Hats off to the girls!

So how's your holiday? Mine's going far too quickly in a flurry of crafting and gaming, and eating and drinking, and, well, you know how it is! Having been under the weather for a few days, I spent a little longer in bed each day; awake from very early, but just chilling with tea, telly and a bit of knitting, and managed to finish Meret #2 for a friend, in this chocolate brown which you can't actually see in the photo thanks to the lack of daylight that the Solstice/Yuletide brings with it. The shortest day might bring a celebration of the 'Thank the Goddess that the days will be getting longer from now on' variety, but they also make for rotten photographic lighting conditions. I didn't have any chunky yarn so I used two strands of DK together and knitted the small size instead of the medium, and it actually knitted up slightly larger than the one that I did for me!

This flash aided photo is a little better, but looks a little washed out compared the the real thing. Never mind, you get the 'picture'. RAFLMAO!! Sorry, bad joke there! Must get back to work so that I can inflict my terrible sense of humour onto my students and not onto  actual grown-ups. I think all teachers develop a juvenile sense of humour eventually. I have colleagues that can reel off the most awful jokes known to man. Or boy. Actually, I think the boy bit is probably more relevant. Schoolboy jokes are in a whole class of their own. Ha ha ha! There I go again. Pun central tonight! Maybe I need more adult company. That'll cure me!   

So where was I? Ah yes, lounging in bed with the Golden Compass, a cup of rose tea and my knitting! This is what came next. Was  it inspired by the Golden Compass? Maybe so. All I can tell you is that it certainly wasn't the shape I'd been intending to knit when I cast on! I had been intending a sort of stocking cap, but it morphed into this sort of slouchy tam with pigtails.

 

 

I really, really love it. It's good for those bad hair days too. You know, where you're just slobbing around the house, nowhere to be and you just can't be bothered to wash your hair because, well, you can do it tomorrow right? (Of course, I'd never do that!) And then you need to pop out to the post office or some such other mindless place. What should you do? Spruce up, or cover up? Well, what can I say? My post office already accepts my eccentricities. I think me and my eBay shop and my various craft or book swapping activities keep them in business. Well, probably not entirely true, but hey, I'm the one waiting in line with an armful of parcels and jiffy bags in one hand and a book in the other. Especially if it's pension day or child benefit day. It has been know to queue for almost an hour in there!

 

Have I mentioned how much I like this hat?

 

In the Yin and Yang of the craft world though, with every success, there must come a complete balls up. Here's mine. This is PMC, Precious Metal Clay, for those of you who haven't succumbed to this expensive little habit yet. 'What's wrong with that' I hear you ask? Well, I spent a couple of hours modelling this sweet name tag pendant from PMC which is 99.9% pure silver in an organic binder (the matt white stuff), fired it in my microwave kiln for only four minutes and cracked it open half an hour later to find a puddle of silver. Well, the puddle had hardened somewhat, but you get my drift. I won't even show you the results. Very very disappointing and expensive results! If I was to melt the silver and use a mould to make something else, what could I use as a mould? I'll have to look into it. 

 

 

Never mind! Regular readers may remember the troubles I was having making some polymer clay pens. I just couldn't get the right pen to encase that wouldn't curl in the oven, then the lovely Ducky kindly sent me a couple of packets of special biros from the US which I've only just had a chance to play with. So these are last nights experiments. Look Ducky, they worked perfectly! Thank you so much! I actually fired these really slowly too. Ten minutes in, ten minutes out of the oven for a total of forty minutes. The goddess is worked in a translucent clay and then dry brushed with some gold acrylic to accent it a little. She's supposed to help me concentrate with my work. Well, that certainly worked today. Not! Today my gift from M arrived, Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, so I've been playing that most of the day! Wow! Nintendo do it again! Mario got me hooked on video games and this certainly got me hooked today! Of course it didn't help that I hadn't read the instructions properly beforehand and couldn't figure out how to pause it!

 

  

 

I also finished my floral flares! They're not really flares, they're boot leg, but I like alliterations!

How cute is this? Felt flowers and leaves appliqué-d with embroidery thread.

 

Even cuter on, believe me! And it's incredibly hard to take photos of your own legs! These look like hippy designer jeans now.

This is my next project. Can you guess what it is yet? UK readers may 'get' that reference, if you're not a Brit, then I'll just say it's a quote from a certain antipodean artist and entertainer and it probably completely gives my age away *lol*

 

Not long now till New Year. I for one, can't wait till this year has gone, it's been a bad year for almost everyone I know. With the current global social and economic crisis I don't think things will get much better and looking online at predictions for the coming year, it looks like many people agree with me, but I try to be optimistic. It's always darkest before the dawn.

Whatever you're doing for New Year, have a good one!!