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The ornament robbed of life before she lived

Such a tragic story this tale is, one I tell with hint of sadness in my voice of a time when the light danced freely on the back of this ornament.

It started a bit more than a moon ago, when I was sitting at my desk painting glass baubles for Christmas, that I had the sudden idea to fill one with beads, it would look so pretty I reasoned, especially with the lights twinkling around it. I pulled out the bead box and some glue. I started on my quest coating the inside of the bauble with glue and then pouring assorted beads into the bauble and rolling it round to distribute the beads.

However in all my grand visions, the beads and glue didn’t agree with me as I had wished them to, the beads didn’t want to stay where I wanted them to, the glue took many passes of the sun before it dried and even though the entire inside was not coated with beads, it did look very pretty with a mass of beads in the bottom and then drifts of beads on the slides, with the glue dried to the glass in sections with no beads looking like Jack Frost had visited the glass after a cold night.

I thought she was so much stronger than she actually was, a knock against my camera when I was lugging stuff out to photograph her one afternoon sent her shattering to the ground, I remember that moment like it was yesterday in a drawn out slow motion scene in my mind. I yelled for Mum, she rushed out thinking I had done something to my camera but alas not it just the sound of a girl who had accidentally murdered her most beautiful handmade ornament. Reminding myself of the times long before us when some of the only photographs people had taken of them was once they were dead, I decided to give her the same treatment.

So I present you the most gorgeous ornament that was robbed of the chance to live her purpose in life, to adorn our tree.

small bead

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Christmas Ornaments Part 1

Well Christmas is fast approaching and in exaclty one weeks time, Mum and I will be drawing close to Dubbo on our 2 day drive to Melbourne.

These are three styles of ornaments I have made so far, little plum puddings (which I need to find some tiny holly to add to the top), Christmas Trees and Stars inspired by Jenny at All Sorts.

ornaments part 1

You can click on the image to see the ornaments larger. The Christmas Tree is by far the easiest to make, just 2 roughly cut triangles for the tree and a thin folded strip of felt for the trunk. The tree which is shown here I have done little bullion stitches, which Mum says look like little gold grubs :), on another one I have done quite primitive cross stitches. The Plum Pudding probably takes the longest time due to the cutting and stitching on of the icing. I did not like cutting out the stars but they do look so cute especially as I reduced the pattern that Jenny provides so some of them measuere 2″ across instead of the usual 4″, so cute 🙂

That is ornament installment part 1, I have a couple more styles that I am working on currently and most of my present shopping is done 🙂

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the coolest kid

funky shower cap

A week? or who knows how long ago, I had a super fun day with Andrea, where we spent next to nothing on great finds and spent a lot of time laughing, the shower cap on Gertrude to the left is one such find. I am the coolest kid in town because without a doubt I do have the coolest shower cap 🙂

I could bitch and moan about how life is at the moment but I am not going to do that, because we all know we hear enough of that in real life, so why carry it on here? So I’ll have a moan about Christmas instead.

My family all know that I normally full of the Christmas spirit, begging that we get the tree a day earlier this year, when can we start eating all the extra-special Christmas biscuits (coming soon to a blog near you), pouring over the yearly family updates we get from far-flung family and friends, thinking up the perfect presents, going nuttso over *Fine European* ornaments.

This year it hasn’t started happening yet, feeling bit scroogish here, so in an attempt to banish that evil spirit, I am making all sorts of cute yet primitive ornaments (also coming to a blog near your) to adorn the tree when we get it next week. I am going to haul myself down to the shops tomorrow to absorb some cheer and find those presents.

Christmas is in less than ten days.
Eleven days till Mum and I hit the road.
So much to do before then.

ohh and I almost forgot the best thing 🙂
Mum and I went into give blood the other day and I wanted to get the whole 470ml of blood out of me this time unlike the two times before so, you know I drank 4L of water between getting up at 4:25am for work and the appointment at 2:15pm. Well the blood was gushing out of me so fast I almost burst the little holding bag that that get the first dregs in. Seven and a bit minutes later, I had donated the whole 470ml! Go Helen! We won’t go into details about what happened afterwards but to say, Helen gets a bit faint headed after offering herself to the vampire… And GO MUM for having her 50th whole blood donation that day as well!

As I have said before I hate giving blood, the copious amounts of water, the faint-headedness bits and all the rest but just knowing that slight discomfort it gives me is less than that of the up to three other people who need my B+ blood.

That almost puts the Christmas hat on me, so with ten days till Christmas, I challenge no ask you to take a couple of hours out of your time and give the gift of blood to some strangers this season.

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and she hits herself on head x5

greenday

A few of you may have heard of the debacle I had with my Green Day tickets for the concert back in March, to cut a long story short for those who haven’t heard it, I lost my ticket as well as Matthew’s and his girlfriend at the time tickets for the show. I pulled apart my room literally twice looking for them; furniture was pulled from the wall in case they had fallen behind. The searches were futile. All evidence pointed to the fact that I must have thrown them out.

So after many talks with Ticketek, I was told that only I would be able to have my ticket replaced as I was in the seating section, however since Matthew and Daisie were in the standing section, they would just have to loose out. I was devastated, as Matthew was giving Daisie the ticket for her birthday, on the day of the show however, some more tickets came on sale but only for the seated section, so I bought two more tickets so Matthew and Daisie could go. The fact that I lost them also meant that my seat was costing me $188.40 to see them opposed to the $62.80 for everyone else.

Well today, just over a year since I had brought the tickets, I found them, hiding in my jewellery case.I proceeded to hit myself on the head countless times over. I wonder if I could sell them on Ebay???

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Machine Made Patchworks Bag

One day a few months ago on a craft blog crawl, I came across Crafting Japanese, a blog which collects details on Japanese craft books and the items that people have made from them. I looked and looked and picked the books I liked best and ordered three of them from YesAsia.com

After many days of thumbing the pages, to select what to make first, I decided on a bag from the book Machine Made Patchworks.

Machine Made Patchworks Bag

Most of the fabric is William Morris Prints by Rose and Hubble, maybe this will be a Christmas present for one of the girls …… or maybe I will keep it for msyelf 🙂

Book Details
ISBN – 457911020X
Easy Links to buy the book – Yes Asia or Amazon Japan See what others have made at the entry for this book at Crafting Japanese – The Japanese Craft Book Resource.

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Pool Confessions

I went swimming this morning. Big deal, right?

Up until year 7, I went to 2 or 3 times a week in swimming season as well as school PE classes and then club on Friday nights. Once I hit year 8, the training went and I went to club every two weeks or so. Then that stopped in year 9 and all I had left was school carnivals and PE Class. I was not the best swimmer but I still could hold a reasonable pace.

Then I finished school and in all honesty, I don’t think I have done actual lap swimming since the carnival in year 12 that was 2002, it is almost 2006.

Since the summer of 2001/02, I think I have swum at the beach three times? In a pool maybe five times? If I said I lived in Ukhta, Russia, that answer may be quite reasonable but I don’t I live in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, we are on the coast line with glorious beaches up and down the coast line and a public pool 3 mins away, yet I can count on my hands the amount of times I have gone in the water.

Since I have the summer off, I decided it was a great time to stop talking about exercising and actually do something. Since it is too hot to ride a bike and if I go out walking I will just take a camera and not get any exercise, swimming reasoned to be the best idea, so I picked up a pair of speedos on Saturday, all ready to go on Tuesday morning, well I didn’t have a cap and you can’t swim without a cap, so I bought one on Tuesday night before work. Couldn’t go on Wednesday morning as I finished at midnight the night before which meant by the time I got up it would be too hot to go training. Then Matthew said he was to start work at 6am on Thursday, I thought great! That gives me a reason to be up early, I can drop you at work then go the pool!

So I did, I got there, paid my admission, put on my cap and got into the pool along with all the others there already.

I started off with freestyle, trying to go at a reasonable pace, yet I got to the other end of the 25m pool and had to have a breather, I eventually got up to doing 75m sets between breaks. After 15mins of freestyle I switched to breaststroke for another 20mins and then finished off with another 15mins of freestyle.

Back in the day at club, I used to dive in and do freestyle for 18m before I needed a breath and was pretty good at doing 5 strokes between breaths. Yeah well that was a while ago. Today for the most part it was stroke, breath, stroke, breath, however I did after a while get back into doing stroke, stroke, breath, stroke, stroke, breath 🙂 This is going to be a long process but worth it.

Observations on my swimming today.
Increase the kicking power; don’t let the arms do all the work.
Improve breathing.
Your technique is lazy, concentrate on stroke movement.
Get some goggles; chlorine eyes aren’t fun.