The personal site of freelance writers and photographers Patricia & Steve Mansfield-Devine. For details of our professional writing and photography, see our WebVivant site.

 

A Passion for Kimono

Kimono diary - August 21

The usumono months are not yet over

Brown meisen with holly berries and leaves

This brown meisen komon has a most unusual pattern

Playing with obis

Here are my first attempts at tying a taiko musubi. Not bad for a beginner, I think.

Kimono gallery part three - wovens

Woven kimono from the Taisho and Showa periods are about my favourite kimono of all time

Kimono diary - August 13

19 degrees and windy - time for kasuri

Kimono gallery part two - komons

Everyday kimono make up the vast majority of my collection. Here are the komons - printed, painted and shibori'ed

Kimono gallery - part one, haregi

Here is my kimono collection - hope you enjoy it

Kimono diary - August 12

Cream ro but now needing a haori

Dating kimono

Every garment has clues as to the date of its origin

Kimono by season

Deciding what to wear and when is a fine art in kimono, so it's worth creating a rough guide for yourself

Wabi-Sabi Garden

Wabi sabi garden

Creating a pond - pt.3

Finishing the structure

Creating a pond - pt.2

The best way of ensuring the pond holds water is to line it

Creating a pond - pt.1

The first step in building a pond is to get yourself a bloody great hole

What is wabi-sabi?

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic that is almost entirely untranslatable, but which contains some entrancing ideas for the garden

Our garden

Low-cost, low-maintenance, environmentally friendly and supporting biodiversity - that's what we were aiming for in creating a garden out of a field

 

Living in France cover

Living in France

A practical guide to your new life in France

by Patricia Mansfield-Devine

Published by Harriman House, March 2008

A hands-on, practical guide for Britons who have bought a house in France, either for holiday use or as a permanent home. Written by a long-time French resident, it takes a nitty-gritty approach to what it is really like for a British ex-pat to live and work in France, looking squarely at both the pleasures and the difficulties.

» Find out more » 

Latest in the blog

Beware France Telecom's 'not there' scam

If France Telecom sends an engineer to your house (or even if they don't) you may be charged for not being in - although you were there all the time

Facebook's self-loathing

Facebook's new news feed thinks the thing I'll find most interesting is a 'Hate the new Facebook news feed' campaign.

We can haz interwebs! (again)

A month after our Internet connection stopped working we're finally back online. It seems that there was something WiBox wasn't telling us...

The trials of a teletravailleur in the Orne

Normandy is a great place to live and work. But when you depend on the Internet, it has its frustrations

Got my mi-fi working

Fun and games with Internet access

Cherry blossom confetti

It's sad to see the blossom fall, but it's a beautiful effect

Great food for (almost) no money

Trish's new book tells you how to create delicious and nutritious meals on the most meagre budget

Tracks in the snow

This weather at least provides us with a clue as to what the local wildlife is up to

Merry Xmas

Wishing you a happy holiday season from all at Montcocher

Mini's new sleeping place

Our smallest cat has found a new place to snooze

 

Our other blogs

SecondCherry - the over-40s babe

Fashion, health, beauty, lifestyle and life for the over-40s woman.

SecondCherry
Review: Ahh Bra
Perfume swap
Review: #3 by Cristina Bertrand
Review: Seven Deadly Sins soaps by Feniqia
Review: Fais-moi de l'oeil by Pulpe de Vie
Blasted by the past
Review: Thermacheck fleeces from Lands' End
Clothes stash: 1950s lamé suit
Review: Odyssey solid perfume by Feniqia
The definite dozen
Makeup overhaul
Review: PreciousBox
Starting from scratch
A new year, a new you
Review: The Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling

FreeShift

The art of downshifting — finding freedom with the simple life

FreeShift
Art on the cheap
Too much comfort?
Don’t shop, swap
Having fun for free
Respecting the vernacular
How much are you worth?
Cleaning and the meaning of life
Free protection for saplings
A huff and a puff
One step at a time

WebVivant

Writing, editing & photography.

WebVivant RSS Feed
E-book improvements favour professional publishers - new formats require real skills
Hacktivism: assessing the damage - what's the real significance of Anonymous and LulzSec?
Loota: sell the stuff you nicked - I think I've spotted a publishing opportunity
Electronic book or paperback? Why are some e-books more expensive than print versions?
Memo to NatWest: It's not the 19-fucking-80s
The Kindle pricing problem - why some of your e-book customers end up paying too much
Getting the price right - with e-books, pricing is everything
Creating ePub files with InDesign CS5 - output ebook files directly from Adobe's DTP software
Amazon passes the e-book tipping point - sells more e-books than paperbacks
Drowning in choice - all bad: The web seems to make it harder to find decent clipart
PubIt! misses the point: e-publishing is international, something Barnes & Noble seems to have overlooked
First few days with the third-generation Kindle
Creating e-books with iWork Pages - The recently updated Pages application now has an ePub export
Publishing workflow: e-books are easier with paragraph styles
What a cheeky phisher - Most scam emails are easy to spot and trash. But this one made me pause before hitting 'delete'.

FreeInfidel FreeInfidel

Atheism, civil liberties, privacy and other freedoms

FreeInfidel
Looking forward to Xmas
The weird things people believe
Christians just want to be victims
A new voice for secularism in Europe
The Pope’s parallel universe
God bless British apathy
A song for the Pope
Loving Allah, and Facebook Security. Why is that funny?
Which is scarier – God or a duck?
What’s in a name?
Pope John Paul II: saintly or unbalanced?
Separation of faith and job
Creationists: stick your fingers in your ears and sing ting-a-ling-a-loo
Bertrand Russell talking sense
When prejudice becomes law