fizzi~jayne makes.... : A day out of the craft den....

I had a fun filled day out of the craft den the other week when I met up with Laura from Bugs and Fishes.

It's always nice to catch up with Laura, we met in London to start the day at the House of Illustration to see the Ladybird by Design exhibition celebrating 100 years of the classic Ladybird books. The exhibition features the original illustrations of the classic Ladybird books. This took me back to my childhood, although their golden years were 1950s -1970s they were still popular in the UK when I was growing up in the 80s.

I recognised books that I had as a child. Due to the period they were published, the books showed a very traditional and stereotypical view of Britain at this time and very different to modern life now. The artwork was amazing and it was interesting to see how they manufactured the books when there were still paper shortages after the Second World War.

This museum is relatively new only opening last year. If you have the chance to go before this exhibition finishes on 27th September 2015 it's well worth a visit.

I treated myself to some bits from the shop. I love these Tupperware boxes to keep bits and bobs in. They will look so cute in the craft den

I also bought some postcards too, to add to my collection.

The museum is on Granary Square where there is a cool water fountain known as the Granary Squirt.

This was a nice place to sit and have lunch. The water feature was mesmerising and there is an App where you can control the formation, how cool is that?! I wish I had downloaded the app and played, I intend to go back at some point when the nights draw in to see them lit up in the dark so maybe I'll have a go then.

The plan for the rest of the day was to take a walking tour around the Kings Cross area which is currently going through an exciting redevelopment project, but the weather was too wet. So instead we headed towards a building to stay dry that was advertising a cafe and gallery. What we found was Kings Place which looks like an office building, and part of it is for the Observer and Guardian newspapers. We did not expect to find a huge building with a lovely cafe, where we ate cake, three art galleries which are commercial but are free to look around and that's not all, it has restaurants and a concert hall too for music events. It opened to the public in 2008 and we had no idea it was there.

It backs on to the canal and we could see the London Canal Museum which was perfect for our next stop as it was still raining.

As we walked round dodging the puddles, we came across this feature on a building, random enough for me to take a picture.

The London Canal Museum was interesting with lots of narrowboat folk art which is very fashionable at the moment in craft.

The rain stopped long enough for us to go outside to look at the boats that were moored up

I'm not sure how long this bike had been there or if it had just been parked amongst the weeds.

The building was home to an ice store in the Victorian era when we imported ice from Norway, you would have thought the UK was cold enough to make our own, but apparently not! Carlo Gatti was the entrepreneur behind the business that imported ice in this building and was credited with making ice cream available to the general public. There was a history on the trade which was eye opening, did you know that ice cream was originally sold in glass cones and they were not washed between uses? yuck!

Once we left the London Canal Museum we wandered back towards Granary Square and visited a book shop on a barge....

I know, cool right?! This is a great second hand book shop on a barge, with so many books! I loved the quirkiness but I did feel a little queasy being on the water.