food/foot stylist

I was just reading this magazine called "Gourmet Traveller" (which is pretty funny, since I'm not really either). It has lovely pictures of scrumptious food, like most food magazines do, and each picture has in little words at the bottom the title of the dish you're looking at (e.g. "Apple Crumble With Cheese" - because really, the titles just describe exactly what it is, which is fine, because that's mostly what you want to know). However, on looking closer at the little words at the bottom, I discovered the dish title has a colon after it, and following the colon is a list. The list lists everything that is in the picture and tells you where it comes from. So the tablecloth is from Tablecloths R Us, and the silverware is from Forkerama, and so on.

Now here's what blew me away. In one picture, it tells you the name of the paint on the wall at the back.

And thus, the domain of the food stylist - as in the "other props" are "stylist's own".

Seriously. The name of the paint colour. And where you can get it from. I can just about fathom a realm, although it is definitely not one I inhabit, in which you might wish to replicate the setting when you make your apple crumble and cheese, and know where the napkins and tchotchkes came from so you could rush out and buy them, but - the paint? So, what, you can repaint your dining room to go with supper?

In other news, this Foot Stylist is back to the socks after two more pairs of slippers (one to replace the irreparably-deformed blue-and-orange stripey ones). Sock needles are even more slippery and pointy after playing for so long with big fat plastic children's needles on the slippers. Anyway I am now getting towards the end of all the balls and skeins I bought for socks and slippers, and am making every-more motley pairs as I try to ensure I have enough of a colour to do two matching feet. Hence quite a lot of stripes - because you can look at what you've got left and think, well, I can definitely get two stripes out of that for each foot, but I'm not sure about any more than that. If you did, say, a whole foot in one colour on the first slipper, you might run out halfway down the second. So the stripes get smaller and in a wider array of colours as I get down to the ends.

All I'm saying is, if you're the recipient of a pair of slippers from me, the more clashingly striped they are, the further you are down the hierarchy. If your slippers are a motley of single stripes of unrelated colours, you were about the last on the list. I mean, I love you and everything, but just not as much as the people who get single-coloured or intentionally two-tone slippers. In fact you might not even have been on the slipper list to begin with, but now I've got enough that I can add you, as long as I do crazy striped ones. Don't feel bad. Just, you know, aim for higher next year. You can attain the single-coloured pure alpaca level of friendship by emailing and writing letters and telling me you actually read my blog and sending chocolate and money (or even yarn). I can totally be bought.

Oh, but socks? I'm mostly using self-striping wool, which is purposely dyed in different colours all along the length to stop knitters from stabbing themselves out of boredom when knitting a particuarly repetitive bit of the sock pattern (say, the foot). So they're supposed to look like that.

Honestly.

Food/Foot Stylist Post: Font: Arial. Background in Electronic White. Cup of tea on the desk provided by TradeAid. Blogger's fleecy pyjama sweater from M&S circa 1999. Laptop from London Drugs, Saskatoon. Content: stylist's own.