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!

A to Z year : January 29th-Feb 11th : the letter C

...it's time to blog what we did to celebrate the letter C....










First of all we went to Cosmo, the yummy all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet restaurant in town, it was the first time Connor has tried Chinese food, and I think he liked it....especially the barbecue pork, the noodles and the sesame prawn toast.

Both boys tried eating with chopsticks too, which was fun to watch :) But they sensibly swapped the chopsticks for spoons when it was time for pudding - what else could they choose in C fortnight other than chocolate cake?





The next day, we met up with our pals and fellow A-Zers Tracy, Michelle, Lauren and Callum, and also their pals Sannine and Molly, for a trip to the local park Coate Water. Michelle had managed to borrow a pile of circus equipment - diablos, plates for plate spinning, juggling balls.... - so we could all have a shot at circus skills. Sadly I had a stinking cold that day, and wasn't really in the mood for juggling, so I stuck to camera duty. The other all had tons of fun though.

Full of cold I may have been, but I wasn't going to miss out on the next activity...every Sunday at Coate Water the local model train enthusiasts open up their track to the paying public for rides through the woods. It's so much fun - especially as that little train goes faster than you might think! So we all went on the choo-chooooo :) And then the kids got to go on again, with a little train all to themselves, which was cool.

After all the fun at the park, Callum came back to ours to play for a couple of hours, and the kids had chicken, chips and coleslaw.

actually started this in "B" fortnight (when it was a bracelet, of course) - but during "C" I finished my chainmaille copper cuff:


For the second weekend of "C", we were planning to go to Warwick Castle for the day, but when the day came around, it was cold and wet, and the castle's webpage indicated that there was hardly anything going on there that day, so we had a last minute change of plans, and decided to go to the Sea Life Centre in Birmingham instead:


Or, as we like to call it, the C-Life Centre :D Now, some people might say that's cheating :P

But as far as I'm concerned, it's a centre in Central England, by a canal:











And we saw crabs, coral, crayfish, clown fish and a treasure chest:

so that counts, right? :)

Check back in a couple of weeks to see what we did for the letter D

A to Z year : January 15th-28th : the letter B

So here I am blogging the brilliant letter B :)

We’ve had a ton of fun this fortnight, not least because we now have some fellow passengers on the A-Z journey – our pals Michelle and Tracy and family have decided to play along, and they have been coming up with some fantastic suggestions for alphabet-styled activities.

So – what have we got up to?



First of all, we went to our first away ice hockey game of the season –because it was in Basingstoke, home of the Bison, and we couldn’t ignore that opportunity to pick up two Bs in one go. Unfortunately, the Wildcats (our team) got beaten :( But it was a good, close game, and we enjoyed making plenty of noise to support our boys.

We also got to see Bud, who is Basingstoke's mascot. He's very cool (if a little scary looking), and I even got a Bud-cuddle :) Sorry for the horrendous pic, I didn't have my proper camera with me, and the lights were very dim at this point. Just imagine a minotaur on skates....

The next day, we took the boys to the local ten pin alley for a spot of bowling. None of us are exactly experts at this particular sport, but we had a laugh, and Jay even got a couple of strrrrrrikes (such a show off). I came last, rubbish, I can’t even win against children! I like Reece’s bowling action – he kind of cocks his leg up like a dog doing a tinkle :) made me smile every time:

(you'll probably need to click on these multi-pics to see the big version, as they come out teeny on the blog)

We also did a spot of baking on that first weekend. I figured we could use this excuse twice, actually, and bake biscuits for B, then cook chocolate chip cookies for C – any ideas how we can shoehorn it into D? :) They were delicious, anyway ... hmmm ... that begins with D ... getting there!



In the week, Connor had his hair cut, or, to remain in the spirit of the exercise, a buzz cut. The plan was to take him to the barbers, but in the end, his dad got the clippers out and did it himself. Luckily, his dad is called Bryan, so it still fits.

Before and after shots, he looks so much older without his mop:



During our second B weekend, we did our first joint A-Z venture with Michelle, Tracy, Callum and Lauren (you'll be seeing many more of these over the year).

A local shop called Buyology is, sadly as my eldest son worked there and is now out of work, in the process of closing down, and so they are selling off all their stock at ludicrously cheap prices. Michelle managed to pick up these brilliant bubble-swords for only 59 pence each! Bargain :)

So we all went up to the local park for an hour or so before this week’s home hockey game to blow ginormous bubbles. It was cooooold up there, but not too cold to have fun :) I love the way the camera flash bounced off the bubbles:



Then on the Sunday, Connor and I went down to my dad’s in London for a belated Christmas dinner (our third attempt – we were originally supposed to go on Boxing Day, but Connor was in hospital, and then the snow put paid to attempt #2 in early January). My dad got in the spirit (literally!) of B fortnight by burning some brandy on the Christmas pud:

That's all the main activity - but there were a few other random Bs:

I bought some Bavarian Blue Brie cheese to try, because I couldn’t resist that BBB triple whammy :) And I’m glad I did – it was delicious!

Connor got a new basketball (and I was planning to snap some piccies of him shooting hoops, but the weather’s been a bit too wet when we haven’t been busy doing other things).

As you can see from previous blog posts, I've made a few bracelets.

And Connor has also been practicing lots of tricks with his new Brain yo-yo:

Check back in a fortnight to see what we managed to do with the letter C!

While I'm blogging....when I really should be sleeping....

....how do you like my new pebbles? :)

I bought these today in the local bargain shop (where Ethan used to work, sadly now in its last week) for 20p :)

I thought they might be good for photographing jewellery on.

They don't really work with this first one, which is a half Persian 4 in 1 bracelet I made last night for Connor, as the rubber rings make it hold its shape for dear life, which means the bracelet steadfastly refuses to drape attractively over the pebbles....

But they look fab with my, still work in progress, Euro 4 in 1 copper cuff, don't you think? Drapes like a pro :)

Stampers CJ - #4 - "gates"....

I'm actually a bit early with this one as I'm hoping to hand deliver it to me bessie Alison next weekend, but for my purposes it's Stampers CJ time again ..... and this book belongs to T-Ann, whose stamp was this pair of ornate gates:

The brief for this book was not only to make something purty with the supplied stamp, but also on the facing page to explain exactly how the purty thing got made, as T-Ann is a beginner stamper and is hoping to learn lots of new techniques from this book when it lands back home.

I've gone with stamping into melted embossing powder as my "technique", probably teaching granny to suck eggs, as I don't think she is that much of a beginner, but I couldn't think what else to do that would work with the angel wings I've had sitting in a drawer for goodness knows how long, and which I really wanted to use on this page.

So here's my entry:



I won't bore you with how everything was done, for once, as if you're really interested you can read about it on the piccie :) (you might need to click on it to see it bigger first)

Sorry about the glare, I didn't even use a flash, that was just from my light - but this entry is very shiny-sparkly :)



PS yes, I know we've skipped straight from #2 to #4 - I forgot to take a piccie of #3 soz...

Shop til you drop

It's coming up to the end of the month, so as usual I have been rushing about like a blue bottomed fly trying to get this month's Disney CJ layout completed....and by the skin of my teeth, here it is!

This month's book was so much fun to work in - I really liked the layout of Maggie's book - here's the front of the CJ - she has bound the journal itself (on the left, horizontal) and the sign in book (on the right, vertical) on the same back cover. So when you open it up you can see each person's sign in tag next to their layout:


Genius! I am soooooo going to be stealing this idea for a future CJ round :)

Maggie's theme is "Shop til you drop...Disney style", which was fun, as it meant I got a chance to document my antenna topper habit :) Yes, I'm a topper shopper, and proud!

Here's my layout plus sign in, in full:



Closer look @ the LHS:


and the RHS:


I gave the Cuttlebug a bit of a workout on this one, as you can see from all the embossing.....nothing else particularly clever going on here, a few of the topper heads have been decoupaged up on foam pads (you can see that clearer in the pic at the top of this post), the wording was either Cricutted (title) or stamped (the rest), and I made a couple of little accordion books for the journalling.

th-th-th-that's all folks.

Another one next month....

A to Z year : January 1st-14th : the letter A

So – what’s this A-Z year thing about?

It’s a stroke of genius, that’s what it is, and the genius in question is the super talented Nicole Maki

She explains the concept far better than I could in her blog posts here and here

But in a nutshell, 52 weeks in a year = 26 fortnights = 26 letters of the alphabet. The idea is to do / experience / try as many things as possible each fortnight starting with the allocated letter.

We’re only on B so far, but it has been a huge amount of fun already, the whole family has got involved in thinking of things to do and try.

I’m going to try and document each letter’s adventures here on my blog ….. so here’s what we did for the letter A:


First of all, we made an A-Z notebook....the boys helped me by punching the diamond shapes, and stamping the letter and date range on each double page spread for me. We are carrying this book around with us everywhere, so when we get an idea of something we’d like to do later in the year, we can jot it down under the correct letter in the book, before we forget. It’s already filling up nicely.

Then we went to see a movie – Alvin & the Chipmunks, the Squeakuel – it was funny – maybe not quite as good as the first one, but the “you spin me right round baby right round” moment in the mixing bowl certainly had me giggling :)








The next challenge was to get Connor to eat apples.....he wasn't keen :) But I did get him to try fresh pressed apple juice (which he has been resisting for years because it has 'bits' in, but has now decided he loves) and Nutrigrain cereal bars with an apple and blackberry filling, which he also really liked. So I count that as a partial success.



And who could resist an Art Attack afternoon? We all love this programme, so we watched an episode and the plan was we would all make something from the show. Neil, the presenter on the show, made these ace little crows out of cones of black card...here's my masterpiece :) (I'm not sure where his wings have got to...he did have some when I first made him)....the boys made some stuff too but they have whisked their creations away out of camera range so you'll just have to trust me on that one.


Our major "A" was a trip out to beautiful Avebury in the snow. Unfortunately Reece wasn't with us for this one as the weather was particularly bad around where his mum lives, and so Jay wasn't able to collect him. The rest of us had a cold but fun time though, exploring the ancient stones and throwing lots of snowballs. And I enjoyed the opportunity to take photos of the stones (and the boys) in the snow.



Other than doing our big shop at ASDA instead of Tesco for a change, I think that's all our As.

Oh hang on - there's one more - during the heavy snow the week before last, I had to work from home for a few days, as Connor's school was closed. So I needed to keep him amused while I got on with my work, and therefore I asked him to paint me some things beginning with A. This astronaut is my favourite of his paintings.





I'll be back in a couple of weeks with the next installment....

More chainmaille....this stuff's addictive :)

May I present, my purple wrist, so far :



I'm kind of enjoying trying out new weaves with nice cheap materials, purple anodised aluminium and rubber on my left wrist, copper on my right. I'm working on a Euro 4 in 1 cuff for the right wrist to go with the Jens Pind Linkage and Byzantine copper bracelets I wear all the time.

My left wrist now has three .... Full Persian 6 in 1 in red and purple AA, Japanese 12 in 2 in black rubber, purple AA and, because I had them handy, sterling silver lil' rings, which kind of defeats the point of cheap experimentation, and Helm in black and purple rubber, and purple AA.

I'm chuffed with how they look together :)

I also cracked Half Persian 4 in 1 today, woohoo! It was a bugger to start off but fine once I got going...this little bit is just a practice but I'll probably do a proper one in copper for the copper wrist soon:

(Propper Copper, that rhymes :) made me giggle :) little things please little minds...)

So that's 7 weaves I can do now, this is FUN! :)

My next project is a little more ambitious - I'm going to make one of THESE for Darby. Once I can find a cheap supplier for the steel rings I need, anyway. Wish me luck :)

a very rare event.....

...all three of my sons in the same photograph!

And here are some more pics from today's snowy day, in itself a rare event in Swindon:




































(and yes, our snowman has a Catherine Wheel on his head....didn't yours??? :) )