Therapeutic

Now I'm not a papercrafts person really, but I do enjoy a bit of cutting-out and the like at Christmas. The kids and I had a whale of a time making paper chains last year, and they've already started looking through our various kids-art-and-craft books for ideas for this year. But for me it's all about little birdies this year! The original design (from Christmas Crafting in No Time by Claire Youngs - a grown-up art-and-craft book) has quilled wings but one of the lovely things about that book is that it prompts so many ideas. Andamento has already adapted the quilled-wing birdies design to give them concertina-folded wings. I'm going to try that and the original quilled wings too, but for the moment painting patterns on with white paint has been my little pleasure. A lot of the ideas for the patterns came from other projects in the book actually. Happiness is a fine paintbrush and some white paint!

I'm not sure what I'll do with the birds - maybe string them on a ribbon so they can be strung up like the paper chains. Or I could just dot them round the place, perching on picture frames and so on. I'd love to hang them on the Christmas tree but they'd get chewed to bits by our Christmas-tree-climbing cat. He's really far too big to climb Christmas trees but he had a good go at it last year and I don't expect him to have outgrown the notion this year.

It seems weird not talking about knitting more, but it's still all secret stuff! Do any other Ravelers mentally sing 'Ravelreeee, Ravelry' like 'Valerie (the Steve Winwood song from the early Iron Age, i.e. when I were lass)? Just me? Ah well..