Feeling horny?

Today's post is initally brought to you by Pippin, sweetly slumbering upon her favourite bed - Tigger. Tigger was given to me for my Birthday many years ago by a very dear friend who has now emigrated to pastures a good deal warmer than these green and pleasant lands. I have only a couple of soft toys; all with sentimental value, and the one of reasons I keep them on the bed is because they act as pillow protectors. Who from? Well, I've never met a cat yet who didn't prefer to sleep on our pillows than anywhere else. As M has asthma, it's a good idea to keep the pillows cat fur free if possible :-) When Pippin came to leave with us, she decided that she was going to make Tigger her bed and now we quite often find her fast asleep on his belly.

If anyone can think of a good Lolcat saying to go with this picture, I'd love to hear it!

And now we have the obligatory cute cat photo out of the way, it's back to our regular programming. I've managed to get a little bit of crafting done over the last couple of days, in between things like chick flicks, lunch dates and staff meetings. (Which has all been good fun by the way, but has done nothing for my waistline! Definately got to get back to the diet.) The trip to the fibre exhibition was unfortunately cancelled as we found out that it was only open 2 half days a week.

I managed to get another glasses case finished for Liebschien; this one in a beautiful bright turquoise colour, with a piece of vintage ribbon for a decorative detail, some chain stitch embroidery and blanket stitch round the edge. It closes with a popper, but has a decorative button detail - I can't help it, I like the look of a button closure, even though I'm not brilliant at creating button holes!

As before, it's lined with felt to give the glasses extra cushioning. I tried to make it look as if the ribbon went all the way round in a continuous strip. There's a slight wobble, but I don't think it looks too bad. It would have been alot quicker to sew these on the machine, but I like the look of hand sewing for some things, especially when decorative stitches are used.

I've been playing with polymer clay as well for the last couple of days. One of the things I was experimenting with was covering this large domino shape with a simple cane design. I have to admit, that wasn't in my mind when I sat down at my studio desk the other night, but sometimes you discover great things without planning. I had some clay in my hand and was about to blend it for something completely different, when my hand almost moved of it's own accord and rolled the clay into a cane like tube. As I did that, my eyes suddenly strayed to a random domino that was also lying on my *ahem* slightly cluttered desk. Would it melt I thought? Hmmmm. I quickly sliced the cane up and covered the domino. It's not an amazing cane, I know that, but the aim of the exercise was to see if it would work! And yes, it appears to work. The plastic (I assumed) domino, didn't melt, and the fimo adhered to the plastic remarkably well. No air bubbles, no scorching, no peeling. Well. Stage two then. I'll be taking my faux Dremel to this baby shortly to see how easy it is to make a hole for a bail without cracking, defacing or otherwise spoiling it. Then I may be adding to the decorative elements; I know, I know, it looks a little plain as it is. It's still in the experimental stage!

The main reason I got the clay out in the first place was for Witchybelle. I had claimed her in the OWS for a Goddess object and I still have these pendants in my head. This one turned out a little differently from the last couple I made, but I love her flowing organicness (is that even a word?). I dusted her with a little metallic powder and gave her a sodalite crystal for her higher self.

Witchybelle also had some clay horns on her Wists, so how I could I resist! The trick to getting these horns looking really, well, horny, is to give the fimo a little twist. And now I'm looking at them, I really want to try making a unicorn horn! I have some white sparkly clay, and some translucent, some glow in the dark and some white! Perfect! I'm envisaging a magickal tool here, a unicorn horn, a crystal quartz.....hmmm....

Like I've always said, the best ideas come to you when you're least expecting it!

On the life front, next door were burgled yesterday. 'She' left the window open. I feel for them that they've been burgled, but the thieves jumped over their back fence, jumped over into our garden, broke into our shed, nicked our ladder to do the job with and then took off. M is now completely paranoid because we've had thieves in our back garden and that's where he keeps his Harley. He's now trying to persuade a friend to keep it in his garage. Not that that's a bad thing. I'll be encouraging that in fact, because it would be nice to get my patio back *lol* So we've had the police around, taking statements, stuff like that. That was our lie-in out of the window this morning. Talking to the old Bill when you've got a hangover is not recommended.

I've been making smellies too. We've had enough almost springtime like weather the last couple of days to make me think that it's maybe time to start defuzzing the legs. I hate stubble and I'm naturally dark haired, so I dilapidate. Ouch! I have to build up to this. A little bit at a time. Over lots of days. So this also involves exfoliating. (See, it's all about the long words today! ) I normally make a pretty good sugar scrub from granulated sugar, olive oil and various essential oils, but this time I thought I'd experiment with brown sugar. I also tried using less olive oil and more almond oil to help the drains from clogging up too much, but the resulting scrub wasn't as moisturizing as with olive oil, so I'll be slipping a bit more of that in. It still made my skin feel super smooth though. My favourite scrub fragrance is a mixture of lavender, geranium and vanilla oil, but I seem to have run out of vanilla, so I switched rosemary for the vanilla, which gives it a nice zingy feeling.

I also managed to make a batch of soap yesterday. I bought some beeswax from the farmers market last week with the intention of trying out a beeswax soap. Because I don't really use any hard oils or animal oils in my soap, sometimes they're a little soft. I've seen a couple of recipes using beeswax and I was curious to see if they hardened the resulting soap up at all. I also wanted to try a honey and oatmeal soap, so this batch was experimental. You know I like my experiments :-)

These were the ingredients: almond oil, beeswax, rapeseed oil, coconut oil, olive oil, soya oil, honey and oats. I also added a little orange and cinnamon essential oils in there, but I didn't add too much and I think the scent will eventually fade although it smells strong at the moment. The batch is still a little soft at the moment, but vegan soap often is at this stage. I'll let you know how it turns out. It did seem to come to trace very quickly. We'll see anyway. In about a month. *Sigh*. That's the worst bit about CP soap making, you have to wait so long for the soap to cure.