The World according to Brendan McKnight - Snow Globes

Written
by
Jenny Butler
Writer
Jenny Butler
26th of June 2012

Brendan McKnight is back again, today sharing his collection of snow globes! While there are many, MANY snow globes in Brendan's collection, we forced him to single out his top four to profile today! Brendan also has a great twitter account, you can follow him here.  - Jenny x

Just a handful from Brendan's epic Snow Globe collection!  Photos - Sean Fennessy. Styling - Lucy Feagins / Brendan McKnight.

So...  the snow globe thing. It all started off as a bit of harmless fun really. A friend who I was working with at a design studio in London started collecting snow globes, and in a bizarre state of competitiveness (which is quite rare for me) I decided I would outmatch her collection. That was about three years ago now, she stopped a few months in, but my collection just kept on growing. The rule I set myself was simple (and perhaps slightly selfish) - I was not allowed to buy any - they all had to be gifted. I've mostly stuck to this rule, and I've only purchased a few myself. The picture above is only a very, very small selection. Half are sitting on my desk at work, and half are at home. They collect dust quite quickly (or maybe I'm just very bad at dusting), I don't really look at them anymore, and I'm not actually quite sure what to do with them.

Photos - Sean Fennessy. Styling - Lucy Feagins / Brendan McKnight.

Clockwise from the top left:

New York: I can't quite seem to remember who gave me this globe, but it is quite handsome - the snow falls very slowly and it's all a bit lovely really. I had this one at work and an ex-colleague accidentally smashed it and felt quite horrible about the whole situation. It was very interesting though, as the liquid from inside really smelt and the 'snow' was not desiccated coconut as I had previously suspected. I'm really not attached to the snow globes so it was no biggie that it smashed, however he spent the next hour searching for the exact model online and in a few weeks a replacement arrived. Bless.

Crab: This one was given to me by my biffle Jesse. My birthday was coming up, he likes lobsters, he tried to find a lobster snow globe for me on eBay, failed, found a crab (which is kinda like a lobster but not), and the rest is history.

Duck on bike: A bit of a sad story this one. For my 21st birthday a friend gave me a wind-up metal toy of a duck on a bike (the one with the spinning propellers on the duck's hat). We were not super close friends, but would run into each other from time to time. I moved to London, we lost contact with each other, and when I randomly ran into his ex-boyfriend in Soho (on my birthday), I found out he had passed away. Horrible horrible. I was then in a gift store some month's later, found this snow globe with the duck on the bike inside it, and bought it as a nice memory.

Big Pineapple: This badboy was found on a road trip to Tyabb with some pals. I don't think we knew it at the time, but Tyabb is famous for its vintage sheds and 'trash and treasure' type stores, and that is where we found the snow globe. This one features the Big Pineapple and is quite fancy because it doubles up as a calendar. It's pretty much everything you could ever need in a snow globe.

- Brendan x

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