Yes, I am eating your bonsai.

Do you want to make something of it?

(Sorry for the poor photo, it was taken sneakily through a window and heavily cropped so the perpetrator didn't have time to run away.)

Late to the granny square party (and other crochet bits)

Image above from Emma Lamb's blog, here.

In the last few years, crochet seems to have really taken off again, and in particular granny squares. I've seen some gorgeous things on various blogs, Etsy and in the Cath Kidston catalogue, but the person whose work I have really fallen in love with is Emma Lamb. There is nothing in her Etsy shop that I wouldn't like to own, and it's traditional and contemporary at the same time which really appeals to me.

Anyway, back in September when we first moved to this house, I bought some cushion pads with the intention of knitting some covers for them. Of course that never happened and they've been languishing in the spare bedroom ever since. So the other day when I came across some sparkly wine and gold yarn that I'd bought in Lidl, I thought I'd add some cream yarn and turn it into some granny square cushions for a previously cushion-less chair in our living room.


One is just a giant granny square, and the other is four squares joined with double crochet. They're lined and backed with beige linen because I couldn't be bothered to crochet the backs - yes I know I'm lazy. And I hadn't used my sewing machine for so long that it took me a while to remember how to sew in a zip, which is shameful. You can't see in the photo (and my camera battery died right after I snapped this so I couldn't take another shot) but the wine and gold yarns are actually sparkly.


Next I have to replace the cushion on my computer chair, which I've had to throw away because Elvis threw up the world's biggest hairball all over my Chinese satin cushion. I discovered this when, having just woken up and being not quite awake, I stumbled into my computer room and sat on the chair and got a big streak of wet hairball right across my backside. I was not pleased, I can tell you. I've started a purple and cream chevron pattern cushion, inspired by one in Erika Knight's Simple Crochet. If you're in London and fancy learning to do something similar, my fabulous crochet teacher Bee is running a chevron cushion workshop as part of her new venture Make Do Mend. Sigh... I do miss the vast array of classes in London.

Image above from makedomend here.

Finally here are some flowers from 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet, which my mum in law bought me for Christmas. The pattern for the pansy didn't seem to work out, as the back petals came out with big gaps between the stitches, so I just sort of made them up as I went along rather than sticking to the pattern. The one with the pom pom wasn't supposed to have a pom pom (I think it was a dahlia) but I was in a pom pom kind of mood.

Walking the dog

(Or possibly the cat, we still haven't decided what he is.)

100 posts! Let's celebrate with lots of cats!

Well I never thought I would have stuck with my blog long enough to make a hundred posts, but here I am! And I still love my little blog. It keeps me motivated to draw and paint and make stuff, and all your comments make me very happy and even more motivated, so hopefully there'll be another hundred posts to come.

(Click to make bigger.)

There is no better way to celebrate something than to draw lots and lots of different coloured cats. So here's lots of cats. (It was too big for my scanner so I had to stitch the pieces together in Photoshop, so if you can see any joins, just pretend you can't.) Faber Castell pen and watercolour.

Sleepy catdog

Elvis is worn out from chasing The Nothing* round the house all day and is now having a full-on slob across the back of the sofa. I grabbed the nearest pen (a fine nibbed calligraphy marker) and did a couple of very quick sketches of him.

Number one. This is on the back of some paper I had been using to try and break in a new very scratchy nib, which is what all the funny shapes are.



Number two. He kept moving in his sleep.

Here's what he looks like right now. Bad webcam photo but just look how huge he is. I measured him and he's about 24 inches long. All the better for cuddling.



*The Nothing is Elvis' nemesis. He likes to chase it round the house at 3am.

Elvis the catdog gets a faceful of butter.

My horrible husband is a big meanie. Elvis came to sniff what Richard was eating (crackers and butter) and Richard shoved one of them in the poor catdog's face. I snapped some photos very quickly - they're a bit out of focus but I hadn't time to fiddle :-)




Elvis made a halfhearted attempt to clean himself up, but has now given up and is wandering round the house looking much as he did when I took the photos.

UPDATE: About an hour later, some of the butter is still there. He appears to have forgotten all about it.

Life drawing - fun with charcoal.

Last night's class was all about light and shade. The room was slightly dimmer than usual and the teacher used two bright lamps to create strong areas of light and shade on the model, Leo.



I did this first one with charcoal pencils, which I hadn't used much before but I really like them. For someone like me who gets herself covered from head to toe with charcoal when using the uncompressed sticks, they're a great idea!

This next one was a bit different. While we were drawing, the teacher prepared a piece of paper for each of us by covering it with charcoal and then brushing the surface with a household paintbrush to create an even tone. Then we were to "draw" the basic shape of the model using a putty rubber to remove the charcoal and leave light areas, and then add the detail back in with more charcoal. The vertical lines are from scratches on the drawing board underneath.



I loved this technique. It's easier to start drawing when the paper isn't bright white, for some reason. I love the drawing (and I don't say that about my work very often) but I think it's more because I enjoyed doing it so much than because I like the end result. When we'd finished, the teacher picked out my drawing to talk about and said some very nice things about it :-) Throughout school, I don't think I ever had an art teacher say anything nice about something I had done. I felt like a five year old being given a gold star, I was so pleased! And I did get myself covered in charcoal, including my trousers and the entire left side of my face.

Here's a bonus sketch of our Elvis. This only took a minute, I was on my way out to class, but he looked so cute I had to grab an envelope and do a quick doodle.

Playing with my waterbrush.

As much as I love my waterbrush, I've only ever used it with watercolour brushes and never with "real" watercolours, so today I took a break from my work to do a quick sketch of some of the things on my windowsill (my beloved Roberts radio, pot of pencils & pens and a tube of handcream) and coloured it in with some cheapy Cotman pan watercolours. I didn't like the waterbrush very much, to be honest - the bristles didn't spring back together the way they would on a sable brush, which made it very difficult to do the lettering (I gave up and went back to pen) and it was quite difficult to clean the brush without a container of water. I ended up using a piece of paper to kind of work the paint out of the brush... till I realised I had defaced the notes I've been making for an essay I'm writing. Oops.


If anyone has any tips for using waterbrushes with traditional watercolours I would love to hear them.

Elvis does not approve, and thinks I should get back to work. Okay, okay, I get the message...


Life drawing class in an hour and a half, hurrah! Happy weekend, everyone.

Another calendar cat to save my sanity

During a moment of confusion and desperation involving our new accounts system, I took a minute's break to scribble today's calendar cat in order to stop my head from exploding. For some reason my scanner hates it.

The roaming gnome returns.

I've been participating in the Roaming Gnome swap on Craftster, and today my gnome Filbert finally made it home. He's been to Marburg and Waiblingen in Germany, and Texas and Florida in the US. He even got to go to Disneyland! Lucky gnome. Here he is with all the stuff he arrived back with. He also had an album and CD full of photos, all of which I've uploaded to Flickr so I can look at them and remind me that my gnome has been to two countries I haven't been to myself. (It's true, I've never been to the US. One day though.)





He arrived with some goodies from Disney and I caught Pokey trying to steal them - have you ever seen such a guilty looking cat? Or come to think of it, it might be anger. "Whatchoo lookin' at? It's ma stuff."




My Thing-a-day today was a tiny little amigurumi bird. I thought these would be nice for Easter but I want to tinker with it a bit and make a slightly fatter one. I plan to write up the pattern and post it here in case anyone would like to make one for themselves. I've been playing with Poladroid a bit, which I think is very cool in a Lomography sort of way, so the little birdie got the polaroid treatment and I also tried out the new font I made with my own handwriting (make your own at this website, it's free and very easy).

Watercolour class

I've been meaning to post some pictures of the stuff I produced in my watercolour class. The idea was to practice techniques, and specifically wet into wet technique. We weren't allowed to draw AT ALL. No pencils, no pens, very big brushes (mine was a size 14, other people had even bigger ones), wet your paper in the shape of the thing you're painting and splodge lots of paint into the wet bits and hope for the best. So while these pictures are somewhat ugly, I didn't feel too bad about it because everyone else in the class produced ugly paintings too. I'm going to try and post these more or less in the order I did them. I should say that I had to shoot all these using flash because there is no light whatsoever in our apartment at the moment. Look at this photo, you can just about see outside. Isn't it disgusting? Pokey thinks so.

Practising the various techniques

We had to paint some stuff using only blues and browns.

Colour mixing - blues and browns again

A banana

An apple that was nice till I spilt water on it and ruined it


A blue jug and a yellow vase thing, that I didn't finish


The same blue jug and a red pepper, again unfinished (ran out of time)


Onions (homework - I used some gum arabic for this)


Some glass bottles, an apple and an orange


A BIG painting of a blue glass bottle, some weird peppers and an unshiny metal teapot that went a bit wrong.

Oh and bonus cat picture - if you put anything on the floor in our house, a cat will magically appear on it within ten seconds.

My life drawing class starts tonight. I can't wait. Apparently there are ten people in the class, so it's nice and small, and we'll be told tonight what materials we need to buy, so I'll have an excuse to go to an art shop at some point over the weekend (as if I needed one).

This doesn't look like Portuguese to me.

I'm supposed to be doing my Portuguese homework, but I accidentally found myself doodling in my exercise book with the mechanical pencil I had been using to fill in answers. For some reason I quite liked drawing on the lined paper - I will have to be careful or all my homework will be covered with doodles. This might not be a bad thing though!

Thank you so much to the people who left comments or sent me emails about the life drawing classes. I contacted the teacher (in this class he offers advice and guidance, rather than actual teaching, if that makes sense) and he reassured me that a total beginner like me would be more than welcome, so I'm going to try and go along on Monday night. Expect to see the fruits of my labour if I'm brave enough to post them here!

Finally, here's a not-arty-or-crafty related thing. Our catdog Elvis (he's officially a cat but thinks he's a dog, even though the vet told him he wasn't) likes to sleep in our bed when there's no one else in it. By 'in' I mean under the duvet, like a person. This is an awful photo and I do apologise but I had to snap it quickly using my useless eeePC webcam before he moved, as he was just about to emerge and beg for food. Isn't he daft? I thought you might get a giggle out of him!


PS: I'm having problems uploading images to blogger tonight so I've uploaded these to Flickr... I hope they work!