I'm in for the long haul....

COIF UPDATE 1 of god knows how many....

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed a new item popping up recently in my “works in progress” section over there on the left <--------

(if anyone actually has noticed, I’m incredibly impressed, and you win a prize :))

The new item is Darby’s coif….and today, finally, I got to update it from 0% to 1%, whoop!

So, with the refrain of “60 rings down, only 5,940 to go” echoing around my brain, this seems like a good time to start documenting what is likely to be my longest-running project ever.

Darby is my 18 year old son, and for some reason I flippantly said, just before Christmas, that I could make him a coif (ie that metal balaclava thingy the dude is wearing in that there photo) for his Christmas present, as 1) he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted, 2) we had been talking about going to a medieval re-enactment fair thingy in the summer and 3) I thought they looked like they would be fun to make.

To my surprise, he said yes please….and so it began….

The first challenge was actually finding the rings I needed – 6,000 stainless steel rings of a particular wire size and diameter….not easy! Getting the raw wire would have been easier, and a lot cheaper, and people on various forums were suggesting I make the rings myself from scratch ...but I just don’t have the tools, the time or the energy for that, frankly, so I wanted to buy them in ring form.

There is one armour supply company in the UK that sells them, but ouch! The price!

In the end it was cheapest to order them in from Canada, even with the £22 customs charge I managed to get stung with.

They arrived last month, at least the advance guard did, I only had the first couple of bags sent Airmail, just to get me started, the rest are on a slow ship somewhere halfway across the ocean as I type.

So - here are the rings:

Look pretty unassuming, don't they?

Well, they're not!

The first time I tried to open a ring to join it to another one (which, in a nutshell, is how you make chainmaille), with my normal pliers, it just sat there and laughed at me.

So - new, chunkier pliers were my next investment (this is turning into a blinking expensive present - it would have been cheaper for me to just BUY him a coif :))

Here they are, next to the lil' dainty ones I use for chainmaille jewellery, bit of a difference :D


Armed with my new pliers, I started joining the rings into European 4-in-1 fivelets at work one lunchtime a couple of weeks ago....this is a fivelet:

Now remember that there will be 6,000 rings in the completed coif. Each of these fivelets contains five rings - plus you need one more ring to join it to the next fivelet - so I need to make 1,000 of these little buggers.

In a full lunch hour, I managed to make the grand total of....

.
.
.
.
.

FOUR!

and my hands were sore and my arms felt like I'd been pumping iron (instead of small amounts of stainless steel...)

oh dear.

I can't deny that I found my first attempt a little discouraging, when I thought I'd be whipping this coif together as quickly as I can a bracelet.

The retailer in Canada that I bought the rings from - The Ring Lord has a forum, so I asked on there that night whether it would get easier, or whether I am just too weak for stainless steel and should give up now. The response was mixed, nobody said give up, but a few said variations on "no it won't get any easier, just suck it up, soldier".

So - that's what I've decided to do.

Today I tried another lunch hour stint....and guess what....I now have over 70 rings joined, making a jolly good start towards what will eventually be the headband of the coif.

Here's how it looks so far:

It's only the first wobbly step, but it was enough for me to be able to update my W.I.P. bar to 1%, which was a nice feeling, and it was also much much easier on my arms than the first attempt.

At this rate of improvement, I'll be weaving armour like a pro in no time :) I'll update regularly on the project's progress so you can see it taking shape.

I'm Excited and Enthusiastic about this project again now - pity we just left 'E' fortnight behind yesterday! How about, I think it's going to be Fun and Fulfilling?

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And, on a completely different subject, although it still involves making stuff out of metal, I made my first ring last night and I'm well chuffed with it.

(as it was after midnight, I'm claiming that F for First as an official 'F' :) )

Technically, it's actually only my first successful ring, as the initial attempt, also last night, ended up in the bin. And before that I did try to make a chainmaille ring, but that went all wrong too.

This one is made from 1mm copper wire, wound round a ring mandrel, twisted into a spiral, and then oxidised with Liver of Sulphur (good GOD that stuff STINKS!).

It was really easy to make, it can't have taken me more than 20 minutes from start to finish, if that.

I'm wearing it now, it's dead comfy and I love how it looks on, dainty but not too girly girly, I might make a similar one out of silver wire next...

Oh I do love making stuff :)

A to Z year : February 12th-25th : the letter D

D is for.... dead tired!

We certainly were by the end of this fortnight, as we did loads - so this is going to be a loooooong blog post, get yourself comfortable :)

I started the D fortnight with a few days off work, which was nice, I didn't have anything in particular to do with them, I just needed to use up some holiday time before the end of the financial year. But it was nice to have time to do things I can't usually fit in to my stupidly busy schedule, like dying my hair (picture to follow...)

Also, thanks to the wonders of Freecycle, I had a massive de-clutter over the two days that I was at home but Connor was in school. I got rid of tons of stuff that's been taking over my home, and it felt gooooood! My hallway actually looks like the entrance to a house now, not a timber yard :)

Once the weekend arrived, our first day out was to be a deer spotting expedition....or that was the plan :)

We struggled out of bed on the Saturday morning (just :)), and jumped in the car and headed towards Bath, where we were due to meet Michelle, Tracy & co at Dyrham Park:

The others already been up and out adventuring for hours, they put us to shame, but then again we do enjoy our lie ins at the weekend :) When we were just approaching Dyrham, they gave us a call with some bad news...Michelle had been chatting to the park keeper, and his assessment of our chances of seeing a deer was "less than zero". Oops. Apparently they don't come out in the cold weather. Pah. I thought that was tortoises!

But what the hey, we were nearly there, so like the stubborn mules we are, we decided to have a mooch around the grounds anyway, and see if we could spot a rare winter loving deer or two...

We saw empty field ...


...after empty field ....

....after empty field

....and we were just about to give up when Michelle called out excitedly, "I've found one!"

"Look! it's just over this wall!"

And she was right!
.
.
.
just over that wall.....
.
.
.
.
was Bambi!
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.
.
.
.


OK...OK...that's not quite how it went :)

In reality, the park ranger dude was spot on, and we saw diddly squat.

Oh well, at least we tried.

We left the rather badly named deer park dejected....it was a long way to drive to look at empty fields.

Finding a little cake shop nearby helped lighten our moods - sadly it didn't seem to sell anything at all beginning with D, but it was still in the village of Dyrham, so hopefully that counts. The lack of the magic letter certainly didn't stop us stocking up on delicious treats - plain and caramel shortbread and chocolate brownies, yum!

Then as we came out of the bakery, Tracy spotted our redemption - just across the road - dirt bike races!!!

Perfect :) We all went over to watch for an hour or so....and to be honest, the bikes were a lot more fun to photograph than the deer probably would have been:



Out in the fresh air, it was also my first opportunity to get someone to take a photo of my new hair colour, so here's that picture I promised you:

After all that excitement and fresh air we all needed a bit of a sit down :)

So we headed back to T&M's place to chill out for the afternoon, and play a bit of DJ Hero

It was so much fun :)


It's basically just the same as Guitar Hero, which in turn was just like a dance mat game really, but you hit the coloured buttons with your fingers not your feet. About as much like playing with real decks as Guitar Hero is like real guitar playing, though, according to our resident superstar DJ, ie not much :)

The following day, we had a decadent lie in, and then a nice lazy rest of the day (it's got to be done from time to time). The boys were in the mood for some arts and crafts, so they made some funky dragons, with card, paint, paper fasteners and drinking straws.


The design was Reece's idea, based on something he did in school a year or two ago. They turned out great!



The following day, Monday, was one of those very welcome rarities - a day off in the week for both me and Connor at the same time :) I let him choose what we would do on our just-mummy-and-Connor day out, and his first choice was to go back to Cosmo, the Chinese buffet, for lunch.

In the spirit of 'D' fortnight he tried duck in a pancake for the first time:







After lunch we went to Butterfly World at Blooms garden centre (about a month too late! :)), and had a good look for things beginning with D, but all we found was a bearded dragon and some ducks (I resisted the urge to point out he had just eaten one of their relatives):


All was not lost, though, as we had a brilliant time there anyway, if largely letter-D free. Connor particularly enjoyed having a snake draped around his neck (do you think that counts? :)). He also had the privelege of hand feeding Iggy the iguana, who, according to the keeper there, has never accepted food from anyone before who doesn't work there. So that was pretty special.



I'm pleased to say that we redeemed ourselves on the alphabet front by going to the Paint your Own Pottery shop – and I know you’re thinking we’ve mistaken our Ps for our Ds, but no, we were still on track, because Connor painted a dragon, and I did a dinosaur, so there :P :)



And then after all our hard work painting, we had a delicious dairy treat - blackberry ice cream, yummmmmmmmm

Our next letter D? Connor having a lesson on Jay's decks - maybe he'll be a superstar DJ too one day :) He really enjoyed his session - he learned how to slow down and speed up the records, how to fade from one deck to the other, and even how to scratch. I was too chicken to try it myself, in case I broke something :)



One week down, another to go, are you still with me? :)

So....the following Saturday we had another fairly lazy day....our partners in A-Z crime were down in London seeing the sights, but we weren't due to join them until the following day.

The boys were getting cabin fever by the afternoon, though, so in an effort to economise we took them to the local reptile shop. It's like a free zoo :) It has a crocodile and snakes galore and all sorts of lizards.

And most importantly, they had a huge tank with about 10 bearded dragon babies. Oh they were so beautiful! This little fella in particular was really friendly. Jay had to physically drag me from the shop to stop me buying him and taking him home :)

I called him Joey Beard after the Swindon Wildcats #15

On the picture below, you can see Joey's brothers and sisters bottom left, and also, nowt to do with the letter D, a very cool Australian Water Monitor called Elvis who is allowed free run around the shop, and a suicidal cricket who kept taunting a tarantula.


Our only other D-related activity for this day was trying, and largely failing, to get the family to pose for photographs in a dreadlock wig:

At least I had fun, so much fun in fact that I didn't want to take it off :)

The boys preferred the coloured wigs, less itchy apparently.

I love the way that Reece, in the purple wig, inadvertently looks just like Connor's monster money box :)


The following day, the Sunday, was our big day out to the big city.

We got up at dawn – well about 7am – which is horrendously early for us :) - and drove down to London.

The plan was to park up at the park-and-ride out in Osterley and get the tube to the Natural History Museum, but I somehow overshot, and we ended up just driving directly to the museum, where we were lucky enough to find a space on one of the free parking meters, right outside the building.


And a very impressive building it is too, I never fail to just stand there and admire it for a while before going inside (not that we stood and admired for TOO long this time, as it was raining cats and dogs and we didn’t want to end up looking like drowned rats)

Once inside, we had no trouble discovering tons of stuff beginning with D:


(to explain the two rather dubious inclusions – bottom left is me and “dem bones” , and at the top right is a display of tiny stuffed hummingbirds. You can’t see it for toffee in that tiny photo, but trust me it was amazing)

We also had a look round the brand new, and very impressive, Darwin centre, which is a huge exhibit devoted to bio-diversity. There were interactive exhibits for the children and lots of interest to the adults too. Unfortunately we didn't have time to go down to the vaults where they have preserved specimens of something like 17 million species of animals/insects, and 3 million species of plants. That would have been fascinating, another time...

We had a late (and expensive - one could almost call it daylight robbery ;) ) lunch in the museum cafe, and then caught the tube to Chinatown, in the (fruitless as it turned out) hope of bumping into Michelle, Tracy and family.

Why Chinatown, in D fortnight? Well, they were having their annual new year celebrations today....and what does that mean? Yes - Dragon Dancing!....









and decorations all over the streets....










and, ummm, crispy duck :)



It was really crowded, but the atmosphere around Chinatown was electric, well worth a visit when the new year celebrations are in full swing.

Here are a couple more pictures, as you can see by the blue sky and all the bright colours, by this afternoon the rain had stopped and it was really sunny (if still a little chilly):



None of the rest of today's activities were really anything to do with the letter D, but just for completeness, this is what we did next:

We managed to get hold of M&T on the phone, who by now were hanging around Covent Garden hoping to see somebody famous as it was the Bafta awards weekend, and arranged to meet them down by the London Eye.

We were going to get the tube there, but as we walked from Trafalgar Square (where we had been watching some traditional Chinese dancing, and posing for pics outside the Canadian High Commission, like the true hockey fans we are) to the tube station, we saw Big Ben in the not too distant distance:

So we decided to walk down Whitehall instead as it was a lovely evening for a stroll (the kids didn't agree, but to be fair we had been walking constantly since 10am, only sitting down once to eat)

We fancied doing a night flight on the Eye, but when we got there it was still fairly light.











So we ducked into the London Aquarium to pass an hour until it got properly dark, and that's where we finally bumped into our pals.


We were particularly pleased to see a replica Easter Island statue in one of the big tanks, as anyone who has seen and enjoyed the movie Night At The Museum knows he is called Dum Dum, which begins with D :)

When we emerged from the aquarium it was suitably dark, and we thoroughly enjoyed our night flight:


And here's a rare piccie of the whole gang together, taken by a kind fellow tourist:



After all that excitement, there was nothing left to do but limp back to the tube station, collect the car from outside the (now beautifully floodlit) museum, and drive home to collapse exhausted in our beds. What a great day that was!

There was even more excitement the following day - as it was a Teacher Development day at Connor's school and so we had another trip out, to the fantastic @Bristol science museum, but it was fairly devoid of Ds....we did animation (too late), went to the planetarium (too early), and all sorts of other wrong-lettered activities:


But never mind, it was fun anyway :)

So that's my D fortnight all wrapped up....E next (which so far we have found pretty tricky, so you can expect a shorter blog post next time :D)

Nights = Lights = Disney Magic

A pretty simple entry in this month's Disney CJ...

The theme was Disney Nights...and so I thought I'd concentrate on the aspect of night-time that Disney does best - the spectacular lights

The book had these very cool shaped pages, already black, so for the background I just coated them with Jo Sonja's Opal Dust (I looooove that stuuuufffff!), and then sprayed with Krylon triple thick gloss varnish.

The photo of the castle was backed with black card to give it a bit of elevation and then cut out and edged with black sharpie. It also got a blast of the triple thick varnish to make it extra glossy.

I stippled a little pearlescent ink around the castle to mimic the glow from the lights dispersing into the night sky, and added stars and gems.

On the other side, the title was Cricutted and stickled, and the subtext was dymo'd.

And that's it. I told you it was a simple one.

I have a new vice.....

....no, not that sort! I'm pure, simple and innocent, me ;)

a proper tool type thing

isn't she a beauty?

I wanted one of these thingies purely so I could try my hand at rivetting jewellery....but they were £25 in Homebase and that's a bit much for something I probably wouldn't use all that often...

so I tried my luck with a WANTED ad on Freecycle and a lovely lady from Wanborough replied almost immediately to say that the previous owners of her house had left a really old vice in the shed, and as she had no use for it I was welcome to pop by and pick it up...

so I did! I love how it's all old and has such character....loads better than if I'd bought a new one, plus it was freeeee - I love Freecycle!

So - anyway - I used it tonight to make my first piece of rivetted jewellery...what do you reckon?


It's burnt copper on aluminium, and the rivets are sterling silver, which is probably a bit extravagant for a practice piece, but I only used a tiny bit, and I didn't have any other wire that fitted the holes :)

The rivets look passable from the front, but the first two I did are a right royal mess around the back of the pendant, good job this one is for me so nobody has to see the back :) I'd got the hang of it by the third and fourth ones though.

I stamped the pendant with a hug ("O") and a kiss ("X") for each of my three sons, inspired by my pal Michelle, who has a real thing for the XOXOXOXOs.

And yes, I know that two of them are way too old for hugs and kisses from mum, but tough :)

The letters are all over the place, maybe I should have used some sort of guide line or a ruler....oh well, I'll learn for next time....and in the meantime I shall pretend they are all out of line on purpose, to "inject a sense of whimsy" lol

It kind of looks like I haven't been making stuff recently....

...when actually I have, I've just been too lazy to blog them....

So here goes, a little round up of things I've made over the past couple of weeks...

First of all, I made a necklace for my best friend for her birthday.

It was my first attempt at wirework with sterling silver, and my first attempt at wet felting too (the base of the pendant - the swirls were needle felted on top afterwards), so it was a bit nerve wracking, but it turned out ok in the end, and Alison loved it, so that's all that matters :)


It's actually quite satisfying to make something completely from first principles from just wire, wool roving and some beads.

I took the first couple of not very good pics, Alison took the much cooler one below.

The beads are Labradorite (which I bought in Granville Market, Vancouver, almost 2 years ago, with the express intention of making them into something for Alison, I've taken my sweet time) and Aventurine.


While we're on jewelery, I also made a chainmaille bracelet for a very cool young lady that I know, called Lauren:

This was super quick to make as her tiny slim little wrists are about the width of my thumbs:)

Very girly, not like the stuff I usually make.

And neither was the Disney CJ layout I made last weekend - all pinks and purples and glitter and bling.... I barely recognised it as one of mine :)

But the theme was "the castle", and you can't really do justice to Disney's castles without a bit of fairy dust....

Excuse the bad photo, I had my lens on manual focus I think not auto:


It's a real pity the pic doesn't show the sparkle overload going on here, from glitter paper behind, to opal dust around the photos, stardust pen used on the title, glimmer mist on the metal rimmed tags, and jewelled brads.

Like I said, it's SO not me :D

My interpretation of the brief was to compare the Disney castles (I didn't include a photo of the Tokyo one as it's essentially a direct copy of the one at WDW anyway)

And inside the Oscar stylee gold envelope is my verdict as to which one is best.

I'll give you a clue - it has the longest name and the most dangerous inhabitant....

And last, but absolutely nowhere near least, it was Valentine's Day last weekend but one, so here's my card for the J-dude:



th-th-th-th-that's all folks!