API RESPONSE
WHEN most of Ria Mishaal's contemporaries were tuning in to the likes of The Office and Little Britain for entertainment in the early 2000s, to her, the notion of top-class television viewing came courtesy of Sir David Attenborough waxing lyrical about the natural world on The Blue Planet and Life in the Undergrowth. However, whereas Sir David's passion for all things flora and fauna has played out to the entire nation over decades, hers has gone under the radar until now.
By the time Covid hit and the UK population was instructed to stay indoors, Dr Mishaal, who has a PhD in behavioural neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, was suffering from burnout after 14 creative, but pressurised years working as a wedding photographer. Craving a new direction, she pondered on her love of art from school days and also the words of William Morris: 'Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'
'I thought, why can't objects be both useful and beautiful?' Dr Mishaal recalls. Just as a chrysalis morphs into a butterfly, her musings soon turned into a beguiling heirloom-textiles brand, Arcana, offering woven cotton blankets depicting her own drawings of the natural world.
Esta historia es de la edición November 13, 2024 de Country Life UK.
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Esta historia es de la edición November 13, 2024 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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A trip down memory lane
IN contemplating the imminent approach of a rather large and unwanted birthday, I keep reminding myself of the time when birthdays were exciting: those landmark moments of becoming a teenager or an adult, of being allowed to drive, to vote or to buy a drink in a pub.
The lord of masterly rock
Charles Dance, fresh from donning Michelangelo’s smock for the BBC, discusses the role, the value of mentoring and why the Sistine chapel is like playing King Lear
The good, the bad and the ugly
With a passion for arguing and a sharp tongue to match his extraordinary genius, Michelangelo was both the enfant prodige and the enfant 'terribile’ of the Renaissance, as Michael Hall reveals
Ha-ha, tricked you!
Giving the impression of an endless vista, with 18th-century-style grandeur and the ability to keep pesky livestock off the roses, a ha-ha is a hugely desirable feature in any landscape. Just don't fall off
Seafood, spinach and asparagus puff-pastry cloud
Cut one sheet of pastry into a 25cm–30cm (10in–12in) circle. Place it on a parchment- lined baking tray and prick all over with a fork. Cut the remaining sheets of pastry to the same size, then cut inner circles so you are left with rings of about 5cm (2½in) width and three circles.
Small, but mighty
To avoid the mass-market cruise-ship circuit means downsizing and going remote—which is exactly what these new small ships and off-the-beaten track itineraries have in common.
Sharp practice
Pruning roses in winter has become the norm, but why do we do it–and should we? Charles Quest-Ritson explains the reasoning underpinning this horticultural habit
Flour power
LONDON LIFE contributors and friends of the magazine reveal where to find the capital's best baked goods
Still rollin' along
John Niven cruises in the wake of Mark Twain up the great Mississippi river of the American South
The legacy Charles Cruft and Crufts
ACKNOWLEDGED as the ‘prince of showmen’ by the late-19th-century world of dog fanciers and, later, as ‘the Napoleon of dog shows’, Charles Cruft (1852–1938) had a phenomenal capacity for hard graft and, importantly, a mind for marketing—he understood consumer behaviour and he knew how to weaponise ‘the hype’.
