4th Blogoversary!!

So today is my 4th Blogoversary! Yay! I can’t believe it’s been going so long. I know that sometimes I don’t have so much time to blog, but I’m afraid that work has to come first, a teachers time is not always her own, even when she’s finished school and is at home! It’s been a fun journey and it’s not over yet, so here’s to many more years of random scribblings…

Anyway, I’d like to invite you to a virtual party to celebrate! The party will be held here, a beautiful hall lit with fireflies, high in the trees of an enchanted forest. 

There will be a sumptuous banquet followed by dancing and everyone will be provided with guest quarters for the night so you don’t have to worry about getting home afterwards! Wear your sparkliest clothes and your best shoes, and you can eat and drink what you want because nothing today has any calories. The only thing you’ll need to bring is a cutting of your favourite flower to plant in the memory garden. Leave me a comment to let me know what you’ll be bringing. I planted mine this morning…sunflowers, my Dad’s favourite flower.

 

Parties and workshops!

Well, the last couple of weeks have gone flying by, yes, literally flying!!! All my students are getting to the end of their courses, which is good, but very very bad for my bank balance! I shudder to think of the upcoming financial drought…my credit is about to be severely crunched! Still I’m hoping that I will be able to get enough summer school work to tide me over; after all, I still have a mortgage to pay, and there are soo many things I want to, no need to do over the summer, especially now I have no lesson prep or marking to be doing!

Myself and some friends took advantage of the £10 train ticket offer to travel for a day out to Hereford, supposedly quite a bohemian place, but the train broke down and we ended up in Birmingham for the day, where we made the most of it and had a nice lunch out and then spent the rest of the day fabric and embellishment shopping in their huge, crazy fabric market.

The social side of summer has started to kick in – we’ve had one birthday barbeque already, in beautiful glorious sunshine which is damn rare for England. We had the usual foodfest, complete with birthday cake, pass the parcel and goodie bags! After all, why should kids have all the fun! If you’re not familiar with ‘pass the parcel’, you start off with a gift, wrapped up, then you wrap another layer of paper round with a tiny gift in the wrapping, then another and another until you have a giant parcel of many layers and tiny gifts. Then you pass it round the circle to music, which is randomly stopped. If you happen to have the parcel in your sticky little mitts when the music stops, then you get to take a layer off! We like to put lovely little chocolates or pretty nail files, nail varnish, make-up, pens, stuff like that between. It’s such good fun and everyone goes home with a gift. I got the centre gift in one of the parcels, a lovely scented candle. I made a really nice glass necklace and pendant for Lorraine, whose birthday it was, but stupidly forgot to take a photo before I gave it to her – doohh!

I also spent nearly two weeks making the goodie bag gifts, little bottle cap pincushions in a rainbow of colour. They have an embroidered and sequined flower on the botton, and chain stitch border round the edge, and a lovely ‘iced’ top so that they looked like little birthday cakes, or cupcakes.

The day after that, myself and a couple of friends went to a Make and Sew workshop ‘Customising Charity Shop Finds’ – you know I’m well into that! We learnt lots of wonderful techniques using Bondaweb and Transfoil. The first thing we did was use strips of bright fabric, stitched together and embellished. These can be used for embellishing all sorts of things.

Then we tried an appliqué and free hand stitching technique using stabiliser,

then a patchwork-y type effect.

We also made little fabric roses! It was such good fun and I came away with loads of ideas and a burning desire to spend lots of money on more fabric, bondaweb, threads, transfoil, etc. I did come home and order a freehand foot for my Brother sewing machine.

The very next day, M and I went to London for the day; we’d got free tickets to see Rage Against the Machine in Finsbury Park! What a great day that was, only it took us four hours to get home! Four hours! We probably could have walked it in that time! There were quite a few bands playing, The Gallows (a punk band), Roots Manuva a London Rap artist,  Gogol Bordello (I love their sort of gypsy anarchist sound, and I love their track ‘start wearing purple’) and a DJ to play between bands.

The weather was lovely, despite dour predictions, we had a very light shower about halfway through the day, but we’d brought light jackets with us.

There are days when I feel up to the mosh pit, but today I was happy a bit further back with space to dance! Luckily they had big screens so that you could see exactly what was going on on the stage.

The finale was amazing – I swear that Zack de la Rocha, the lead singer of RATM looks exactly the same as he did years ago when ‘Killing in the Name of’ was Number One the first time round (and yes I saw them live on that tour too!  

The day was amazing and all the better because it was free! Proceeds went to Shelter which was excellent. Getting home was a nightmare though, the Tubes on Sunday end a lot earlier than in the rest of the week, and the police were being typically over cautious and closed off all the Underground entrances except one. Then they had mounted police filtering 40,000 tired and drunk party-goers onto one Underground platform! What a recipe for disaster! The Tube station is literally 2 minutes walk from Finsbury Park and yet it took us over an hour to get onto a train! We managed to get the very last Tube of the night and barely made it back to Euston for our last train home! Then that train terminated at Milton Keynes because of ‘engineering work’ at Northampton, and we had to get a coach back. A journey which would take us an hour by car took us over four hours! We got in at two o’clock in the morning and then I had to be up at six thirty, for an eight thirty lesson. I was knackered!  God knows what London will do when we get the Olympics! 

Markets and Parties

So where has December gone? It’s just flown by! My friend G and I went to a Victorian Christmas market in the city of Lincoln where the whole city was closed off to traffic and the streets were filled with Christmas stalls and stall holders in Victorian costume. We had such a great day, filled with mulled wine, roast chestnuts and shopping. The cathedral looked so pretty at night that I had to get a shot!

It was another friends birthday and we held a double party; a birthday and Christmas party all rolled up together, with the usual food, secret Santa, pass the parcels, party bags and silly party games. What a great night!

This was my contribution to the party bags, you know those little packets of tissues you can get, I made little fabric wallets for them and put a packet of tissues and a holder into each party bag. Luckily  I already had some Christmas fabric in my stash! I have some of these which I carry around with me and they really protect your tissues from disintegrating in your bag!

I also finished and posted Lana’s poncho hoodie! Hurray! With the crazy workload I’ve had this term, this has taken me ages! I really hope that Lana likes it. I received my side of the personal swap; Rox sent me a bunch of steampunk jewellery, some Kool-Aid and a beautiful purple scarf.

To be fair, I used a much smaller hook for Lana’s because she’s only about 5, so there were many more stitches in this than in the adult one.

Now I’ve finished this I can crack on with all my WIP’s, so I’ve done alot more of my BPT hoodie and I’m really hoping to get that finished before I go back to school so I can wear it now the weather’s cold!

I’ve been really creative recently, now I’ve got all my reports and marking out of the way. I made this for me last weekend. I love the simple combo of black and silver.

I love these Balinese silver beads, they’re just ornate enough to compliment the simpleness of the black leaves. I also used silver twisted bugles and silver and black seed beads as spacers.

Remember this Fimo focal bead I bought from a bead fayre back in March? (I think it was March anyway). I finally got around to creating a necklace with it.

I though the leaf fimo beads perfectly complimented the focal bead, they even had the same colours in, and the square glass foil beads perfectly complimented the focal bead.

I haven’t worn this yet, but I can’t wait to!

Another installment of Decembers creations will follow, I don’t want to overload you with photos *lol*

Birthdays and Bellydancing!

Okay, so my birthday has been and gone…lots of celebrating occurred, lots of food was consumed, and I had some amazing presents including this fantastic camera from M

It has an amazing 14 megapixels and an amazing zoom facility. I’m sure my ‘babies’ will become sick of my photographing them, but hey, I’ve got to get used to it; it has tons of settings like this lovely soft focus portrait setting!

I got some wonderful presents from family and friends, and made some bead pendants to put in the party goody bags.

The Christmas Hafla took place on Thursday night and even though my cowrie embellished choli had been finished, the belt that I ordered didn’t turn up until the day before, and then it was faulty!

The woman said she’d send me another one, but I knew it wouldn’t turn up in time, so I decided to wear something else instead. Not bad for being thrown together on the night! 

I took my new Digi SLR to the Hafla with me to get some practice in using it in action. Here’s one of some of the girls (we had a professional one done too, but we won’t get that for a few weeks)

 

As always it was a fun night out, the dance went wonderfully and I got some great shots with my camera. Can you believe that our youngest performer was eleven!

Our favourite tribal troop!

I have two days of term left! I can’t wait for a break!

 

Up, up and away!

This week has been really exciting for me! Last Sunday I had a flying lesson! M had bought me a lesson as a birthday gift last year, it was a special birthday and I wanted an Experience, something I’d remember and although it’s been almost a year, I finally got around to having my Experience. I took my entourage with me just like a Diva, M came with me, my mum, bruv and sis, M’s mum, M’s mate C, and my mate G with her kids! There were 11 of us all together! Do you think that’s too much? *lol* I flew in a small light aircraft, 2 seater, the pilot took off and landed and I flew the plane for the rest of the flight! I FLEW the plane!!! Wow!

It was absolutely amazing!!!!  The weather was kind of cloudy when we took off and a little bumpy, but we climbed up to be above the clouds and that decreased the turbulence and bathed us in glorious sunshine! It was so beautiful and serene, with the sunlight glinting off the tops of the clouds; it was quite a shock when the pilot said we were flying at over 100 miles an hour!

I stupidly handed my bag to my mum to hold when I strapped into the seat and didn’t get it back from her before I took off so I didn’t have my camera with me, just my mobile phone which was in my pocket. I didn’t have much time for taking photos anyway, what with flying the thing ‘n’ all, but I did get a few quick shots in when the pilot took over to land.

We flew all over the county and burned through a few clouds which was fantastic and such a surreal experience. You fly into whiteness and it totally encompasses you, it’s quite disorientating, like being in the worst pea-souper you can imagine! You could be flying upside down for all you know, it’s quite bizarre. I tried to see my house but it’s totally unrecognisable at an altitude of 5000 miles in the air. The pilot asked if I’d flown before – I said no but I was a dab hand at Nintendo! The pilot had given me a briefing before we took off so I knew how the flaps and stuff worked but I was unprepared for just how sensitive the controls were! It made me nervous feeling that responsibility, like a second lapse in concentration could have us crashing to the earth. Of course, that was never going to happen. I felt totally safe. I knew that the pilot would never let us fall! I would do it all again in a heart beat!

I was up in the air for about three quarters of an hour; the best forty five minutes I can remember! I didn’t stop grinning for days! I would love to take my pilots licence! *Sigh* one day maybe!

I’m hoping my entourage managed to get some good shots…I have these photos, my certificate and some fantastic memories…I have some photos and videos promised to me, but I have yet to see them! I’ll pass on any I get

Bourton and Butterflies

Last week I found this great vintage warehouse, Trashy Flowers, with tons of stuff at very cheap prices and one of the things I bought was this bright green corduroy jacket which apart from a tiny stain on the back, was in lovely condition. I decided to cover the stain using a patch I got in the Hippy Swap last year from the lovely Holistic Knitter. I finally found the perfect project for it. The jacket perfectly matched the colour of the Ohm, the other little stains were covered with the use of some sequins and beads which I built up to create little flowers.

The jacket twinkles in the light now; I can’t wait to try it out!

I also raided my bead stash to create this sweet loveheart necklace. I got the beads in the bead fair at Towcester earlier in the year and I just haven’t had the time to play with them. I love the result though.

Should have made this back in February, it’s the perfect piece for Valentines Day isn’t it?

The main reason that I’d busted the bead stash out was to create a gift for my Mum for her birthday. Mum loves butterflies and I had this handmade fimo pendent from the same bead fair as the heart from above.

I also found some beautiful little cloisonné butterflies which matched the colour scheme perfectly.

and I made her a necklace and matching bracelet from memory wire.

We took her to Bourton-on-the-Water for the day. It’s a picturesque little village in the Cotswolds which has rivers running through the streets and a fantastic crystal shop.

We had a drink in one of the pubs along the river, followed by a stroll along the streets, stocking up on crystals in the crystal shop. Then we had a cream tea (freshly baked warm scones, butter, jam, clotted cream and a pot of tea) in one of the tea shops (mine didn’t have cream because I don’t eat dairy; the home-made strawberry jam was lovely though!)

Having finished my Sealife Swap gifts and my birthday gifts, I made a start on Lana’s poncho hoodie. Lana is the young daughter of Atsuko, a Craftster friend, I agreed to make Lana a miniature version of the one I made for TintedShadow and in return Atsuko is making me some steampunk jewellery – how lucky am I?

Speaking of lucky, I finally managed to book my Birthday treat from last year…I have a flying lesson booked on Sunday…hurray! In the immortal words of Ace Rimmer (Red Dwarf fans know who I’m talking about here), “Smoke me a kipper; I’ll be back for breakfast.” I’m so excited!

Anyway, tiredness is overcoming me. My Mondays and Tuesdays are very long days this year, which see me start teaching my first lesson at 8.30am, and finish at 6pm. On a Tuesday night I also have yoga class in the evening and it wouldn’t be the first time that I’d nearly fallen asleep during the meditation section!