The conference brought together bakers, farmers, scientists, writers, campaigners and retailers to look at the food supply chain behind Britain's mass-produced bread to ask whether it could be improved. And whether natural bread be made accessible to all?

You'd be forgiven for thinking that 'real bread' is only for the rich or those with time on their hands but it's an important issue. We learnt how majority of Britain's bread is highly processed - packed with additives, enzymes and fat - designed to be as cheap as possible with the emphasis on shelf-life rather than nutritional content and flavour.

Bee Wilson, food columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and author of Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee - The Dark History of the Food Cheats was hugely entertaining. Bee described how in medieval times bread was a serious business. Any baker caught trying to cheat customers would be punished by being dragged around the community on a sleigh with the offending loaf of bread tied around his neck...Bee suggested it should still be the case.

We spent bonfire night filming the SFA's at Nation.

The crowd not only got to see a great performance they also got to see James splitting his pants trying to get a better view of the band on stage.

Thoughtful thanks to Gill Nightingale, Laura Buckley and Rob Lister at Nation. And Daf, Gruff, Huw, Cian and Guto...have safe trip to Dubai.

We attended a D&AD President’s Lecture last night as part of the Liverpool Design Symposium. It’s one we’ve been looking forward to for a while as we haven’t been to a Michael Wolff talk before. And everyone we know who has would tell us how it brilliant they are. Well, they were right. Is was that good.

We had to think back afterwards to how many hour-and-a-half auditorium talks we’ve been to before where there wasn’t any visual content projected onto a screen. The answer was none. Last night’s talk was done in Q&A format with Creative Review’s Patrick Burgoyne, and was more about Michael himself than the work he’s done. And for that hour and a half, the audience seemed to hang on his every word. We know we did. He came across like a kind of spiritual guru, sharing knowledge with his followers. Who needs fancy visuals?

A lot of what Michael talked about was the need for common sense, value, simplicity and a human approach to design, and life in general for that matter. We won’t go into too much detail, as the talk was filmed by Dion at D&AD so we’re sure you’ll be able to see it yourself online very soon.

What was nice to see last night was the large Manchester presence. The task of getting Manchester creatives to events outside their own city has been described in the past as ‘incredibly difficult’. They must have been told how brilliant a Michael Wolff talk is too.

Thoughtful thanks to Michael for sparing a few moments at the end to chat to us.

Creamfields '09 – here's one of the films we shot with the Hatch.
You can watch the others here. ]]>The Big Knit 2http://thoughtful.squarespace.com/journal/2009/10/26/the-big-knit-2.htmlchris2009-10-26T21:50:04Z

Thoughtful thanks to everyone who stopped to talk to us about the Big Knit and for giving us lots of knitting tips and advice. Thanks also to Allen Wales and all the staff at Sainsbury's in Romiley for making us feel so welcome.

Today we're at Sainsbury's in Romiley, Stockport doing our bit for the Innocent Big Knit. We were here at 6.30am warming up for a 7am start. The idea is to do 100 by the time the store closes at 11pm. After a slow start the needles are warming up nicely. We've been getting some good advice along the way off some of the lovely customers. It needs a Nanna's touch.

Yesterday we were talking about the Stirling Prize, the shortlist, who won and the fact you had all these famous architects in one building at the same time.

This got us thinking about those little plastic people found in architects models and thought it might be interesting to produce a set of miniature famous architects in this way. We thought it would be funny to have a miniature David Adjaye or a miniature Zaha Hadid standing talking to each other in a model made by Foster and Partners.

As well as a miniature set of figures of great architects from the past, for example: Sir Christopher Wren, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Perhaps this idea could be taken in the opposite direction?

The excellent Radford Wallis created 'Bob' as part of a visual identity to promote 16 Palace Street, a premium office space in Victoria, SW1. Perhaps life-sized models of these famous architects would make a great addition to an exhibition?

If anyone knows of a good model maker, please drop us a line. Thanks.

Frieze Art Fair only runs for 4 days and ends this Sunday. If you're in the area, we'd recommend you check it out.

We had tons of entries for the Studio Culture book so we decided to draw two names out of the tombola, they are: Richard Weston of Belfast and Shawn James Seymour from Japan. Congratulations to you both.

Thoughtful thanks to everyone who entered and thanks for taking the time to read our blog - we really appreciate your support.

We've got another tombola competition coming up soon...to win a Tate Liverpool Colour Chart smart code poster, so we hope you'll keep coming back.