The V&A is the greatest museum of art and design, a world treasure house with collections of fabulous scope and diversity. The Museum holds over 3,000 years worth of artefacts from many of the world’s richest cultures. Choose one of the collections below to explore in detail, or use our award-winning search of over 1,000,000 works.

Oh, I get tingly just reading that. When I was there last they had the winners of that year’s children’s book illustrators on display. I melted into a puddle on the floor. I then considered sneaking into the basement and living there for eternity, but the lack of sushi prevented me from making that choice.

2. Dormice. They are endangered, so in South Wales they built a dormouse bridge over a busy street so they don’t get squished. By the way, “dormouse” is not a misspelling of “doormouse”. The “dor” part comes from the French word for sleep, “dormir”. These fellas go into hibernation in the winter, and are insanely cute about it while doing so. Here are some pictures I found on the web.

3. Recently I saw some BBC animations that caused me to giggle in my workplace and made my co-workers express concern for my mental health. This was my favorite one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi2kaDzGh9A

The feathers aren’t just white and gray, there are nuances of pink and blue in there. It’s just stellar. I would let whoever did this paint anything they wanted on my van with shag carpeting anytime.

Continuing with the exterior art theme, I saw a video for some guys who painted a wall. What I liked so much was how they handled the shadowing, in repeating adjacent stripes. It’s a really lovely technique I have seen before.

http://vimeo.com/14375730

Getty, methinks your search parameters be too wide.

Now, some charts that make me happy.

In keeping with my chart theme, I saw this blog about three months ago, and I every time I go to the blog, I laugh and laugh and laugh and embarrass myself. The website is Hyperbole and a Half.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

This woman who writes this blog, Allie, she’s awesome. She makes truly evocative and emotionally powerful drawings in MS Paint that make me giggle unstoppably until I almost tinkle in me pantaloons. If that sounds like an oxymoron, I understand. You must go and experience for yourself. If you read only a few entries, these are the ones you should read. The first one even has a chart!

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/05/sneaky-hate-spiral.html

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-fish-almost-destroyed-my-childhood.html

Catalog interiors are decorated weirdly more often than not. What if real people lived there, and they decorated like that? “Catalog Living” answers that question for you.

http://hackedirl.com/

This stands for “Hacked In Real Life”. There are signs. People do bad things to the signs. You and I laugh. Here are some of my favorites:

My friend Jon and I have marveled at how good some tattoos are, and how truly bad some tattoos are. As Jon says, “Every tattoo artist has to start somewhere.” I thought of that sentiment when I witnessed this craptacular backpiece at Coney Island when I went for the Mermaid Parade. I followed the dude for quite some time to snap this winner.

Finally, this Fourth of July, I went with Cricket to watch the fireworks. There were bloodsucking bugs, as there tends to be outside (which is one of the reasons I tend not to go outside). Cricket handed me a little nylon bag and told me to open it. Inside was a jacket with mesh armpits and a hood with mesh going over the face, like a low-rent beekeeper’s suit. You could unzip the face part if you wanted to talk to someone without you looking like you were wearing your camping burqa. Cricket took a picture of me in it. We called it “The Faithfulmaker” because no one, absolutely no one, would think you were sexy in this thing. Cricket said it was like “a chastity belt, but lighter!” See for yourself.

The hotness, it is palpable.

Now that that’s taken care of, I have some charts to share.

And now, on to Spoonflower. Spoonflower is a genius idea of letting people print their own fabric. Anything they want, on fabric. A drawing they made. A piece of clipart they were diggin’. A picture of their pet fish. Really, whatever they want. Here’s a picture of their homepage.

And, bonus, sometimes if the design is a cool enough idea, they sell that fabric to the public. I picked some of my favorites.

So if you’re making a quilt or an apron or a pillow or a doll or any number of cool things and you can’t find a fabric that suits your needs, Spoonflower can help.

www.spoonflower.com

2. Pogo is a musician-slash-dj who takes classic movies and meshes some of the words the characters say with electronic music, and in the process beautiful music is made. Pogo is most famous for his Alice in Wonderland mix:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQuqeLBTetA

And he just recently came out with a Toy Story version, which I love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbD5ke7xqww

3. I recently discovered an amazingly talented beader, Laura McCabe. She’s been around for a while, I just didn’t know about her. I remember when I was right out of college, I saw a necklace she designed that won an award, and I was like I WANT THAT. She is completely focused on making her pieces complicated and perfect, which I can appreciate, and she sometimes uses false eyes as focal pieces, which appeals to my macabre side. Also, one of her pieces is a dodecahedron, which is my favorite polygon to say. All-around fabulousness. And she makes a living doing this! Additional fabulousness.

How Laura makes her living is by teaching classes and selling patterns and kits, so if you want to make one of her pieces, you can find a bunch of them here:

www.beadpatterncentral.com

Bonus Thing totally unrelated to any other thing: This has to be one of the creepiest pictures I have ever seen. Courtesy of Awkward Family Photos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format

If that was confusing or excessively complicated for some of y’all, here’s my description: It’s a bunch of images with a palette of 256 colors, and you can save it with code embedded up in there that remembers a bunch of gifs in a row, making a teeny tiny movie that you don’t need special software to see (like Flash). So even if you’re on the most basic of computers, chances are people can see your wee animation. Also, it’s an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, but some people pronounce it Jif, like the peanut butter, which is WRONG (even though the dictionary recognizes it as an acceptable pronunciation). Please pronounce it like “gift” without the T. Thank you.

I just discovered a great website called Señor Gif. It finds adorable little gifs around the internet and shares them with you, the viewer. As you can imagine, the internet is vast, and gifs are easily made, making the world flooded with crappy, sucky gifs. So it’s nice to have a website that only shows you the finest the world has to offer. Here are some of my favorites. You’ll notice there are a lot of cat gifs, and that’s because if the internet was a human body, the spine would be comprised of cats and funny cat-related things.

http://senorgif.com/2010/05/07/funny-animated-gifs-bananaman/

http://senorgif.com/2010/05/02/mexican-standoff/

http://senorgif.com/2010/05/01/funny-animated-gifs-pop-o-matic-kitteh-action/

http://senorgif.com/2010/04/30/back-to-work/

http://senorgif.com/2010/04/27/funny-animated-gifs-hoversnail-deploy/

http://senorgif.com/2010/04/23/funny-animated-gifs-japanese-moustache-mafia/

http://senorgif.com/2010/03/19/funny-animated-gifs-fearless-leader-has-lost-his-mind/

http://senorgif.com/2010/03/12/funny-animated-gifs-omg-put-on-pants/

By the way, the last animated gif has many people up in a tizzy. Nothing’s wrong with OMG Cat, he just has gray-colored fur on his chin area. No horrible accident, no deformity, nothing. Gray fur. Everybody stay calm.

I think that the name should be changed to “American Cheese Slug”.

Thank you, photographer J-Fish.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/j-fish/

2. I saw The Princess and The Frog the other night (it was meh) but I noticed that I look exactly like the large friendly alligator named Louis who only wants to play trumpet in a band. I took a screengrab so you could appreciate the similarity. I mean, look at Louis’ facial expression. I make that face all the time.

I would prefer to look exactly like a fancy-pants lady movie star, but it is what it is.

3. Charts! First, a chart about Pixar characters.

And then an angry chart about how stupid charts are.

4. I originally thought this was the greatest Rube Goldberg thing of all time – the Honda cog commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo

And then I saw the OKGO video. Super rad, dudes. Super rad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

This is a rather ingenious chart of the body’s systems shown like London’s subway map. The only problem I have with it is that I immediately assumed the urinary part would be yellow, yes? That seems intuitive. And yet, it is not.

Here is something that extremely funny to me, and maybe after I explain it, it will be funny to you as well. We recently did a big ole presentation for a potential client, and the fancy-schmancy award-winning graphic designer guy designed the posters, which looked like this:

(I pixelated some stuff because I don’t know if it’s proprietary or not.)

I thought is was a lovely design, very creative and fresh. Then, I saw this:

And I laughed and laughed and laughed, because apparently everyone is designing their charts like this, I just didn’t know. Not creative, not fresh, standard. Ha ha ha! I’m still the only one finding this funny, huh? Oh well.