Category: Kristine Hughes

Wedding Central

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge!

 

Parents host pre-wedding gala at Mandarin Oriental
This is what happiness looks like
(OMG, I’m actually tearing up already)

The Ceremony – minute by minute

The full guest list

Today’s last minute rehearsals in pictures and

The coach that will carry Wills and Kate after the wedding

Ceremony to include music by composer Paul Mealor

Listen to selections from the wedding music

Recessional music revealed – take a listen

 

A peek inside Kate’s suite at The Goring

An essential guide to the RW

Chelsy Davy to wear TWO Ferretti’s

Ellie Goulding to perform at reception

Details about the Royal after party at the Palace

Dame Edna gives Piers Morgan some Royal insights

Download Will and Kate masks here

In the Garden With Kristine

Yesterday, I had just come in from a few sweaty hours out in the garden to find a new post on Margaret Evans Porter’s blog, Periodic Pearls, showing her latest snowfall photos – just after she’d done some spring planting. Here in Southwest Florida (otherwise known as “the Sauna”) it’s already reaching 90 during the day. My garden is glorious and blooming and I thought I’d share some of my own snaps with you. I do not do this to boast, but rather to showcase the garden before everything that blooms and flowers withers away in the Zone 10 heat. Honestly, it’s enough to make Lawrence of Arabia faint.

Yes, that’s English lavender, doing quite well . . . . so far. Mexican petunia’s grow against the fence. All of the rocks you see were unearthed by moi whilst planting. There’s no real soil here, just lots of sandy dirt and many, many rocks. Sigh.

The Impatiens began as potted plants and now propagate themselves willy-nilly throughout my garden, back and front. I am not complaining.

Succulents, needless to say, do well in our climate
When I first began the garden, I’d bring home pots of lovely plants that would have suited an English garden, only to have them burned to a crisp. This year, I’ve admitted defeat and have given over the garden to tropical flowers.
These Daisy’s began as weeds. I finally stopped fighting them
 and now the bees have a new home.
Pentas + sun + poor soil = success
The Plumbago is in bloom
Even the roses are doing well
These are old English Heirloom Roses that I received through the post three years ago. Until this year, it looked like a rather sickly, snakey single shoot. Now, however, it’s gone crazy and is climbing the fence, blooming and throwing out many thick shoots at its base. I can’t tell you the exact name of the rose, as I threw the tag out in disgust last year. Patience is not one of my virtues.

A kind friend gave me two Frangipani’s two years ago. He cut branches from his trees and told me to just stick them in the ground and they’d grow. One is yellow, the other pink. The pink, above, has never flowered, but it’s gotten taller and has leaves. For a long time, both looked like nothing more than naked stalks stuck in the ground. My husband and son called them my “phallic symbols.” However, she who laughs last laughs best – the yellow Frangipani has not only gotten taller, it’s flowering.

Their fragrance is delicious – ripe nectarines.

Happy Easter!

The Art Needlepoint Company Offers Cruise on the Queen Mary 2

The Art Needlepoint Company was founded on the simple idea that art, like good design, should be available to everyone. Their canvasses represent a large variety of artists from nearly all centuries and genres. With a myriad of thread and stitch choices, stitchers can unleash their creativity to make each canvas their own.

Now, stitchers can come together on the Company’s first cruise aboard the Queen Mary 2 sailing from NYC on July 27th 2011 on a six day crossing – a time for unwinding and relaxation and when the weather is most often ideal to travel across the pond. Lorna Bateman, one of England’s better known embroidery and needlepoint instructors will be onboard and there will be technique instruction every day with chances beyond class time to stitch together and learn from one another. A variety of topics will be covered. The cruise vacation will culminate at the Royal School of Needlework in London and for those who wish to stay on for an extra few days, there is a planned a tour of the tapestries at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Calmady Children by Sir Thomas Lawrence

During the cruise, stitchers will learn how to stitch a face, enliven an abstract image with a variety of stitches or give dimension to a landscape by shading with thread. We’ll teach them how to select a masterpiece canvas to match their skill level or learn how and why to select fiber best suited for particular canvases. The Art Needlepoint Company’s cruises and retreats have an educational component to them; both an art history education or cultural review of a particular destination (cruise) as well as an educational component of needlepoint focused on stitches and ways to interpret paintings with threads.

Plums, Walnuts and Jasmine

The QM2 is a trip of a lifetime. The Queen Mary has many beautiful attributes as well as a wide variety of activities available on board for people to do in addition to needlepoint. The ship sets the tone for the experience. It is a gorgeous vessel and we hope that everyone who joins us completes or near to completes a gorgeous canvas! If any one would like more details on what canvases are offered or course syllabus they are welcome to phone or email us. A second cruise is planned for December on The Ruby Princess which travels the Eastern Caribbean – Princess’ private island, St. Martin, St. Thomas, Grand Turk.

In the works for 2011 are several one-two or three day retreats for those who want to share that needlepoint community experience but prefer a shorter, land-based adventure. As Doreen Finkle explains, “To replicate the cruise experience on land, all of our retreats will be based at spas and luxury hotels around the country. For both the cruises and retreats, particpants are welcome to bring a canvas from home. However, we will have a special selection of canvases, keyed to either the cruise or retreat theme, which participants can view and select at the Art Needlepoint site.

Collies

“This year we are planning a retreat in Raleigh NC . This will be a retreat in the fall. We will have one day at the Raleigh Museum of Art with a specially developed tour of the American painters collection and modern paintings with another day of classes. The canvases we would like people to bring with them to class will be either a portrait (American painter) a landscape (American painter) or a modern canvas. We will discuss how to stitch faces and skin so that they are realistic, as well as other technique points. There will always be a one on one opportunity to ask for specific assistance on whatever the individual requests.

“We also have a retreat planned for the late summer in Boston. We will gather together at the Colonnade Hotel, which is in walking distance to the MFA, Boston where we will have a private specially developed tour of their magnificent newly built Art of the Americas wing. Our class format will follow the day after the tour and will focus on portraits and landscapes. We will talk about techniques for creating light and dark with different threads, as well as rendering realistic faces and skin. There will always be a one on one opportunity to ask for specific assistance on whatever the individual requests.”

For further cruise details, contact Doreen at the Art Needlepoint Company, or by telephone (978) 226-8271.

Followers of Number One London will receive a 10% discount on any canvases or kits purchased.
Use code “London” when placing your order!

Julian Fellowes Writes Titanic Screenplay for ITV

According to The Daily Telegraph, Julian Fellowes has been tapped to write a screenplay about the Titanic disaster to be aired by ITV to mark the centenary of the ship’s sinking. Fellowes, who also penned Downton Abbey, Gosford Park and The Young Victoria, explained that he wants to approach the subject in a different way from James Cameron’s 1997 movie.
He also suggested that he wants to portray the British people on board the ship in a more sympathetic light.
“Far be it for me to buck a Hollywood tradition, but I think that those generalisations [about British people] are not as interesting as real life,” Fellowes said. “Obviously, the special effects of the Cameron version can’t be rivalled on television, but what we can offer, and what we are hoping to offer, is a much more human version of the story.”
He added: “Ours is more a tale of the people on board told from the perspective of the different classes and the crew. We are using real characters and fictional characters, but we develop the real as much as the fictional.”

Perhaps Fellowes’s remarks were prompted by David Warner, who played the villainous manservant in the 1997 Titanic film, who complained that English actors were typecast as the baddies. “There wasn’t a single good character in Titanic who was English, and this is typical,” said the actor.
“Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.”
He added that, with one or two exceptions, heroic English figures were almost always played by non-English actors. “Even Hornblower was played by Gregory Peck. Daniel Craig is a rare English Bond – normally one can expect an Irishman, a Scotsman or even an Australian.”

Warner’s comments echoed those of Dame Helen Mirren. She felt the need to tell an audience in Los Angeles in April: “We’re not the snooty, stuck-up, malevolent, malignant creatures as we’re so often portrayed.”
Dame Helen insisted: “We’re actually kind of cool and hip.”

The latest Titanic adaptation will feature actors Linus Roache and Geraldine Somerville heading a cast that also includes Celia Imrie, Toby Jones and Perdita Weeks. It begins filming in Hungary later this month, made by Bafta-winning producer Nigel Stafford Clark, whose successes have included Bleak House and Warriors.

In Memoriam: The Titanic

On this, the 99th anniversary of the sinking of the luxury liner Titanic, we have yet another book out on the disaster, but one that promises to be more logical than lurid in it’s approach to the already well churned material surrounding the tragedy.

The latest book is Titanic: Nine Hours to Hell – The Survivor’s Story by W.B. Bartlett. The publishers blurb for the book call it: “A major new history of the disaster that weaves into the narrative the first-hand accounts of those who survived. It was twenty minutes to midnight on Sunday 14 April, when Jack Thayer felt the Titanic lurch to port, a motion followed by the slightest of shocks. Seven-year old Eva Hart barely noticed anything was wrong. For Stoker Fred Barrett, shovelling coal down below, it was somewhat different; the side of the ship where he was working caved in. For the next nine hours, Jack, Eva and Fred faced death and survived. They lived, along with just over 700 others picked up by 08.30 the next morning. Over 1600 people did not. This is the story told through the eyes of Jack, Eva, Fred and over a hundred others of those who survived and either wrote their experiences down or appeared before the major inquiries held subsequently. Drawing extensively on their collective evidence, this book weaves the narrative of the events that occurred in those nine fateful hours. The stories of some are discussed in detail, such as Colonel Gracie, a first-class survivor, and Lawrence Beesley, a schoolteacher, who both wrote lengthy accounts of their experiences. No less fascinating are the accounts of those who gave gripping evidence to the inquiries, people like the controversial Lady Lucille Duff-Gordon, steward John Hart who was responsible for saving the lives of the majority of the third-class passengers who lived, or Charles Joughin, the baker, who owed his survival to whisky. This is their story, and those of a fateful night, when the largest ship ever built sank without completing one successful voyage.”

David Randall, of The Independent, said in his review of the book, “. . . The centenary of the sinking of the Titanic looms, and, with it, the prospect of book after book marking the anniversary. This is, even for mild obsessives of the saga such as myself, not altogether to be welcomed. Our shelves already overflow with volumes about the ship, and we have long since discovered that new books on the subject are liable to be written to prosecute ever more arcane theories. So it was with some foreboding that I opened Mr. Bartlett’s offering. What cock-eyed “revelation” would he be peddling?

“Er, none. Instead, we have here quite the best and most level-headed telling of the whole story I have ever read. What makes it so is not just that Bartlett can, unlike the authors of many Titanic books, actually write; but that he brings to the controversies which still surround the sinking a judicial sense of what constitutes conclusive evidence, and what does not. He makes plain that the recollections of survivors are so varied (and often conflicting) that some of the more bitter controversies (such as the role of the SS Californian, five miles away or 19, depending on whom you believe) are only kept going by taking the word of some and ignoring the testimony of all the rest.”