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..

Jinxed

Noooo, I shouldn't have mentioned the cavity-wall insulation! Bad idea! Things did not work out. That, coupled with my Beloved falling off his motorbike (due to invisible ice) and me falling on my backside trying to see if he was okay (also invisible ice, and he was fine), meant that it wasn't a great morning. So I cut out lots of little red birds to calm myself down. Cutting-out's very soothing.

I'm trying Advent Blogging - a post a day 'til Christmas. Some of them will no doubt be very short, some of them might only be a picture, but ah, it'll be a bit of a laugh. After all, there are such gems as the school nativity coming up...

Reasons To Be Cheerful-ish

Yay! It's the 1st of December! (Yes, you knew that).

And it's week 7 of Planet Penny's Reasons To Be Cheerful! I don't think I've done seven weeks of it yet though - have I? I think I missed the first week.

The wind has dropped a bit and it's not actually raining - at the moment anyway. It was sleeting as I dropped the kids off at school (bitterly regretted forgetting my woolly hat). And I've just gone round the house and changed my many calenders over to their new pictures! I love turning to a new calendar page. So that's my first reason to be cheerful. Do you like our Santa Claus in that picture? Miss Mouse made it yesterday - the schools were closed due to the strike, and we were stuck inside due to colds and grim weather, so apart from bickering, telly and the Wii there was a little making going on. I like his curly beard!

Reason number two is a much delayed ta-daa! Finally, finally, the item fondly known as Bogroll Barbie (though she's not a Barbie, she's a cheap pound-shop 'fashion doll' equivalent) is FINISHED! Hurrah, huzzah, rejoicing in the streets!

I painted the base yesterday, and there she is in all her glory, on her little pedestal! Loo-roll dolls are just the most bonkers creation aren't they? I sometimes wonder who first thought 'You know, that toilet roll really needs a crinoline!'

I like this picture a lot - it's pleasingly strange..

Reason three - well, I don't want to jinx it, but we should, fingers crossed, touch wood, being cautiously optimistic here, be getting our cavity wall insulation done tomorrow. I'm being very cautious about this because we've had people out three times to do this, but this time.. well, let's hope. In any case, we're reasonably well-prepared for winter:

This time last year we were up to our oxters in snow - well, slight exaggeration but looking back at my 365 blog, this is how things were on the 1st of December 2010. Chilly. I'm working on my mum's premise which is that if we're well-prepared for winter it won't be such a bad one!

You know what? We forgot the advent calenders this morning! Something to look forward to once the kids are home from school :-D.

a little Making Monday

Can you tell what is yet?

This is something I've been meaning to get back to for a while. Can you guess? Well, actually it's a base/stand for a loo-roll doll:

As you can see from this In Progress picture her legs are too long, so I've made the base with a hole in it to sort out the disparity in height. So far so good, but I started this project two years ago for my friend's daughter! The dress itself was a doddle (and really really good fun!) to make but the base has been a bit of a nightmare. I tried various things but ended up using layers of cardboard stuck together, which was okay, but putting papier-mâché on it to smoothe out the surface has not come naturally!

So anyway, today I finally went into a paper-and-glue frenzy and got it done. It's still drying but with any luck I'll be able to paint it tomorrow (pink naturally) and be finally done! Yay! Fortunately my friend's daughter still thinks such things are cool...

It's so great to able to write about something I'm making, however pathetic it is!

More Reasons To Be Cheerful

Reasons To Be Cheerful are all I ever post at the moment - though that's not a bad thing of course!

I'm doing a lot of bloggy catching-up this morning, which is lovely. I seem to have missed a lot though! It's been a hectic week - my Beloved had a stinking cold and was off work for a couple of days, then he passed it on to me (so generous!) and the kids have had a busy week. But despite the snifflings and snufflings, I have Reasons!

Reason 1 - Miss Mouse had her very first dance exams this week. Due to a mix-up in the paperwork she actually did four when she was supposed to do three - she ended up doing Disco as well as Tap, Majorettes and Cheerleading - but did very well! Shh, I'm not telling her yet, so it's a surprise when she goes to her class this week, but she's passed them all. Actually I get the impression that with the little ones you'd probably have to have two left feet and hit the examiner over the head with a baton to fail, but nevertheless I'm very proud of her. Not least because it's so very far outwith my experience! Anyway, here she is as she was about to go in to the cheerleading exam:

A blur of pompoms

2) The Boy's tooth fell out! It hung in there until Tuesday lunchtime though, persistent thing that it was. It got to the rather gross state of being able to spin back to front and he was getting thoroughly fed-up with it but persistence on his part paid off. And very fortunately their school photos weren't taken until Wednesday morning. No picture of the momentous dental occasion as at the moment I only have one very blurry gap-toothed picture taken under electric light - it's so murky when they head off to school and much the same when they come home that photography in decent light is impossible during the week. And they're off at their Grandma's so I can't take one now - shame as it's a bright morning. We've had a wet week and three days of strong winds so the sunshine today is wonderful. The cats are outside making up for lost time! They were most offended by the weather and there was a bit of regression to climbing the curtains.

3) Tomato - there is an actual tomato on the Boy's tomato plant:

I think I may have mentioned it a few weeks ago, when it was still green, but look at it now! I never did get round to repotting the plant, but it doesn't seem to mind too much.


Secret knitting is progressing nicely, Christmas shopping is progressing (but I wouldn't say nicely), and I'm going to 'feed' the Christmas cake. I might even do some mordanting this morning..

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Reason 1. Wheeeeeeee - it's my trashy-telly-time-of-the-year! It's I'm A Celebrity..Get Me Out Of Here time! There's no defending it - I just love it. I love the the way Dec says 'may cost considerably more', I love z-list celebs I haven't heard of eating bugs, I love the inventive ridiculousness of the trials and celebrity chests. Add Stuart Hall wetting himself laughing and it'd be It's A Knockout all over again. I love to wonder whether I could do better than the celebs at the trials - in the case of Sinitta's one yesterday, almost certainly!

Reason 2. That incredible feeling of freedom you get when you get called for jury service but they don't need you after all! I thought I'd be spending much of this week at the High Court in Glasgow, but instead I've been doing things like Christmas shopping and going out for lunch with a friend.

Reason 3. The Boy has the wibbliest wobbliest wobbly front tooth ever. It should fall out tonight or tomorrow. The school photos are being done at the start of the week - will my boy have the most engaging gappy-toothed smile for his school photo? Will he? Will he?

Has anybody else got the same problem as me with blogging in November and December? Which is that I'm making things which I desperately want to witter on about, but they're Christmas presents so I can't blog about them in case the recipients reads my blog. Oh the frustration! I'll have to have a ta-daa binge on Boxing Day!

And just to finish, a picture which makes me smile and which I should have had for my last Reasons To Be Cheerful post:

Tap-shoes and scabby knee!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

They're very small and domestic reasons to be cheerful this week!

1. My Peerie Flooers hat is progressing nicely. I've done virtually no knitting for the last week or so for one reason or another, so it's nice to get back to it.


2. Miss Mouse is enjoying her dance classes and it makes both laugh and smile to see her practising in the middle of the living-room. I never thought I'd have a child who does tap, majorettes and cheerleading! I was going to take a picture of her brand-new tap shoes to illustrate my point (she's so excited about them, she took them to school to show her teacher!) but it's too dark now.

3. Weird low winter light makes me smile. I took this picture yesterday when there was no direct sunlight in the garden but indirect sunlight (bouncing off the house) was lighting up what's left of the nasturtiums.

Looking at other blogs today and seeing various beautiful poppy pictures for Armistice Day, it occurred to me that I was sure I'd planted poppy seeds this year, but none came up. Odd. I'd thought they were supposed to be fairly straight-forward to grow. Maybe next year!

Poppies at Kittochside, June 2011.