Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2017 i frankie Magazine

Old dudes seem to rule TV gardening shows. Switch on the telly and you’ll find a profusion of magnificent beards, wiry grey hair and enormous gumboots. Sure, the occasional dame caked in a weird amount of make-up for the outdoors might pop up on our screens, but even then it’s assumed her audience is middle-aged, or older and clued in. Enter Melbourne lasses Melissa King, Chloe Thomson and Dani Venn, whose new online video series The Gardenettes is aimed at younger gardeners who are keen as mustard, but a bit short on knowledge. (They even cater for our minuscule attention spans by keeping each episode to a short-and-sharp eight minutes.) In setting the show’s style, Melissa, Chloe and Dani took their cues from the past, especially wartime women who joined…

Tell us a little about yourself. I’m a knitwear designer and artist living in Brighton, UK. I take a nostalgic look at everyday items, and reinvent them in yarn with wry comic touches. What is your background in art? I studied a fashion textiles degree at Brighton University, where I learned how to use a knitting machine. I already knew how to crochet and embroider to a high standard, as I’d always made things while growing up. A lot of the techniques are self-taught, but originally it was my grandmother and mother who encouraged me to create as a child. Where did the idea of making crocheted, sequinned seafood come from? I’ve always had a fascination with fish, and always try to create something that looks as realistic as possible.…

Once, a little while back, a presence came to Paz Lenchantin in a dream. “It was quite helpful,” Paz recalls down the line from her home in California, where she’s taking some downtime in the days before her band releases its new album, Head Carrier. “I have no contact with her, except for in this mystical place of music.” She’s talking about Kim Deal, her predecessor as the bassist for seminal rockers Pixies, who left the band acrimoniously in 2013. Stepping into her sizeable shoes, Paz has toured with Pixies since then, but Head Carrier is her first album as a full-time member of the group. She pays tribute to Kim with a song on the record, for which she takes the microphone. “All I Think About Now” bears a…

Who are you, and what do you do? I’m a graphic artist based in London who’s been working on illustration and design projects for the past 12 years. Is there a story behind the Emily Forgot moniker? Forgetfulness is a bit of a trait of mine! I had to come up with a website domain name when I graduated, and it seemed to fit the bill. Now my obsession with list-making combats my forgetful nature, and I can often surprise myself with my own efficiency! Tell us a bit about your series, Neverland. It was created for a solo show, inspired by real, remembered and imagined buildings and interiors. From a visual point of view, I used the term ‘Neverland’ as an opportunity to create my own world – a…

Where is it? 446 Karangahape Road, Newton. Describe The Caker in a sentence. A girly wonderland of cake and cool. What goes on there? We create made-to-order cakes, have wedding consultations and sell mini cakes, our cake mix range and my cookbook! We also host private events in the Salon, like baby showers and birthdays, where people hold cake banquet parties. Is there baking done on-site? Yes, all of our baking is done here, which is a lot! The whole place smells like cake 24 hours a day – everyone who walks in the door comments on it. How did it all begin? During the final stages of my marketing and business degree, I began to bake in earnest. People quickly became interested in what I was doing, and after…

DAGGY DESIGNS IN A SENTENCE: A brand new Melbourne-based design studio specialising in fine porcelain wares, jewellery and art // WHAT WE SELL: Handmade, hand-painted porcelain pieces for your home, including vases, cups and bowls, one-off commissions, and limited edition art objects // PRICE POINT: From $40 for a cup to $420 for a large exhibition vase // WHAT MAKES THE SHOP SPECIAL: We fuse our passion for design and contemporary art with a good dose of irreverence and humour. Each piece is handcrafted with the utmost care in Melbourne // FIND US: Online at daggydesigns.com NATTY IN A SENTENCE: Two ladies making witty and pretty hand-printed textiles, reclaimed jewellery, illustrated gift cards and prints // WHAT WE SELL: Earrings, necklaces, brooches, aprons, tea towels, pillow cases, paper goods and…

History will remember Kathleen Hanna. Her work as a pioneer in the punk-infused third-wave feminist movement – one that was soundtracked by her riot grrrl band, Bikini Kill, and the like-minded artists that emerged in the mid-’90s – cemented her place in the annals of both political and musical history. But, when that trio disbanded in 1998, she found herself scrambling. “Bikini Kill was my family,” Kathleen says. “It was my life. When that started dissolving, I was like, ‘Who am I?’” The first Julie Ruin record – a solo undertaking – was almost a therapeutic exploration of who ‘Kathleen Hanna’ could be, now that the band that had come to define her had disintegrated. As much as the project gave her space for introspection and an attempt at clarity,…

What kind of art do you make? I guess you could call it contemporary. It’s another world – a parallel one. Just like ours, but quieter and slower; twisted, but more honest. Have you always been an arty type? Being creative was my skill, and drawing was what I did best. It was a way out from where I came from. I had to move from my town to another to be able to go to art school. Being an artist took me to a new city and a new place in life. Can you talk us through your creative process? The best part is in the beginning, when everything is possible, but I also like the last part, when everything falls into place and I solve the puzzle. I…

WINSTON CHURCHILL // The British prime minister Winston Churchill never apologised – except to cats. Legend has it, during a phone conversation with the lord chancellor, Churchill’s tabby Mickey began to tinker with the phone cord. Churchill shouted, “Get off the line, you fool!” before explaining to his colleague, “Not you.” The wartime leader later begged Mickey’s forgiveness for his scolding. Among Churchill’s favourite felines was Horatio Nelson, who he believed was doing more for the war effort than he was, serving as the prime ministerial hot water bottle. He also once claimed a black stray that he believed brought him good luck. CATHERINE THE GREAT // At 33, following her husband’s mysterious death by strangulation, Catherine the Great took charge of the largest state on Earth: the Russian Empire.…

LETTERS@FRANKIE.COM.AU Dearest frankie, I owe you a melon-sized thank you for your general existence! I’ve only recently entered that no man's land between high school and the rest of my life, filled with university applications and grown-up advice. Here, my anxiety-prone brain fancies itself a fortune teller (mainly predicting loneliness, unemployment and an alarming lack of knitting supplies), but I regularly find comfort in your words. While ‘adulting’ may be exceedingly daunting, those who came before me faced the same troubles – including tax forms and being an introvert in a chatty world. Now, if you'll excuse me, my blanket fort calls! Lucy x Dear frankie, For someone who doesn't have kids, Eleanor Robertson sure knows how to channel the heart and mind of a parent. As I sat in…

Like all self-respecting citizens of Melbourne, I’m an arsehole when it comes to my coffee. On average, I drink around five cups of joe a day, and I like at least two of those cups to be barista-made. But not made by any barista; I need my coffee made by my barista. Otherwise I hate life, hate society and rue the day I was born. Given this, it would be fair to say that coffee has a significant impact on my mood. Not the way that heroin might, but caffeine is a drug, and like any drug addict, I want the good stuff. My barista takes coffee seriously. When pulling a shot, he holds the same expression on his face that a brain surgeon might while performing surgery that could…

As a general rule, grandmas don’t tend to dabble in graffiti – unless they’re in Lisbon, that is. For the past four years or so, a bunch of oldies have taken to the Portuguese capital’s streets with spray cans, leaving their mark on public spaces through wildly colourful tags, stencil art and free-form drawings. Hardly delinquents, the graffing grannies are students of Lara Seixo Rodrigues’s LATA 65 street art classes, aimed at breaking down stereotypes around both age and graffiti. The whole thing actually sprang from a dare. In 2011, Lara – who is in her 30s – was helping organise the first WOOL Urban Art Festival for her small Portuguese hometown of Covilhã, expecting young people to jump at the chance to see famed artists at work. Instead, she…

I was never into conventional Australian sports as a kid. When I was about five, Mum started getting a bit worried, saying, “You need to get out of the house.” So she found this ad in the local Fremantle paper for a circus school, signed me up, and I just kept going. First you learn tumbling, cartwheels and backflips. Then juggling, aerial skills, trampolining – all the basic skills every circus performer needs. Then, as you get older, you find the one you really like doing, and that becomes your speciality. For me, it was hula hoops, which is now my full-time career. I saw another girl performing it at a circus festival when I was about 13. I thought: she looks pretty cool; she’s got a cool costume on;…

I live a simple lifestyle. I wake, run, work, eat lentils and spinach, clean, then head to bed with a book. Every day; every night. I am, by choice, not much fun. But on this particular week, that wasn’t the case. When I was asked to explore the seven deadly sins – one immoral day at a time – my evil twin woke, cracked her knuckles and grinned. For the next seven days, she was in charge. DAY 1: GLUTTONY I woke with a spring in my step. I had a job to do, and I was going to do it well. I started with pre-breakfast croissants, before devouring fried everything with slabs of buttery toast. Dishes be damned, I then moved straight on to digital gluttony: online shopping. I…

A couple of hundred years ago, scientists in England began to notice a curious thing: in newly industrialised areas of the country, a white moth was developing black spots. First one or two, then more and more until, within the space of just a few decades, many moths had turned completely black, apparently to better camouflage themselves within an increasingly polluted environment. It was an astounding example of evolution in action – a painstaking process usually played out almost imperceptibly over centuries. The peppered moth’s evolution-on-speed seemed like visible proof of humankind’s influence on nature. But how might that sound, if you could listen to it? That’s the challenge that sparked an unlikely alliance between a scientist, a musician and a theatrical literary manager in Melbourne earlier this year. During…

Over a cheap espresso in Paris, I’m watching a video of my father knocking back a vanilla slice for dinner. The way he’s wrangling it, I can tell the pastry is stubborn. He catches his breath between bites. Despite the labour and mess, he looks happy. My old man is judicious when it comes to baked goods. He’ll push a sub-par slice aside after one bite – no fucks given. My brother-in-law, Ned, has been recording these peculiar keepsakes for me because my father is dying. Last week’s entry was a piece to camera where Dad relayed his breakfast for the day: “Two Weet-Bix with hot milk; spaghetti on wholemeal toast; coffee.” His right lung is banked up with cancer, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease makes it an effort to…

Customs officials were pretty suspicious when Cassandra Weller opened her bags at an Ecuadorian airport in June and, one by one, pulled out 10 plastic mannequin heads. They closely inspected each one, before finally allowing Cassandra to move on. “I guess they thought I was hiding drugs,” she says. Seven months earlier, Cassandra had made the same trip with even more bags crammed tight with dummy domes, plus 20 pairs of super-sharp scissors, 16 long black capes and a huge collection of brushes and combs. She’d had to vacuum-pack her own clothes to fit them in, but she was pleased as punch – she’d managed to squeeze in everything needed to launch her own social change hairdressing salon in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito. The idea had been floating around…

For more than 12 years I’ve worked on the retail front lines – greeting people at the door, checking bags, selling from the floor and working the checkouts – so I can confirm that the moment someone crosses the threshold of a store, they tend to lose any semblance of human decency and social decorum. It’s like they’ve fallen under a magic douchebaggery spell. And while it hasn’t been scientifically proven (though I’m willing to foot the bill for the research), as someone who’s been on the receiving end of unprovoked tantrums, threats and insults, I’ve got a pretty good hunch this shit is biological. As customers, people become twice as whiny and intolerable – basically, they transform into children who are perpetually searching for public toilets or making unreasonable…

I am here. I have made it. Once again, I’ve persevered mightily through the very many indignities, frustrations and challenges of life without losing my shit, and have happily crushed/conquered/ destroyed (with only a small amount of screaming) ANOTHER YEAR. To mark this outstanding occasion, I think I deserve a trophy or a ribbon. Maybe a parade (or, at the very least, a commemorative banknote). Let me be honest, though: I am tired. I’m so tired. I feel like a blunt and tiny pencil, ground down to a nub by the combined weight of 366 days of remembering things, doing things, being alive, pretending to be normal, and sometimes responding to unexpected emergencies (like that time at 2am when I thought my house was burning down, but it was really…

Among the many first world problems I grapple with as a white, middle-class millennial is the question of whether to pack my bags and head on out of Australia. It seems like a rite of passage. Get an education, save a bit of cash, and then piss off for anything from a few years to a few decades. It’s something I’ve been thinking about since I was a child, and I’m not entirely sure who’s to blame. All I know is that I’m not alone: Australia is full of 20-somethings plotting their escape. When I tried to explain this to an American friend, she couldn’t understand. “But aren’t you surrounded by beaches?” she asked, accidentally assuming that Australia is essentially just Queensland. “Kind of,” I replied, “but I think that’s…

Knowing you’re about to move house can be enough to make you want to drop everything and bail. (But then again, that’s exactly what got you into this mess.) The whole process is a nightmare: packing boxes, cleaning the house, hiding the bodies… the chores never end. It gets particularly gross when you have to scrub six years of grime from the crusty rangehood, especially when you’ve only lived there for three. Before the fun and games even begin, however, you’re faced with the looming task of finding a new abode. If a sharehouse is what you’re after, there’s the added bonus of trying to find tolerable housemates. Most of the people I’ve lived with have been great, but we’ve all experienced our fair share of the unbearable from time…

 The thing I first noticed about Lithuania: I remember it as a country with a laidback atmosphere. The streets weren’t that crowded, people weren’t in a rush, and they took their time for a talk on the sidewalk. There was a mixture of traditional wooden houses and hundreds of identical Soviet apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city, all built in the same style, with the same white brick stone. The thing about the locals: It was quite unique how open-minded and friendly the locals were. There were moments I simply asked if I could take a photo, and people said yes. There was no mistrust, as there has been in more western parts of Europe. The younger generation speaks English fluently, which helped a lot to get in…

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I collect illustrated natural history prints of animals. There are about 30 to 40 prints on my walls, and another 20 or so unframed, or in boxes. Many are full-page drawings (or ‘plates’) out of old books, and some are more recent reproductions of old designs, but if it has detailed line work and was created as scientific documentation of an animal, I’ll notice it. My interest started with research for my own art – I’m an illustrator and animator, and a large proportion of my personal work is ink drawings of fictitious creatures, based on Australian natural history. The physical collection began in 2007, though, when I stumbled across prints at bargain prices in flea markets around Europe. The first ones I bought were postcard-sized, from a market in…

BABEE AND ME Based just outside of Byron Bay, we create beautiful modern products for babies and kids, including play mats, cushions and toys. Everything is hand-printed using eco-friendly, non-toxic inks on natural, organic fabrics.babeeandme.com.au BIBOLO Our bibs are different from other bibs. Handmade in Sydney by Eve, a mother of two, they’re comfortable, absorbent and full of personality – perfect for the expressive eater, muddy explorer, gooey dribbler or reflex burper baby.bibolo.com BRIGHT STAR KIDS High-quality customised products for school kids, designed and printed in our Wollongong studio. We’ve got a great range of personalised school bags, lunch bags, lunch boxes, drink bottles, stationery, t-shirts, name labels and more.brightstarkids.com.au BAND OF BOYS Rad threads just for little guys, including tees, jumpers, shorts, pyjamas, boardies and caps. We design our…

1. Georgia Perry flower patch, rrp $20 for set of two, georgiaperry.com. 2. Danny Brito Craft Life iron-on patch, around $9, dannybrito.etsy.com. 3. Bel’s Art Friendly Bacteria iron-on patch, around $11.50, belsart.etsy.com. 4. Hand Over Your Fairy Cakes pastel camera iron-on patch, around $9.50, handoveryourfairycakes.goodsie.com. 5. Anatomical Heart Art Geo Heart embroidered patch, around $8, anatomicalheartart.etsy.com. 6. Mokuyobi No Handed Bike Club patch, rrp $6, mokuyobi.com. 7. The Lazy Craft Store sewing machine patch, around $5, thelazycraftstore.etsy.com. 8. Lucky Horse Press Butterfly patch in natural white, around $8, luckyhorsepress.etsy.com. 9. Hella Cool Kids Unladylike patch, around $6.50, hellacoolkids.com. 10. These Are Things I Did My Best patch, around $6.50, thesearethings.com. 11. Wildflower + Co. Tropical Coconut Cocktail patch, around $5.50, wildflowerandcompany.etsy.com. 12. EAT. ME. DO Melody Pop patch, rrp $10,…

On a drizzly Melbourne afternoon earlier this year, illustrator Ashley Ronning was quietly printing from her Brunswick studio, when her ageing risograph machine suddenly emitted a loud bang and a flash of light, then stopped dead. It was her worst nightmare – the transformer had most likely blown, and a replacement would almost certainly be impossible to find. “I was like, ‘My life is over.’ But then I came in the next day and it just turned on. It was really weird,” she says. That’s the downside of risograph printing: few machines are still around – or at least, the old ones like Ashley’s – and parts can be hard to come by. First designed in the mid-’80s by a Japanese company named RISO, risographs were marketed as a cheap…