It was just one of those days…

when you keep being interrupted.

The door bell kept ringing – delivery men, meter readers, that sort of thing.

One of the deliveries was a slow cooker – yes, another slow cooker. Not sure whether it was the first one or a third one as, as instructed by Amazon, I refused it. So it is, presumably, on its way back to Scotland.

Another delivery contained this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, when a girl’s got one of these, and it’s nearly Christmas, how could her granny resist?

 

 

 

 

 

In between all this excitement, granny played with paper and paint. And wire.

 

 

 

I’ve been looking through some old sketchbooks, and came to the conclusion that they are much more interesting than the current ones. The recent ones have a lot of other people’s work but not much of my own.

So I splashed some paint on some pages to make them more interesting, and cut up some paper, as I’d rather do that than draw.

This is in the figure drawing sketchbook. I cheated by tracing some fashion shots from a magazine. The paper is one of the sun prints I did in the summer. I think maybe it needs a bit of drawing [aaagh] added.

 

 

 

This was sun printed, and overprinted paper – for the still life sketchbook.

 

 

 

 

And then I got the urge to fold trees for the landscape book – although we haven’t ‘done’ landscape yet. I started with the backs of old envelopes and then moved on to a failed collagraph. [To tell the truth, I started with some pages from a John Lewis catalogue, but didn’t like the result.]

Perhaps not a conventional landscape, but the one thing I’ve learned over the last year is that our drawings are not expected to be conventional.

So I suppose I’ve done quite a lot, in between the usual chores, and answering the doorbell again and again and again …

Just hanging around.

Rambo the dodo phoenix, that is. Despite me making him a fiery nest – or perhaps because I did – he said he wanted to be hung up so everyone could laugh at admire his feet.

 

 

 

 

 

And his bling. I wasn’t able to get a good photo, but he has ELC confetti paint on his crest and tail, as well as the necklaces.

More like Mr T. than Rambo, perhaps.

On a more serious topic – we enjoyed the birthday party yesterday. The hostess was very welcoming and had laid on a very good spread for us all – although she was a bit too busy to see us off. 

Parcels all round

Someone very important has a birthday tomorrow.

This is just what she is getting from granny and grangrad. [Yes, there are a lot of thin flat rectangular parcels – her granny thinks you can never have too many books.]

Granny also got a parcel today – a bit heavier but much less exciting. Yes – the slow cooker has arrived!

Although I’ve been frustrated by Amazon’s ‘Express’ Delivery, their customer service has been prompt and efficient – after I emailed quite late on Wednesday to say the cooker still hadn’t arrived, I got a very quick reply to say another one was on it’s way, expected delivery date 12th November.

So getting it on the 11th was a bit of a surprise. [It is the second one, not the first, I checked the despatch date on the parcel.] The Logistics Manager in the family reckons the first one probably ‘fell off the back of a lorry’, if you know what I mean.

Ironically, if I read the labelling on the packaging correctly, it was imported through Southampton before being sent to Scotland and then back to Hampshire. I should have gone down to the docks and demanded they opened a container – or maybe not …

Nothing to show from college yesterday as it was a lecture + ‘work on your 3D pieces while everyone else has tutorials’. Of course muggins, who had nothing in a suitable state to take to work on, drew the short straw and got the penultimate tutorial spot.

My knitting grew quite considerably.

However, when I eventually got to be tutored, nice things were said about my choice of research topic [Susie MacMurray] my research proposal, and the selection of 3D bits I’d taken in to be inspected. I am now officially allowed to go on make very peculiar bits of nothing out of very peculiar materials. You have been warned…

Speaking of peculiar 3D things, Rambo the dodo phoenix is nearly finished. He needs some eyes and, I think, a little jewellery. And then he needs attaching to the nest/flames on which he is sitting as he has a tendency to fall over.

I don’t like stuffies, but I like Rambo – I suppose it’s different when it’s your own child! [And his feet do remind me of the Logistics Manager …]

We had a great night last night.

Wensleydale and I don’t go out much at night – we tend to turn into pumpkins after midnight, and grouchy pumpkins at that. but we do make exceptions – going to the Watermill with Mr and Mrs Cheddar, for instance. Another exception we make when we get the chance is an outing to see one of our favourite singers – Mr Tom Paxton.

So we pottered down to Poole to gathwr with a lot of other aging Guardian readers for a night of singing and laughing, with a little political comment thrown in, and still got home well before pumpkin time.

There were CDs for sale at the concert but not wanting to join the rugby scrum around the table, we decided to buy on line. As we already have one or two – several – lots of Paxton CDs, we chose to get a couple by his accompanist, Robin Bullock. They had cost £15 at the concert, so I was a little surprised to find that on Amazon the two we wanted were over twice that price!

In the end we ordered them from Bullock's own website - $15 each plus $5 postage.

So if you fancy some beautiful gentle guitar playing – go to the source!

This just added to my general disgruntlement with Amazon. You may remember that we’d waited in all Saturday for an ‘Express’ delivery which never arrived. I emailed Amazon and got a [in my opinion] rather over the top apology, a promise that I would get the delivery fee refunded, and a revised delivery date of today.

Well – I’ve got my delivery fee back – but do I have my slow cooker? No. [Perhaps someone is taking the name too literally.]

So we have jiggled the Babybel arrangements to make sure we can be in tomorrow. This is clearly a stopping train on a branch line, not an express.

Will I be using Amazon's express service again? What do you think?

Give me a few sunny days …

and I get creative again. even if Wensleydale did most of the work in the first instance.

A week late [it’s a Cheese tradition to make Christmas cake in half-term week] but our now traditional recipe produced this.

 

 

 

Something else turned brown – but then went silver.

Thanks to Gill for her inspired suggestion that he is a dodo – but I think he may turn into a phoenix, [some symbolism there, perhaps?] with the addition of some gold and copper paint and possibly a few flames. [This layering of metallic paints over a dark base is something I got from Terrie the tutor – it looks great when she does it. Hmm – we shall see.]

I also finished these. Yes, they are pictures of Thomas characters in bottle caps. It’s a matching game for a certain Thomas-mad toddler, from whom we had an unexpected visit this afternoon.

The idea of using bottle caps came from a blog – I apologise for not being able to remember whose. The idea of using packaging from Thomas fromage frais came from me.

Wensleydale has suggested using milk bottle caps as they are a bit less fiddly [not the foil kind, the coloured plastic ones from supermarket milk!]

Yesterday I went a bit mad – well, even madder than usual. In one of my books full of interesting ideas I’ve nicked found there was a picture of a cone with sticks round it.

Which led to me spending Friday afternoon making miles of cord from ripped up fabric, and Friday evening weaving and reweaving said cord round some left over giant spillikins. Not much like the original [good!] but I like it.

Babybel inspected it very carefully and decided it was a tower. 

It isn’t quite finished – I want to add a few more rounds of the shinier cord round the top.

And finally, this afternoon, I got round to doing something I started when the weather was bad and I was quite down. [If all else fails, make a book.] But then the sun appeared and it all got put to one side.

However, I was inspired by a small sketchbook Terrie the tutor had, with her ideas for soft sculpture, and that encouraged me to get back to this one – made, as usual, from recycled packaging. The binding is from Keith Smith’s ‘One, Two and Three Section Sewings’: I like the way the variegated thread makes the crosses change colour, although I made a mess of counting the holes.

The only downside to today has been waiting in all day for an order from Amazon – we paid for next day delivery and didn’t get it. Which means contacting Amazon to demand my £9 back, and waiting in all day again on Monday in the hope that Citylink might actually deliver it …

Cor, luv a duck!

Except it’s a chicken. Or maybe a peacock.

This was the result of my college class yesterday. We had to take a line for a walk on a piece of A3, then select part of it for the outline of a stuffie.

The emphasis was very much on making a figure – but me, I had to be different. The shape I saw was an elegant swan.

Stop laughing, he’ll look better when his seams are trimmed. [Of course if he’s a chicken he’s not a he – perhaps he is Rambo the ginormous cockerel from Manor Farm?]

S/he will get bigger feet, a coat of paint or several, and an eye or two.

Stuffies are not my favourite thing – I went through a period of making cloth dolls [which will become Babybel’s very soon] but that got it out of my system – and my experience with Rambo has not encouraged me to resume!

Just a quickie

A bit of Lois Walpole inspired creativity. Newspaper, wire and Crafty Notions paint sprays. I think it could be done in fabric and one day I hope to have enough energy to try.

Meanwhile we are recovering from 1.5 days of Babybel – an over-nighter due to training courses and tube strikes.

She was fine till her dad phoned! The tears were assuaged by readings from the original Thomas the Tank Engine books, courtesy of her Granddad, and ‘We’re All Going on a Bear Hunt’, courtesy of me. I can’t quite do the latter in the dark, which I used to be able to do with ‘Where the Wild things Are’, but expect to know it off by heart very soon.

College tomorrow, so I shall probably be completely knackered by Thursday.