The Jar Project

Eeeek - it's Saturday and I haven't done my Rockin' Your World Friday post yet, very slack of me

In the meantime, here is my jar that went in the post to Brooklyn today to take part in The Jar Project

I'm not totally over the moon with how it turned out - I actually had a different idea for it in mind originally but had forgotten the instruction to "fill me with stories" - so at the last minute I went for something totally different, using some of my painted paper from the postcard swap with a very personal story on the back

It's kind of designed so that it's impossible to read the whole thing but people can get snippets from different angles

My favourite bit is probably the lid:

I hope it gets there before the deadline....

Cats, cats and more cats

I was lucky enough to get a few arty books for Christmas last year, and I've finally got around to making a start on working my way through this one - Carla Sonheim's Drawing Lab.

The book contains 52 "creative exercises to make drawing fun" - and with any luck, as well as being enjoyable, they will help me improve my drawing skills - which as you'll see in a minute, are currently sadly lacking!

The plan is to do one exercise per week, let's see how we get on...

The first lesson, I kid you not, involves sitting in bed and drawing a load of cats from your imagination.  I'm sure this will all make sense at some point :)

So on Saturday evening, with the kids engrossed in some spectacularly boring (for us grown ups) teen-movie on Nickelodeon, we went up to bed and drew cats like there was no tomorrow :)

Here are mine:

I told you there was plenty of room for improvement :D

And here are Jay's - which are much better than mine:

I especially like the one in the dustbin :)

Next week....blind contour giraffes!

Rocking Your World Friday week 11

Greetings fellow Rockettes – it’s time once again to sing the praises of the week gone by.

This has been another fairly quiet week so I don’t have an awful lot to tell you about, I’m busier than usual in the office and that results in being more tired than usual in the evenings and therefore not doing much at all except at the weekends.

But I’m grateful in a roundabout way for the fact that we’re busy at work as it sure beats being bored, and the quieter times just make me worry in these days of redundancies and loads of businesses going under….

So anyway, the week started well last Saturday with a cracking hockey game on Saturday which saw my team, the Swindon Wildcats, thoroughly see off the Sheffield Steeldogs, who up until then had been the only team in the league we hadn't beaten this year.  Swindon are playing so well at the moment, as they always seem to just as the season draws to a close....


On Sunday I had a wonderful afternoon in Bristol visiting my middle son Darby who is at Uni there.

On the way we popped into Ikea as I had won a £10 voucher in the work's Christmas raffle a while back, and I thought I could maybe spend it on some photo frames.  I haven't been there in years, forgot how fab it was.  I confess that I might have ended up spending a little more than the £10!!  And Connor enjoyed it there too, playing on all the interactive bits and bobs:

Next we went to Cribbs Causeway, a giant shopping centre, because I had promised Darby a feed up, and there is an all you can eat buffet restaurant there that we all wanted to try out.  It was amazing.  But we ended up so stuffed we could barely move :D

So to attempt to walk it off we went for a nose around the shops afterwards. We are probably not really the demographic they are trying to attract, because between the three of us we couldn't find a single thing we wanted to buy, but Darbs and I had fun listening to House of Pain STUPIDLY loud on some ridiculously expensive "Beats by Dr Dre" headphones - the two pairs we have on between us cost over £600!  eek!  They did sound great but I don't think I'll be shelling out on a pair :)

As we still had some walking off to do, next we drove out to Leigh Woods up above the Clifton suspension bridge for a nice long wander.  We were in there about 4 hours and had to find our way out by torchlight.  It's a lovely bit of woodland, with some amazing views down over the gorge and the bridge:

We attempted to find a "wherigo" geocache in the woods - which is partly why we took so long - we came very close to cracking it but ran out of battery (and daylight!) - we will have to go back another day to finish it off.

I don't need much of an excuse to go visit Darby :)

On Monday night I finished off my postcards for the mail art swap I'm taking part in, and I posted my cards out on Tuesday.  I've already started getting wonderful postcards in return - here are the three I have received so far, two from Sweden and one from Canada: 

On Wednesday it was Connor's parent's evening - and he got a glowing report from teacher, so as a reward, I took advantage (for the first time ever and I've been on Orange for 2 years!) of the Orange Wednesdays BOGOF offer and took him to the cinema to see the new Disney film John Carter:

Gosh it was a long old movie - we didn't get home until 11pm! on a schoolnight!  oops!  It was good though, a nice old fashioned Sci Fi / Fantasy romp.  And the leading man spent most of the movie running around topless, which can only be a good thing :)  (He wasn't anywhere near as hot as Thor though, I'm looking forward to the Avengers!)

And that's about it really for this week ...

Oh, apart from I got two bits of news.  The first is definitely good - my phone contract is up in just two days time, so I get to choose a fancy new phone - woohoo!  I'm thinking of this one, mainly because it has a really good camera and a hefty dual core processor.  Any other suggestions?  (and no, I don't want an iphone!  I'm allergic to all things Apple :)  )

And the other news is that my oldest son is moving out!  He is the one that I thought would still be living at home with mum when he hit 55, so I'm very surprised!  Mixed feelings about this - I'll miss him tons (he's going to Cornwall which is far enough away that I probably won't get to see him very often :(   ), and I'll miss the cat too (she's his cat so he'll be taking her), and also he does my cleaning and he does a good job too, and I'll definitely miss that!!!

But on the other hand he won't be around to eat all my food and play his music waaaay too loud and run up my fuel bills - and in the longer term, when I'm sure he's not coming back - I will have a big spare room to play with - maybe to have a dedicated studio for painting and stuff..... hmmmm ....... need to have a think :)

I'm off now to link this up at "Rockin' Central" - otherwise known as Virginia's blog - maybe see you there?

And they're off....

My ten postcards for iHanna's mail art swap went in the post today - one within the UK, one to Sweden, and the remaining eight to the USA - there must have been a lot of American sign ups this year!

I hope they all safely reach their destinations without getting too grubby - fly! fly my pretties! :)

I'll do another post in a couple of weeks to share the cards I receive in return....

Rocking Your World Friday week 10

Yay – 10 weeks in and I haven’t missed one yet!  You know I’m really enjoying writing these little positivity round ups, especially at the end of a work week that hasn’t been all that great – it kind of knocks everything back into perspective just in time for the weekend – so let’s hear it for Virginia for having the fab idea in the first place :)

As for my week, it’s been so so, nothing horrid, just with more work and less rushing around having fun than usual

But at least it started with a nice weekend :

Last Saturday and Sunday we were in celebration mode, as it was Reece’s 13th birthday on Sunday.  It’s a real treat for us to see him on his birthday (he lives with his mum in the week and we only have him at the weekends), so we made the most of it.

As well as pressies, we laid on a few birthday treats (and one attempted treat)

Planned treat #1 : a photo op on the ice after Saturday’s hockey game (which, as an aside, was THE best game I’ve seen all season, brilliant!!) with his favourite player - #49 Nicky Watt   (This was cool as Reece had no idea this was going to happen until they called his name :) )

Unplanned but fun treat #2 : we didn’t realise there was going to be a fair this weekend, until we spotted it on our way to hockey.   A birthday weekend gave us the perfect excuse to visit after the game.  And while the boys whooped it up on the rides, I had fun playing with long exposure photographs.

Attempted treat #3 : we tried to go swimming, but everyone else in Swindon seemed to have the same idea and the queue was over an hour long!  So fast forward to

Planned treat # 4 :  an absolutely delicious meal at Cosmo, our local all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet restaurant.  Yummmmmmmmmmm.

And talking of yum – planned treat #5 : CAAAAKE!!!!

For the rest of the week, as I said up top, it’s been a bit all work and no play making Sarah a dull girl – but as ever there were a couple of little shafts of sunshine:

- I finished another CJ entry and sent it out into the world – that was the last one that I was pushing the deadline on, so I can relax a little now
- The next Rock CJ turned up in the post and it is gorgeous, I loved looking through what has been done in it so far

- My Korn tickets came- the gig is only a couple of weeks away now and I’m super pumped!!

- I got my first ever postcard from Vietnam – a pretty rare country on Postcrossing, so I was chuffed with that

- I’ve been going off Glee a bit recently, but their version of Smooth Criminal last night with the duelling cellos was a-MAZ-ing!  It really lifted my mood.

- I treated myself to a Waitrose sarnie for lunch today, Brie and Grape with Redcurrant Chutney.  SO good!

Th-th-th-that’s all for this week folks

Life's a beach, and then ya die

Project Runway CJ time again - and this month it's the wedding dress challenge.

The brief for this journal was to use at least three altered or transformed elements (papers, embellies etc) on a double page 8"x8" layout - to reflect how the Project Runway designers altered and transformed old, unfashionable wedding dresses into something wearable.

I wasn't sure where to start with this one at first - as it was free theme - so I started to play with transforming some background papers - eg this one which started life as a floral print, until I got to it with the gesso and my airbrush - and the sea and sand colours I ended up with screamed BEACH!

So to the beach I went :)

My altered elements are the background papers, the chipboard letters for the title which I "sandified" with a mix of embossing powders in white, orange, and beige, the footprints which are paper clips that I spraypainted copper,

and the round, shell embellishments which I appropriated from an old hair band:

(plus I guess the tags count as altered too as I painted and sprayed them?)

All in all this was a fun entry to pull together - just like proper scrapbooking!  The journal even had proper page protectors.  I haven't seen one of those in years.

Photos taken in South Wales (left hand page) and on the Isle of Wight (right hand page).

Hurry up summer!

Rocking Your World Friday - week 9

Happy Friday everyone!  I do love me a Friday.  I'm usually a TGIF girl, but I've had a bit of a tough one this week, so I'm upgrading it to a TFIF!! :)

Not such a toughie that I don't have tons of positives to report though - so, let's see what's been rockin' my world :

Last weekend first off - and that WEATHER!  wow!

Isn't February supposed to be cold???

We went out walking on both Saturday and Sunday in short sleeves, it was so warm and sunny and wonderful.

And those walks relate to my second Rockin' thing - this weekend we really rediscovered our love for Geocaching.

Not that we had lost the love completely, but what with less than perfect outdoor weather in recent months, coupled with the feeling that we have already picked off a lot of the most interesting caches in the area (and we don't care much for a lot of the 'just for the numbers' caches and series that have been put out in the past couple of years), we had slowed right down.

But it was perfect walking weather this weekend - plus one of my caching buddies (who despite being a Bruins fan seems like a nice chap ;) ) had recently hidden a Wherigo cache in Swindon's Lydiard Park - and we have always wanted to try one of those.  So out we headed.

Wherigo caches are like a cross between a computer game and a treasure hunt - the whole thing has a story, and you interact with characters in the story on the screen of your GPS or phone, and get clues, solve puzzles etc.  But you can only meet the characters, or find "items" you need, in very specific locations, so you have to physically go to those places so that the GPS will confirm you are there and unlock the next part of the story.

Does that make any sense???

And at the end, there is a real treasure box to find, but you need to complete the adventure first.

It was a whole pile of fun, anyway :D

This one was based on the adventures of Tom Sawyer and it took us all over Lydiard Park - about a 3 mile round trip in all - very cleverly tying in real landmarks in the grounds to places in the story.  It was brilliant!

Here are some pics from our way around the park (that sundial was perfectly on time, by the way, it really was 2pm when I took the photo)

So that was on Saturday afternoon, and then the next day the weather was even MORE glorious!

So we went out geocaching again, this time out near Devizes, we did a 4 mile circuit taking in 10 geocaches around the Cherhill white horse:

A perfect Sunday afternoon stroll - good company, good weather, good scenery, good music (from my phone tucked in the pocket of my backpack :) ) - I had a bit of a "how wonderful it is to be alive" epiphany half way around -  THIS is what geocaching (and life in general) is supposed to be about.

Another plus point on this particular walk is that I found lots of letters for my photographic alphabet that I am in the process of collecting - I was particularly pleased with the D-shaped stick and the hoofprint C :

On Monday, my hairdresser rocked my world because she cut my fringe so I can see again - yay!!

I don't have any after shots, but here's a before, showing how desperately I needed that cut :)









On Tuesday, it was Waitrose's turn to put a huge smile on my face - because they have started stocking Heidi Pies!!!  Result!  These are the most delicious (if not desperately healthy :) ) veggie pies you will EVER taste in your life.  Sweet potato and goats cheese, heavenly.  My Tesco used to sell them but stopped around a year ago, and I've been pining for them ever since :(

But not only do Waitrose now sell them, they are currently on special offer.  So I bought two :)


Wednesday was Leap Day of course, and knowing that there was a special Geocaching souvenir available for people who found a cache on this special day, we were determined not to miss out.

--------> It's basically just this little virtual badge that goes onto your profile - so nothing too exciting - but it's nice to collect them nevertheless

What I hadn't thought through was the fact that by the time I was home from work and had collected Connor, and we had got the GPS, and headed back out, the light would be fading fast.  So we ended up finding our leap day cache in the dark.  But luckily I had a torch and it was actually tremendous fun rummaging through the trees at night time, it was a real adventure :)

There's the cache up in the tree, illuminated by our torch, it took us quite a while to spot it.

And the last thing to rock my socks off this week was my 9 year old Connor, who made this FAB robot costume for World Book Day almost completely by himself.  I think he did a great job!

The design was all his, and he did 99% of the work, all I did was spraypaint the head (it just looks cardboard colour in this photo but it was shiny gold), and also the stencilled circuits on the t shirt.

I should have taken a photo from the side really as he made all these cool knobs and dials for the sides of the head.  Plus you can't see the antennae all that clearly here.  But you get the jist.

I'm not entirely sure why his interpretation of my request to do "robot arms" for the photo resulted in "I'm a little teapot" though :D

That's my little roundup done, I'm off to link this up on Virginia's blog now, and see what all the other Rockettes have been up to.  Please feel free to come and join us there if you would like to share what’s been rockin’ your own little corner of the planet.  We all spend too much time in our lives worrying about the rubbish things like work, health (or lack of), money (ditto) etc – spending a few minutes every Friday focussing on the positives really does help to put everything in perspective.

Pollyanna, over and out ;) 

Starry starry night

It's Artistic Licence Circle Journal time again - and this time our given muse is Van Gogh.

We were each issued a blank canvas board, and asked to pay homage to any Van Gogh painting using a technique of our choice

I chose this painting:

Starry Night Over The Rhone, painted in 1888

and made my own needle felted version  (above).

It seems, that if you start needle felting during your lunch break at work, everyone thinks you are a little bit odd.  I think it's the repeated stabbing motions.

Cue the music from the Psycho shower scene ;)