Christmas cards

Finished the Christmas cards a few nights ago, I'm quite happy with them. I think the snowman design is my favourite :)

Christmas crafty fun!

Well it's now less than two weeks until Christmas, and it's a good job that most of my presents are finished. Sort of. After looking up zips on you tube (god bless the internet), I quickly whipped up a few cushions. Firstly, for my mother:




Considering I'd never put in a zip before, I'm quite proud of this neat shit:



Anyway, moving swiftly on, I then sewed three smaller cushions for my mother-in-law, this time getting a bit adventurous and having two different colours (phew, steady there...), and I think they came out pretty well, even if I do say so myself:



So all is looking good. Except I still have about 8 inches of a striped scarf to finish, I have to figure out how to make DK tassels look good (minor felting?), I've got 8 handmade Christmas cards to do, I've got to imagine and make a) a peg bag, and b) a compact mirror case. I feel like I could be in training for Blue Peter... (and that's not even starting on wrapping).

This Christmas has turned into a bit of a mad fucking rush, full of highs and lows. In three days I need to hand in my latest section of my report to work, and drive to Sussex at 9pm with husband to have four days of family frolicks (hence the mad rush to make their presents....). We had some sad news on Thursday, as husband's nan had passed away in the night, but simultaneously good news, as sister-in-law's waters had broken and she was hours away from giving birth to our new neice. I am struggling with not imagining happy news for us in the near future. Emotional times. So the funeral is on the 22nd in the East End, and then I am going to frantically try and get back to Norwich for Christmas (on my own, up the M25...eeeeek - stay away snow!). Still husband managed to get Boxing day off, so all is not lost ;)

At least Willis is taking it easy (in her crack den!):




Ta ta xx

New neice's cardigan

UPDATE: Niece has arrived - Isobel Florence, 8 pounds 6 ounces. Now I'm getting urges to make another little cardigan, in a burgundy DK I found at the market. So many Christmas projects to finish though, just don't have the time....Welcome to the world, not-so-little one :)

Well I finished it! Actually, it was a very fast knit (only 9in long), but I had a disaster with yarn (running out of it), so had to do some quiet improvisation. But I think it worked out well. Its a very simple pattern and knits up quick, without the stripes and the sewing in of tails, it could probably be done in under 10 hours. Or less, as some of the techniques were new to me (making the I-cords for the ties took about as long as the fronts!).



It should fit from birth-six months, but its got lots of growing space as the front can expand quite a bit. I'm quite happy with it - the finishing ended up being very neat which was satisfying as I'm still new to stitching the pieces together. But I'm rather proud of the outcome, so all is well. Now a mad dash to get all the Christmas knits done - I fear I've overstretched myself, especially with a work deadline looming in a menacing fashion over Christmas. Maaaaa. So much to knit and so little time!

And finally, Willis adding her own special input:

One more...

I forgot to include my fuzzy bat. Shame on me!

Knitting!

Knitting is amazing and everyone should do it. That's all I have to say on the matter :) Here are a few finished bits:

Obviously, a scarf is about as simple as it gets (except maybe a blanket!), and this is only in garter stitch, but I feel fondly towards it as my first ever project. And it keeps me warm and only cost £1 to make :) The booties are free to a goth newborn....

Some of my creations

As of the last few months, I've been afflicted with a problem I've had since childhood - the ability to get ridiculously excited about things (think x-files here, people!). Thankfully, its being channelled at the moment into more creative pursuits - sewing and knitting!



This is my platypus, and his younger sibling. One now resides with a toddler, the little one with Spoon. They are made from fleece and felt, and took about one-two hours to make (in my standard contorted golem posture).

With halloween coming up I wanted to find some projects to test out my new-found sewing skills, so I decided to make a halloween bib for the nephew:



This took very little time to make, from materials I had lying about - husband's old coat, thread, toggle - and a child's skirt from Oxfam for 49p. [Side note: I find it really tempting to make loads of children/baby-related things, because they're so quick and sweet....hmmmm - get procreating friends!].

Stay tuned for my knitting expose...

Aimless

Well today I have fiddled with the blog and its almost the way I want it to be (with a little help from Spoon). After a restless day full of absolute aimlessness and almost complete mental breakdown, I feel I have achieved something.

Only kidding. I felt like that after I had hacked at two bushes in our garden :)

One day I will actually write something on here, properly. But until then, something mostly half-baked from before:

I am a woman. Not sure if this has been said somewhere, but I am 100% female. And because of this, I am targeted for a *brilliant* range of adverts. Recently, it seems women as a whole have become plagued with digestive problems – bloating, diarrhoea, a lack of ‘good bacteria’ . I’m sure men also suffer from these issues, but you wouldn’t know it from the adverts. It seems like my husband and I can’t turn on the TV without having to watch another 40 something housewife rubbing her belly and going ‘oooooh’, or rushing back inside the house to take a huge, messy shit (not that they show you that part). Often they’re slotted between adverts urging people to use acid on their faces (see below).

Is this really necessary? If you do suffer from bloating or the squits, surely you don’t need a character in an advert to directly match your life/demographic before you seek medication? “Oh dear, I’m not 43, live in a detached house and go for coffee, can’t use that pill.” Just waiting about for the perfect tablet: "Susan Millar, No. 7 Canterbury Place, Bedford - this pill is for YOU!" It's a tad creepy - we've been through your bins, we've bought your medical records and we know just what you need.

No. So why be so specific? Surely the companies who are marketing the drugs want to get as many people as possible identifying and using the product – of both sexes. By this reasoning, they will stop males from buying the product, as it is made to look like a female problem (for whatever reasons; I could speculate, but I've just stopped feeling grumpy).

I find this annoying.

A few days ago I was watching TV, and an advert came on for another ridiculous facial cream which supposedly ‘turns back the clock’. I find these adverts sinister at the best of times, with their middle-aged women spinning about glass-walled rooms, grinning manically and going to the beach/shops. The ever so considerate effort to spare us from complicated science. But this time, I noticed something at the end:

“Until you’re ready for a permanent lift, try .....”

What the fuck? Suddenly, slicing your face open is now mainstream and accepted as a part of a ‘beauty regime’? This seriously disturbs me. It’s bad enough constantly filtering out media telling you to slather acid on your face twice a day (the creams make your skin swell, puffing out wrinkles....that part's not in the "science bit"), now they are subtly enticing women to think of surgery in the same league as an over-priced cream?

Why not just try “Until you’re ready to have your whole face replaced, why not try this state of the art paper bag over your head?” It’s sure as fuck cheaper.

Grrr.

Bug Hunt

Today, something I suspected strongly for a while now was brilliantly illustrated to me: our cat is mad.

Willis has been patroling the house more than once a day (when I'm here, who knows how much during the day) staring intently into space - the bathroom windowsill corner, the ceiling above the utility area, the wall by the front door, the kitchen windows. Every time she follows the same sequence. Why?

Bugs.

This is a cat possessed. Her waking hours are consumed by the need to hunt insects. Whatever kind, it doesn't matter to her (although she is somewhat scared of thick-legged spiders). If you go and talk to her whilst she is performing one of her patrols, she will try and climb your legs, and, if on a worktop, will use your shoulders as a convenient boost. I've taken to holding her up to the walls, which seems to send her into hysterical excitement even when there are no bugs. She tries to clamber up the wall like a gecko, legs akimbo, quivering with crazy glee and chattering away.

However, this afternoon an unfortunate bluebottle found its way into our kitchen, and all hell broke loose. She was mewing at me in a cheery way from the worktop, as I'd just returned from watering the "vegetables". Suddenly, she launched herself at the blind, making a noise that sounds a LOT like very quiet quacking. (Yes, as in ducks). Paying no heed to washing up (and therefore planting her foot in a soaking saucepan full of yesterday's risotto), windowsill plants or the water in the sink she jumped up and down like a deranged kangaroo.

I look on bemused, but slightly proud. Ahh, this is a dedicated cat. All those patrols have paid off, she has finally found something. After about a minute, she slumps ungracefully over the drying rack, leaping heavily to the floor whilst making a peculiar deep buzzing. Being slow, my first thought was that she had failed to get the bug, and was retreating in a sulk. Ha! It very quickly dawned on me that she had actually caught it, and was at this very moment running around in tight circles on the bathroom floor with the poor creature in her mouth. Hence the frantic buzzing.

I was more than a little impressed that she had not only hit it but manoevered it into her gob, and told her so (she can't even seem to get food into it!). After a bit of this running, she opened her mouth and slowly dropped the traumatised bluebottle onto the floor (yum). It laid upsidedown, quivering and feebly buzzing. At this point I asked her to kill it a bit more quickly and stop being mean.

She ignores me, proceeding to tap it over and over again, waiting for it to buzz, then tapping it. She looks up at me, and I bend down to see how close it is to death or if its just faking. Willis is ridiculously excited by this, which she seems to think is me joining in her game, and starts purring so frantically that the purr on the out-breath is bizarrely high-pitched and sounds like a squeak. My involvement seems to fire her up, but instead of squashing it like I expect, she sweeps down and starts eating it whilst I look on in disgust.

Finished, she comes over and climbs on my thighs, evidently extremely pleased. The manic purring continues. For my part, I'm not sure whether to be amused or disturbed. She's a little monster, I think, stroking her.

An hour later I come downstairs and she is still sitting on the sink, staring at where she found the fly. That's dedication to duty.

Willow

Willow is finding life a little trying at present - having been spayed last Friday, she is required to wear one of those Elizabethan collars to stop her chewing her stitches. Being a sensitive soul, she is finding this rather hard. When we first put it on (Egg screaming in terror), she let her head droop to the floor as if it were made from bricks, and lifted her front paws higher than her head with each step. Coupled with a drunken reeling, this made for rather amusing viewing, and I couldn't stop myself from laughing at her - to which her response was to climb into a box and get her head stuck in the corner. She then spent the next hour running around hitting the cone on everything she possibly could (table/chair legs, washing machine, cupboard, doors, legs, the floor, etc) efore sitting on my lap and looking plaintively up at me. Oh, the shame! If only she could speak, we could explain...

This set the scene for the rest of the weekend really, with Willow making scant improvement with regards to orientation and appearing to just give up moving. So she spends all her time sleeping on me/Egg, walking over confusedly and resting her big lampshade head on our laps. Which I suppose is good from the point of view of the wound healing, but I do feel sorry for her. Especially as she has valiantly decided to carry on grooming herself, getting into position and licking desperately at the funnel round her head.

Poor Little. At least it's only for a week....

Some of the aforementioned musings...

I started an internship at Cambridge University's Conservation Science Group a few weeks ago, which involves my commuting from Norwich to Cambridge three or four days a week. Apart from the abject misery that getting up early bestows on me (regardless of what time I go to bed - if late: tiredness and nausea, if early: headache and nausea), and the trauma of walking through Prince of Wales Road on the way to and from the station each day, it gives me a greater opportunity than I would like to observe Other People from The General Public.

People commuting on trains are a strange mix. Here are some of the fauna I've noted so far:
--> Obnoxious LoudMouths, blabbering on loudly to people/into phones about the minute details of their incredibly boring lives (Example: woman whining about the trials and tribulations of getting a 25,000 pound kitchen fitted and the 'utterly insufferable' chatter of the builders. Poor diddums.)
--> Man staring intently (I won't say reading) at Daily Star/Sun/similar and then staring at nearest female (or group of teenagers, preferably), whilst eating loudly. This makes my skin crawl for many reasons.
--> Twats (simple, but adequately descriptive) who listen to incredibly shit music out loud through their mobile phones.
-->PlumMouthLongFaces - they always seem to be discussing a yacht or archery or their next transatlantic holiday. Maybe I shouldn't find it annoying, and if I believed that they had any idea of their own privileges I might not. As it is, these boys are the kind of people who will trip over a homeless beggar because they're so keen not to notice them (I watched one in Norwich do just this...)
--> Golems - contorted into bizarre bodily positions whilst engrossed in books (mostly of crime novels and Harry Potter).

There are never enough carriages for the rush hour trains back to Norwich (no surprises there, then), not helped by the fact that there is no half past the hour connection (of COURSE, when else better to half the number of services per hour? Rush hour!) so you are always cramped in next to people tired, stinky and normally breathing with difficulty.

One day I had an extremely potent experience of deja vu, and after about half an hour of wondering if I had fallen asleep and was experiencing head-fuckery, I realised that the man next to me (who rather endearingly can't seem to see and holds book/phone/paper/ticket three centimetres from his eyes) and the woman diagonally opposite from me who is an Obnoxious LoudMouth had sat in exactly the same seats, in exactly the same configuration, for the past three journeys on the same train. It was a most peculiar sensation. Like when you have a dream that is the same as daily life except for a few random details, but the details are so mundane that you have no way to tell which version is actually true.

They're going to be like old friends by the end of March.

Pensive Frogmouth

This is what came to my mind whilst thinking about nuclear holocaust. I know.

Frogmouth at the dentist

Scorpion

Atta columbica

This is a major worker from a colony of leaf-cutter ants from London Zoo. I was given a few to draw in my microscope... they are hairier than they look!

Adventures of Egg: Episode Two

Adventures of Egg: Episode One

Coreus marginatus

Here is one of my drawings - a nymph I found on Box Hill in Surrey one July, and drew down the microscope. It was all shiny and iridescent, which obviously isn't really captured with the old pencils.