Kings Road Artist Studios

Today we went to a Micro Beer Festival at the Kings Road Artist Studios in Pontcanna, Cardiff. The festival takes place every month so you don't have to wait too long for a chance to check it out for yourselves! Apparently we missed all the best festivities as they took place on the Saturday (they had a ukulele band and everything), but we still had a very splendid time and met some very wonderful people.

In fact, they were so wonderful that we're going to do a stand alone post for them! (I just decided that now.)

One thing we will say is that the beer, which is actually brewed on site in their own micro brewery, is first class and the free tea and cake was pretty good too!

JazzCakes100

Lots of things to talk about today, lots of things happening and lots of things coming up.

First of all we want to tell everybody about our new project: JazzCakes100. 'Not a very imaginative title,' we hear you say, but simplicity is key; less is more! JazzCakes100 is a new series, curated by the people at JazzCakesHQ, where we get 100 things designed, modified or improved by 100 people. 

To kick off the series we have JazzCakes100:T-shirts. It does exactly what it says on the tin. But - and this is where you come in - we still need a small amount of creative people to get our full quota of 100. So if you or anybody you know may be interested in this project, read on. Below is a link to Facebook where there is some more information on what it entails. 

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=153300880131&id=1187081773&ref=mf

If you don't think taking part is your cup of earl grey but you'd still like to see the final collection then we shall keep you posted on when the exhibition will be. There will definitely be a Cardiff exhibition and we are also working on a London exhibition thanks to our lovely friends at The Bridge Collective.

Quiet Summer

JazzCakes have been a little quiet over the summer months for one reason and another.

To tide you over 'til there's something exciting to tell you about here's a new exciting Cardiff based project from three fine young graduates.

Open/Close are hoping to make use of all those empty units that are littering the high streets at the moment, with the intention of making them look beautiful by putting on art exhibitions.

They also have an interesting blog which is being utilised as an open exhibition space. 

Robin Rhode

Now street art is something which really inspires JazzCakes and makes us tick. Being from near Bristol we've obviously seen the work of Banksy, and being regular visitors to East London we've come across the various styles of street art around Shoreditch such as The Great Cake Escape (see our 21st Feb post) and this little beauty... 

A tree planted in a turfed over skip, if you can't make it out. Just brilliant.

A number of months back we went to an exhibition at the Hoxton Square White Cube Gallery that really struck a chord with us.

At the White Cube was an exhibition of the work of Robin Rhode, a name I knew without being familiar with his work. Rhode is a South African artist now based in Berlin. Despite living in Germany, his playful drawings - often in public spaces - relate back to his experiences from South Africa. A lot of his work is monochromatic, often in chalk or charcoal, into which he then incorporates elements of performance.

The simplicity of Rhodes work is what we really like, and the playfulness which draws away from the sometimes negative themes in his work.

Still from Untitled Harvest, 2005

New Line

Here at JazzCakes we're always looking for new and innovative ways to display our new and (not so)innovative designs; we also like to give something back to the people. On that premise we thought it would be a nice idea to hit the charity shops of Cardiff. 

'And what came of it?' we hear you ask. Well, it's quite simple really. We only bloody well came up with our new line of T-shirts!

Although we have no images to prove this, we have already created the first in the line, a pre-commissioned piece for a friend of ours. The rest of the line will be made of unique tees where we take charity shop bought T-shirts and, depending on the tee, we either create a new JazzCake style design, or we playfully rework the existing design on the tee. It's a simple concept, but very effective.

We hope you will enjoy the results when they are unveiled. Your first chance to buy one is at the previously mentioned Jumble on 2nd May.

We look forward to seeing you there.

The Big Fuss Arts Directory

Apologies for the distance between this and the last post, it has been an exceedingly busy time for us.

Over the period of the last six weeks we have made new friends, new business partners, new designs, new decisions, new emotions... The list goes on. It has been a productive period of discovery.

One significant happening has been making the acquaintance of David Lee and Zaeger Jones of The Big Fuss Arts Directory.

The Big Fuss offers Artists of all genres and experiences a professional, down-to-earth service of personal one-to-one direction; their aim is to provide as many Artists with the help, guidance and exposure their Art deserves. 

We like their concept so much we decided to join forces with them and collaborate on an Opening Party for the launch of their new website.

The event will take place at Cardiff's Nos Da hostel and will play host to a number of artists already on the database. It's looking like it's going to be an important event on the Cardiff arts scene so we encourage everybody to attend.

Although it's looking unlikely we will be able to attend the opening, we will be providing a birthday cake to celebrate 2 years of The Big Fuss, so make sure you get a piece. We will also be attending the closing party, although this is yet to be confirmed.

Hello,

we're very excited today. We're able to announce that we are going to have a stall at the fantastic Jumble @ The Amersham Arms, New Cross, London. Its a monthly event and hopefully, if all goes well, we'll be doing it every month starting on 2nd May.

The reason we're excited is, not only is this a superb opportunity for us to meet new people and broaden our community, but the wonderful people from The Great Cake Escape also have a stall there and we just love them.

If you're from the Shoreditch/Hackney area of London you may well have walked past some of their work without knowing. They are becoming  well known for their 'cake drops' where they leave cupcakes on the streets for people to take away. Magical. You can see their photos on Flickr.

Well I hope some of you might be able to make it down there but if not, tell any friend you might have in that area to pop over and check us out.

Have a great weekend,

Jazz

x

Rebekka Kill

Here at JazzCakes we're all about the fun, 'cos what's the point in life without fun?

You may or may not have heard of our Guerilla Tea Parties. If you have you probably know that you're one of the lucky ones. Well the tea parties are just one of the ways we're trying to form networks and build communities. Other more obvious ways are through social networking sites like Facebook and little things like this blog. The markets which we sell our cakes and T-shirts at also help to build up these groups of people. We don't see this as building a fan-base, more as making friends, friends who may well be able to help us in the future or who may need help from us.

Our aim is to eventually have some sort of headquarters where we can gather all of these people, but for now we'll stick to holding tea parties in obscure places.

One person who seems to like what we do is Rebekka Kill. She is also becoming something of an influence to us. Instead of us going into detail about her, why don't you read this interesting article? And this one here. Hopefully we'll be working with her in the future, so watch this space.

Sketch

Well since everything that happens in London is generally well publicised to the rest of the world, you will more than likely have heard about the masses of snow which descended on our capital city last week; a bit like a sweet coating of icing sugar, except not very sweet.

I thought this would be an opportune moment to share with everybody our favourite place to go in London when the outside isn't very nice.

It is a place called Sketch, on Conduit Street, just of Regent's Street and not too far from Vivenne Westwood, but on the opposite side of the road.

Anyway, Sketch is a restaurant, tea rooms, gallery and club all rolled into one. What we love about it is it's mixture of tradition, contemporary and futuristic designs; if you ever get a chance to use the toilets, do it, they are something to behold. I won't go into too much deatail but they have two sets of toilets, one of which I have not been into but am told are even more amazing than the ones I have been into. You'll just have to see for yourself.

Another thing that we love about sketch is its website. Whereas the actual venue is quite expensive, the website is free of course, yet it still feel as though you are spending money every minute you are on it.

They're also on facebook

Our Finest Work

As an example of the kind of T-shirts we like to make, this one is probably the best design we've made so far. It encapsulates pretty much everything about us; stenciling, embroidering and our red, black and white colour palette.

Unfortunately this design never made it to production - and probably never will. It was commissioned by singer-songwriter Luke Leighfield, but funding issues prevented us going beyond the prototype.

Welcome

Hello everybody and welcome to the JazzCakes web log.

Since this is our first post we should probably introduce ourselves,

JazzCakes is a Cardiff, UK, based design house that specialises in T-shirts and cakes. Our t-shirts are hand printed and hand embroidered, often with images of sweet treats such as cakes, naturally. We recently decided to only produce one-off designs or short-runs of about 5 or 10. Our cakes are usually very elaborately decorated.

One of our favourite pastimes is tea drinking. In fact we love it so much that we began coordinating Guerilla Tea-parties, a kind of anti-social gathering in the very loosest sense of the word. But more on that in a later post.

Our other interests include art - particularly the time-based variety -, film, music, fashion, theatre and photography. Basically the whole arts umbrella.

We are very much into collaborating with our friends to produce some very exciting designs. We pride ourselves on our vast network of friends and try to include everyone in our business as much as possible. We hope that by creating this blog we can gather more friends up and exchange ideas with people.

Well, hopefully that held your attention and kept you interested. We plan to give more details about what we do over the course of this blog, along with sharing interesting things we find that relate to what we do and what we enjoy.

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