Why is that all baby shoes are cute?

I don't tend to coo over babies the way lots of women do. I'm just not that terribly interested in them. Cats are far more entertaining.

However, what I am interested in is that my lovely friend and former workmate is pregnant with a healthy baby after many complications and several miscarriages and I am very very happy about that. So happy, in fact, that I knitted him or her some booties from leftover sock yarn.



Sorry for the bad photos, I snapped them quickly as I was leaving the house, before giving them away.

I don't know what it is about baby booties and shoes (especially those tiny little Nike trainers) but they are all incredibly cute. I can't resist them.

Odosketch, and how not to do perspective

Odosketch is a very fun little online sketching program. You have to sign up (which takes about fifteen seconds) and then you can save your sketches and publish them on your blog or wherever. (It embeds it as a Flash thingy though so I've just taken a screenshot instead.)

I can't find the pen for my graphics tablet so I had a little doodle with my mouse. Have you ever tried drawing with a mouse? It's VERY difficult! Here's our beloved car, a 14 year old Fiat Punto. It's covered in scratches, but I think it gives it character :) In real life it's bright green.

Now I want to go out and draw it properly, with a pen/pencil/crayon/whatever that I can actually control! And when I find the pen for my Bamboo tablet I'll have another go at Odosketch and see what I can come up with.

The first thing I ever felted.

While hunting in some drawers for a necklace today, I found the first felted object I ever made a few years ago. It's a little corsage made from some mohair I bought in Paris, with a pretty vintage button. I had no idea how to felt, so I threw it in the washing machine with the rest of the laundry and hoped for the best! I loved how it turned out.

The necklace in the photo is the one I was searching for in the drawers. Do you like it? I do, but I've never worn it because I just can't figure out what to wear it with. It's rose quartz and lavender jade. If you have any ideas what it would match, let me know!

Bee's Brilliant Beads

Last Sunday I went to a workshop with the fabulous Bee of Chain Creative. The topic of the day was bead crochet and we learned how to thread the beads into a pattern and crochet them up into a rope-type affair that we could then turn into a bracelet. I have to admit it took me a while to get the hang of it. Then when I did, I realised I'd threaded the beads wrong, and I hadn't time to finish my bracelet. Oh and when I got home I realised I'd left my only 1.5mm hook at Bee's so I had to order another one (good excuse to buy some nice new Clover hooks!). But last night I finally got time to sit down and finish it, and here it is.

Here it is on my arm.



I love it! I have lots of spare beads from when I ordered the wrong size and they're just lying around, so now I have a good use for them. I think everyone will be getting one of these for Christmas :-)

Agnes from MrsG Knits was at the workshop too and she's posted her finished bracelet on her blog, go and have a look. Hers is very professional-looking!

Oh and here's a little toadstool brooch I needle felted, just because I felt like it.

A digital drawing (abandoned)

I have been dabbling with this for ages. It's a tutorial from Corel Painter magazine. It looks nothing like the version in the magazine. And now I'm bored of it. It's not exactly the most interesting subject matter. So now I'm posting it here, and that means I don't have to work on it anymore and can do something else instead.

(If only I had time to sit down and learn it properly... I have such a long list of arty stuff to do when our house move is finally over.)

A very nice Saturday!

Yesterday I took a break from ebaying and headed out to the Kent countryside, home of Bee from Chain Creative, who taught me to crochet a few years ago. Bee has a lovely house with a fabulous garden, and in the summer she holds workshops there. Yesterday was a felting day, and five us (plus Bee) got stuck in and did some messy wet felting, crocheted a pear doorstop to felt in the washing machine, and best of all, we learned needle felting. I've been wanting do learn this for ages and ages and I wasn't disappointed!

Unfortunately most of the things I made aren't finished yet (I have to finish crocheting the pear, and the felted fabric I made is still drying) but I'll post some photos when it's all done. However I did manage to make two little brooches with the needle felting, and here they are!



I'm so addicted to this, it appeals to my love of all things cute and quick to make! It's so cool that by taking bits of unspun wool, like in the photo, and stabbing them repeatedly with a sharp needle you can turn them into 3D objects. I think I'll do a Moomin next...

Thanks Bee for a fab day, a yummy lunch and for introducing me to yet another crafty hobby!

Do I really have to get rid of these?

We are moving house soon. It's a BIG move, as we are leaving the big smoke and heading out to the countryside, and we are leaving our jobs in the hope that we'll be able to find new jobs when we get there. So partly because we need the money and partly because we desperately need to get rid of lots of stuff to make moving easier, we're having a massive ebay clearout and listing all the stuff we don't want in batches. So far we've sold lots of books, and I have about ten million handbags listed which will end this afternoon. So far so good.

Except now it's time to ebay the cameras.

Not all of them, obviously, some will never ever be sold. Like my Trip and Holga and Richard's Werra.

But some. Like these.



It's hard to get rid of cameras! I don't know why I get so attached to them, when most of them I don't even use. But they have to go. Sigh.

However the little blue Instamatic in the main photo is not going anywhere. Richard bought it years ago, I think from a charity shop, but it's too pretty to ebay. Look at it. It's blue! And it has some brand new flash cubes!


So I'm keeping it - who can blame me?