Last Wednesday I got to play with Ros Atkinson (@her_dark_materials) at Osterley Park, where she hosted a fun workshop for about a dozen enthusiasts. She'd set the props up in the Osterley kitchen before we got there, and we had a couple of hours to go nuts and take photos.
The kitchen is one of my favourite parts of Osterley. And Ros had brought along a wheelbarrow-load of the most wonderful props - copper pans, Victorian jelly moulds, old rolling pins and linen towels for us to play with.
One thing that struck me about Ros was that she regarded her work as the best play-date since ... forever! She reminded me of my brother-in-law, who's a really talented linguist. Whereas I groan under the weight of conjugating an irregular verb, he skips along delighting in the detail that this particular pain-in-the-arse verb is also irregular in another 5 languages that he knows about. There's a lot in the mindset. Yeah, sure, you have to have talent too, but I'm sure it's the passion, that helps a real genius tower over the rest of us mere mortals.
Instead of quirks in the verb table Ros delights in the vagaries of the how the light from a north-facing window is different from a south-facing one. She paints her home to give her the palette that she needs for her backgrounds, and moves tables around, lowers them, raises them, adds curtains until she's got that magical ambiance-bearing light just right. And she's been obsessively buying copper jelly moulds and vintage kitchen accouterments since before anyone knew they were cool.
She was inspirational. And if you check out her Instagram feed you'll see exactly where I'm coming from.
All the best for now,
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