a secret rose garden

...lies hidden just outside Kortrijk. It's close to my goldsmithing class at Syntra. Nobody seems to know of it -whenever I bring my picnick before going to class I have this gorgeous garden all to myself and pretend to be Lizzie Bennett or Marianne Dashwood.

The first roses are starting to bloom and I just couldn't resist...

design museum Gent

I haven't had any studio time since February, since the silver necklace with the sprouty cabuchons and let me tell you, I'm starting to lose it! An eye that doesn't stop twitching, occasional mouth foaming and snarling... I stocked up on extra chocolate and strawberries to keep myself from becoming a danger to society. But I don't know what will happen when I run out...

Although I have to practice my patience a little longer, library school exams come first and the renovations in our home & studio in Ronse are nearly done...in less than a month it'll be all good again. And meanwhile I've been mentally preparing all those nagging, needy ideas, so when I'm able to set myself free in the studio it'll be quite the sight! ;-)

So last Sunday my friend Jessy met up in Ghent -she has a knack with organic and natural elements, turning them into her "Pure Creations", take a look at her Dawanda and blog! And if you happen to be in Kontich on Saturday, she'll be there at the Meifeest markt. ;-)

We hadn't seen each other in ages it seemed, so there was a lot of catching up to do over cappuccino, Moroccan food and my very favorite shop Phulkari. Which is in the same street as the Design Museum! The weather was a little too chilly to enjoy outside, so we decided to take a look at all the pretties and let ourselves be inspired...

BCC's Big Read book meme

Which ones have you read?

"Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and make those you have read bold.
2) Star (*) the ones you LOVE.
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien * (but can't be bothered with the movies)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (first 3 only actually)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible umm...I liked the bit with the horses. Apocalypse.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell * (yay SF dystopias!)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy * in college.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (started it when I was 18)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -I guess tales reworked for kids by Charles & Mary Lamb doesn't count... :-p read some sonnets, and parts of some of his famous ones
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien *
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -started it in college
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -saw the movie
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -started it
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -does the audio book count? or the movie?
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -again, movie
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -while I lived in Bournemouth
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -while I was visiting friends in Wisconsin
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -saw the movie. Read the Cement garden in college, hated it.
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (but wasn't impressed)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (ooh movie! Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, yay!)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley*
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy * (did you see that movie adaptation with Kate winslet & Christopher Eccleston?)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -and the movie obviously
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -started it
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett * I want that garden!
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -meh
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ooh I love his illustrations
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -the Muppets? or the Simpsons version? :-p
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -just recently thanks to bookcrossing! :-D
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -ooh! wanna read! Emma Thompson + Anthony Hopkins = awesome
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -in college. finished in one day...
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -movie. kinda meh.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad * And Apocalypse now. ;-)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery* en français bien sûr
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (actually read the "cat version" by J. Smith-Aiken first, only discovered years later that the bunnies were first... :-p )(never saw the movie though)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -ok I cheat: I had this book in a graphic novel version of 8 classics as a kid, this one was in it (as was Black Beauty, which I thought was brilliant as an 11-year old)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -Kenneth Branagh version
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl *
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -movie

If I count correctly, that makes 43 books! Not too bad. :-D However the tendency seems to be mostly SF/fantasy (well d'uh), almost all children's literature listed (except for Charlotte's Web at first sight) and some 19th century classics (Austen, Brönte, Hardy, Dickens,...)

I see I've got to work on my Russian classics though...but they're so thick! And have no illustrations! Or movie adaptations! LOL. I think I have War & Peace lying around here somewhere, a mustly old fat book with small print. This is where a kindle would come in handy... ;-)

Also, no Dutch, Italian or German literature?! Boo!

Via Tenaanval via Other stories.