Katherine Mansfield said: “… but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people.” For me costuming is the same satisfaction – I get to pretend to be another life for a little bit, and then return to my own happy nest when I’m tired of trying on a new life.  My models tell me that it’s the same thing – historic dress lets you experience another life, another standard of beauty, another way of moving and living. Two weekends ago 8 models and I got to be Mansfield’s life and stories brought to life  for an afternoon at Ruffles to Rebellion: a Katherine Mansfield fashion show.  Here are the images (by the fantastic Facundo, who is always looking for new models and events, if you’re in Wellington and looking for a photographer) – complete with quotes from Mansfield’s writings. It was understood that at eleven o’clock the women and children of the summer colony had the sea to themselves. First the women undressed, pulled on their bathing dresses and covered …

My garden is significantly less attractive than the garden of Tennyson’s poem, but this blog post will also be significantly less weird, bloody, and tragic, so that should help balance things a bit! My parents are farmers, and my mother has the most spectacularly green thumbs, which sadly I mostly did not inherit.  But I do like  gardening, and I’ve really been enjoying turning the brown, weedy wasteland of a garden that we inherited when we bought the house into something green and growing. Mr D and I have some differences of opinion about how much garden there should be as he prefers LAWN (and pretty much nothing else).  So I haven’t made much headway in my quest to turn the entire front lawn into raised garden boxes (oh, the dream!) but I have been allowed to clear out the three weed-filled garden boxes we inherited, and I have turned them into three mini gardens. The gardens have struggled a bit this year: the weather turned abruptly from quite cold and wet to HOT and …