Drawing the sports pages again.

I discovered today that The Sun does a football supplement on Mondays to report on the weekend action. I stole my workmate's copy to draw. Here's some Liverpool player, apparently he scored a goal or two last weekend.


I'm also working on something really quite cool for a Craftster swap but it's top secret for now! I can't wait to post the results.

Oh and I'm still sticking to the "not eating out" thing, and my halo is getting shiner by the day!

My beloved Macbook is currently in the clutches of Apple, having its cracked case replaced (free of charge, happily, as it's a design fault) and I'm using my little eeePC in the meantime. Its tiny little screen and keyboard aren't too bad, but what's really bugging me is the lack of Photoshop. Oh how I miss it :( I downloaded GIMP so at least I'd have something to crop/resize stuff with, but it's just not the same at all. Even worse is the fact that all my bookmarks are on the Macbook, as is the software I use to listen to Brazilian and Spanish radio. I hope Apple hurry up before I go mad!

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).

Sunday procrastination

I always find it hard to sit down and write an essay, but even more so when my husband is around. He makes too much noise! So I procrastinated for several hours, wrote 127 words of a review of Sin noticias de Gurb (most of which I will probably delete) and did very little that was useful apart from putting away laundry and changing cat litter. I have Fridays off work for studying and doing assignments, so I can work in peace, but now that my husband isn't working and will be home all day, I'll probably have to think of a plan B if I don't want to fail the year! Oh and I finished making bookmarks for the Bookmark Swap I'm co-organising at the moment. I love what I've made, but I can't post photos in case my swap partners see them so I will have to contain my excitement until everyone receives them.

You'd think if I wasn't working I could at least have been doing some drawing, but noooo. Although I did do a quick watercolour, from Frank's book (again), because I wanted to try out my masking fluid that I hadn't used before. I masked off the cottage and it worked quite well although I missed a bit and had to cover it up with gouache. Peeling off masking fluid is fun. It's like when I was in primary school and used to paint my fingers with PVA glue, wait till it dried and pick it all off. I'm sure that's not as weird as it sounds. I don't much like the mountains in this but it was only an experiment!


I would also like to say thank you to the people in EDM for all the comments and for being so nice - and in particular to Sue for all the helpful links she emailed me.

Back to Top Gear now, because that's what Sunday evenings are all about after all.

Writer's block

I've got a Portuguese assignment that has to be handed in on Thursday. It's a relatively simple task: write a travel guide of around 500 words about "an area local to your school" and stick in a few photos stolen from random websites. So I'm choosing London, which is fairly local to my school, given that my school is in London. Actually it's in Bloomsbury but I'm not sure what I could write about that, apart from the British Museum. Unfortunately, I've hit a snag. It seems I really don't know how to write in Portuguese. In fact my Portuguese is not very good at all, but it's too advanced for the beginner class, and the gap between the beginner class and the next class (mine) is huge. From nothing to post A-level in a year. And that's not great when you've got to sit and write something and your head goes straight into Spanish mode. There are penalties for plagiarism (I think death is one of them, they get pretty pissed off about it) so I'm really trying very hard not to copy stuff, but it's quite difficult as I don't actually know anything about London hotels. I live here, I never need to stay in a hotel. And my mind has gone blank about pubs and shops and exciting places to go. So I'm procrastinating by surfing the internet for interesting blogs (I really need to update my list), daydreaming and trying not to succumb to temptation and read my new book that I bought today. It's called Terry Harrison's Complete Guide to Watercolour Landscapes, and one of the great things about it is that he shows you how to mix brown. When I try to mix brown using primaries, I get either muddy blue, muddy red or muddy yellow. In the absence of any photos to add to this post, here's a picture of the book I've stolen from Amazon.


Other things I am procrasting about at the moment include blocking two scarves I've made for Christmas presents (is there anything more tiresome than actually finishing your knitting once you've finished knitting it?), writing Christmas cards, and sorting out our wedding photos, which are still sitting on memory cards and have been since we got married in August. There's no excuse really. I was off work for three weeks with the Evil Arthritis and what did I do with myself? Watch Life on Mars. Watch NYPD Blue. Knit (but not finish) scarves. Make bottlecap pincushions. Mindlessly surf the internet. I'm really rather cross with myself for being so unmotivated.

Today's happy news is that my latest gnome from Craftster's Roaming Gnome Swap has arrived! She's called Ruby and is from Germany and is made of nallbinding. I don't actually know what that is. The last two gnomes I had didn't have a very good time. I was stuck indoors and consequently so were they. But little Ruby will be different, she's going to have some fun! I'll post photos soon.

Wow, what a wordy post. Time flies when you're not getting any work done.