trade fair is Tent London info here.




so other yummy links:
The London Design Festival - the reason to get to town and look around next week.
the V&A museum - the hub of the design museum this year.

So I was in a bar....

Waiting for a friend and i had just purchased my wedding plimsoles and so couldn't help but commit them to my sketchbook, now what to paint them with!?

New pics for me&my products from the fab Charlotte Broster

Hey got some new pics done of me and my products for upcoming trade fairs like the fab Content and the pretty to good to miss One day designers sale at Crafts Central...
I love them im very pleased, as I knew I would be form my talented friend, she is very reasonable and i would defo (!) recommend her!!
Her info here: www.charlottebrosterphotography.co.uk
Pics here:

Nice bit of Press.. Garden Heaven A/W 09

Hey
I got a lovely bit of press featuring my seed markers in the Irish Autumn Winter 09 Issue of Garden Heaven..
Check it out..!!

Stewardesses Illustrated fiction post by Julia F Green.

She never said anything when she flew, just put her tray table in the upright and locked position as instructed and closed her eyes during takeoff, which she’d done even when she was a stewardess, back when they were still called stewardesses. She smirked to herself. It was nicer now—they didn’t make the women wear four-inch heels or put their hair up, and they hired men, though most of them, it turned out, were fruits. It was good, she told herself, that the world had undergone these sorts of changes, but there were days when she missed the ruby red lipstick, the hairsprayed beehives, the icy cocktails in the left hand of a man who reached for her with his right.

Her granddaughter says “that’s ----ed up” but her granddaughter also doesn’t brush her hair or own a pair of pantyhose. It wasn’t that she was against equality, she just argued that life held more mystery and charm in those days. Her granddaughter argued that all that mystery and charm was fake, and prevented people from pursuing their true goals and dreams. She took this to mean that she was supposed to have wanted something besides her career in the air, but she never did. She earned her own money, she married a pilot, they had beautiful children, who brought her grandchildren, some grateful, some not.

The plane sped up, preparing to nose its way into the stratosphere. She reached for her granddaughter’s hand and pressed it between her own as they shot into the sky.

some new stuff on etsy

Hi some new work to show you.. the yellow teapot was picked for a related images post in etsy here the post was on twitter and well worth a lot, id love to hear your views on twitter people of the www! have a great day..

just a little something im working on..

the lovely lady at modish!

has done a very cute little post about me, i can defo recommend modish and the sister blog modish biz tips for creative people tips I (heart) modish..heres the little post!

Gift certificate..

For all of you who are unsure what to get as a gift but wanna a little token of my work to be part of it, now you can buy gift vouchers from me to say, "the gift is on its way" or "this little card entitles you to a commission from esther coombs", or "hey check it out I've given you a tea set now just tell esther what you would like to be drawn on it!".. you get the idea. These will be for sale in the same way a commission would by request to me at my etsy store! Check back for news on when the commission section goes live!
Thanks
Est :)

Seen some cool stuff!

Lately I have seen some really cool stuff!
I couldn't help but whip out the iphone for pics so i could post them i don't know what it is about the images, maybe its the knitting needles all bundled up all different colours and sizes so fun and full of sweater making experience.. Or that i had my first carrots out of the garden this week and they were so many weeks coming it felt like a little garden gift that they were such crazy little shapes i had to show you, well you get the picture, cool stuff to look at! roll up, roll up get your cool stuff to look at here!

Doodlers Anonymous

Hey,

Today i have a bit of a cracker for you recently I was contacted by the fab Chris Piascik who did a little post about some of my drawn on ceramics plates on this fab blog which shot straight into my bookmark list Doodlers Anonymous, check it out below!
the link to the blog piece on my plates here.

Some pretty pics from some other doodlers here:


































pic one: Chris Piascik
pic two: OKAT

Illustrated fiction;Julia Green and Esther Coombs

Prose poem: Trains

It’s a movie. There’s a woman on a train. In that book, they ride a train. We all have many, many places to hurdle toward and escape from, and thank god for all these trains. How else would we seek out that important, forgotten place? Or elude the demanding members of our family? On trains, we are happily free to sob and huff and clutch handkerchiefs to our cheeks as the rumbles shake our bowels and the steam whistle echoes our mourning. We stare out at the cows in the fields. Brown and slow, they are firmly rooted in the earth upon which they stand, while we zip by. We long for the cow’s life, chewing the same cud every day, teats manipulated diligently, daily, giving the world milk. We wish to be that purposeful.

But we are not. We don’t even know where we’re going, or why we feel the strange way we feel. All we know is the conductor does not look at us knowingly, and teenage hooligans are caught rifling through bags at the edge of the car. A baby cries and two cell phones ring and it’s too hard to hear the romance of the journey above the infernal din. Someone cracks a window, and the smell of cow shit is everywhere.

Commission anyone?

Hey folks,
I'm about to open up a new part of my etsy shop, a commissions area..!
I've been picking up some great stuff at boot fairs of late and they are just perfect for commissions..
I get many enquires about commissions for gifts, weddings or for your own home, and this is how it will work, purchase a blank item at the full finished price, email me your image and hey presto finished drawn on commission winging its way to you!
I cant wait to be doing all the new drawing projects!
Here are just a few jugs i have right now which would be perfect for commissions!
Hope to hear from you soon,
Esther

My Shed Jug - Illustrated fiction

The garden shed was a strange place to keep a pitcher, but nobody ever moved it, and that, of course, was why it was broken. It was a shed like any other -- a musty repository of hoes, rakes, and spiders -- but the pitcher seemed extraordinary. It was lovely, and I remember the feeling of horror I felt when I saw it at the charity shop and realized somebody had chosen to discard it. I took it home, determined to cherish it. But the cupboards were already quite full, and somehow everyone just took the water straight from the tap, and ignored the pitcher altogether.

So I made Seamus -- who was 15 then and already taller than my husband, me, and everybody else we’d ever met -- put it in the shed, thinking we might use it to water some flowers or herbs in a few months’ time. But we didn’t, and the next time I saw it, the thing was shattered and scattered across the floor.

I assumed it was the work of a critter, some lost squirrel or chipmunk who, upon finding nothing to eat acted out his anger and disappointment by simply knocking things over. I swept up the shards and carried them to the bin by the back door of the house. I went back inside; Seamus was making breakfast, and when I told him about the broken pitcher, his face registered alarm, as if he’d just remembered leaving his keys in the door. Then the flicker of worry was gone. I thought nothing of it then; I was sad about the pitcher, but I’d paid a quid for it at a charity shop, which wasn’t much to cry over.

Ten years later, Seamus got married and when his new sister-in-law got up to toast the couple, she was already quite tipsy and the first thing she said was, "I knew Seamus and Lila would get married after she called me to tell me about what happened in the garden shed." She actually didn’t say much more than that, quickly segueing to the spontaneity and immediacy of their love, which I agreed with. We raised our champagne flutes and suddenly I longed to have a day of Seamus’ childhood back. It wasn’t the innocence I missed, just the opposite in fact. I missed the mischief.

Seed Markers featured in the Observer Magazine

My seed markers are today featured in the Observer Magazines eco issue, in a line of products picked out by the Master of Style Wayne Hemingway, Thank you Wayne!! if you have seen the article and are looking for a link to my seed markers you can by them here! in my etsy shop.

First ever item i have listed for sale on ebay...

And it a real cutie, hope someone gives it a home check it out, click here!

New summer collection

Some great new work has just gone up on my etsy shop and with the summery wedding season soon upon us some of these would be great gifts, and ideal and unique item i hope and lets face it with the current climate a pretty reasonable spend, check out more on my etsy store.

Open studios lovelyness!

I'm showing at Crafts Centrals open studios 'Made in Clerkenwell next month and I'm starting to pull everything together in prep for it and thought you might like to see the very pretty flyer with info....

Finished TSP wall drawing...

Only just realised I have yet to post images of the finished drawing I did in Boston last week for TSP, I think it turned out pretty well and the space there is shaping up to be v.cool, should be a very groovy digital lounge type spot if your in Boston drop by..

Illustrated fiction post: Fisherman, Part III

Sorry for the delay on the regular dose of the wonderful fiction from Ms. Julia Green and the little illustration for it from me, but I know you can hardly wait so here it is!























When I ran past Ray in Central Park, it was sunny and I hadn’t seen him in six months. I spotted him from twenty or thirty feet off; he was walking with a woman, and although I couldn’t tell if they were involved, it occurred to me that if she were a friend, I would have recognized her.

As I got nearer to them, I had a momentary hallucination in which the two of them appeared in fish suits--not dressed as fishermen, but in full-body costumes with satiny scales and large, heavy, detachable heads with ventilating gills. I had realized in the months since Ray had broken up with me that for the rest of my life, he'd forever be remembered as "fish guy," even if that hadn’t had anything to do with the breakup at all. In fact, we'd been having fully imagined, theatrical, choreographed and surprisingly fulfilling sex, both in and not in fishermen-related scenarios. The insane, infuriating thing about the world is sometimes you can get the most complicated things to work, only to find that the basic elements aren't holding their own. Six months later, I had pretty much come to understand what had seemed baffling to me on that cold day in December: Just because you're willing to wear a funny outfit for somebody doesn’t mean it's built to last.

Ray had said something funny and when the woman laughed, she leaned forward and her curly hair covered her face. Despite the urgings of Chase and other friends, I hadn't dated since the breakup. It had been over a year with Ray, and although at 32, I felt certain the clock was against me, I couldn’t bring myself to face it all again with a new man, who’d have a different birthday to remember, new sisters' names to recall, a preferred meal to learn how to cook -- and then there was the strong possibility of another unpredictable fetish. I was getting tired of all the energy it took to distinguish new facts from the old and useless ones.

While the woman crouched, giggled, swayed, Ray raised his head for a moment and surveyed the park’s bustle. I knew he wouldn't see me. One of his strengths was his ability to be focused entirely on the person he was with, and disregard the world at large. Once, we’d been walking down Central Park West and the whole block had frozen and twittered while a movie star strolled by with his dog. Ray continued to recount the hijinks of his junior prom.

Despite knowing he’d never notice me, I sped up as we got within spitting distance of each other, perhaps to minimize the time spent in his orbit. The worst part of all of it was feeling like I was trapped in a cliché -- I was either 32 and desperate or 32 and a resigned spinster. But I wasn’t either of those things, or rather I didn’t feel like either of those things. I just felt like a woman who’d had four serious relationships, none of which seemed to have the right combination of compatibility and compromise. A woman who knew how to dress like a fisherman, a flight attendant, and a farm girl. (Ronnie had been simple -- a blindfold every once in a while, and sometimes a room full of candles. You could never tell by looking at them.)

As I shot past them, I put a big smile on my face, just in case he saw me. I thought about looking back to see if he’d noticed me, to see if he’d turn his head in disbelief, but then I decided not to.

On the little screen!!

Hey!..
This Thursday on the UKTV FOOD on Sky TV there is a great little programe called Market Kitchen, and they, the wonderful people at Market Kitchen, are featuring my little lace doilie cake stand available through my etsy store and also the wonderful online shop Green Union!
Check it out!
market kitchen
green union
my etsy place

Bit of News!

My English Rose cake stand pictured here is featured in "Wedding Magazine" this month (March/April). It's now sold, but for similar check my etsy store in a few days as I'm about to post some new work !! www.esthercoombs.etsy.com