Scarfage Appreciation

Now, I'm pretty new to crochet, as we know. The first proper thing I crocheted was my massive yellow shawl/scarf, which I have been practically living in since mid November. I also whipped up (I LOVE how fast crochet is) this stripy scarf for Boyfriend for Christmas, based on this pattern.

 

Now, since Crimbo, whenever Boyf and I have been out, someone has stopped us and commented on the scarves. Last week, we had a guy stop us in Pavillion Gardens and ask if he could take our picture (he had a Holga, so I let him). Then, not three minutes later, we went into a cafe only to have the waitress comment on the awesomeness of the scarfage we were displaying. Hehehhe! It does make me laff. The power of the hook!

End of Week 2

Snow on the Beach...

....a sight which totally weirds me out. Back in the dark days of my youth, I went to see Pulp live in Bournemouth and I'm pretty sure that after the concert we went down to the beach and it was covered in snow. It was weird then, it's weird now. But who knows if that's a real memory or not? You're listening to the woman who informed her Boyfriend at half-nine this morning: "Hello. I've just been talking to a baby tiger cub on a bus."



Look at Boyfriend manfully striding off to look at the water. An astonishing turn up, as he's a self-certified aquaphobe, if there is such a word. We stood and watched the virtually non-existent waves and I dared them to touch my wellies. They declined to accept my invitation. Until I turned to go, then they got me good. Crafty buggers. Perhaps they are related to the patch of ice that made me skid over and land on my left hip yesterday. My own fault really, I was too busy wondering why the bin men had emptied the big bin but not bothered to take the bin bags on the ground around it, therefore rendering the emptying pointless, when over I went. Hot chocolate at Ethel's made it better, though.

The CIA "Ace" Calendar for 2010

Cover and week 1:

Guess What I Found in Tesco Today?

It's Been Snowing Again...

3.39pm today

Boy, has it. I wonder if from now on we will have snow every winter? Like back in the day when the Thames used to freeze and Frost Fairs and the like would be held. Snow settling for any length of time in Brighton is a rather rare occurrence, but now it seems to happen willy-nilly. Now that I am (supposedly) a Grown Up, time naturally moves much faster than it used to when I was a nipper. In fact, time has moved so fast over the last 10 months that I was rather perturbed to get another Snow Day just before Christmas, thinking that we'd only just had one, when, in fact, it was the previous February. Crazy. We had another yesterday, so I couldn't get a bus up to Mile Oak to go to work. Rather than going into Hove Library (which is my nearest and therefore walkable), I finished off the roughs for my latest illo project and got to feel all smug all evening. I doubt there will be buses again tomorrow, so I should really go into Hove. There are only so many Snow Days you can take without getting a bit bored of it all, right? Not that I don't love snow, it's just with the Xmas/New Year break barely behind us, I'm getting a bit confused as to what the date is, what day of the week it might be, and whether or not shops/work etc will actually be open and/or functional when I need to go out. It's rather messing with my internal calendar and I'd quite like things to get back into a nice routine now, please!

Annnyway, enough winge-bagging. Here are a couple of pretty useful and awesome Xmas pressies from Boyfriend that have been keeping my cold fingers toasty on the bus home:





I've been keeping them in my bag at all times in that lovely zipper purse which Steph gave me for Crimbo. Awesome fabric, right?

NYR Update: We tried to go to the cinema today, but thought better of it when we realised that if it started snowing again while we were in there, the buses would be cancelled and we'd be stranded at the marina. We came home and watched HP6 and snuggled under a blanket instead. As for new dinner ideas, I was going to make a sausage and bean casserole tonight, but, alas, no beans, so we're going for roasted sausage and red onion sandwiches. Classic.

Click To Feed The Fishies

Thanks to Cat at treacletoffee for bringing it to my attention! Hehehe.

Alphabet City

I came across these awesome prints today. The blurb says:

From the head and hand of master draftsman Scott Teplin comes a series of 26 dream-houses fashioned after our alphabet. Explore in each a bizarre, miniaturized constellation of bed rooms, drawing rooms, fantasy swimming pools, mysterious laboratories, personal ice cream parlors, gambling halls, nuclear reactors, and oozing phenomena of unknown consequence. Each crisp drawing pops from its page in a field of floating color.

Click to do all that embiggening stuff.

M is my favourite. Ice-cream-parlour-come-cosy-cottage. What more could you want?

Lunch Today

Toasted brie and cranberry sandwich. Hom nom. And on my new Hungry Caterpillar plate, too.

Retro Fabric Haul

Check out these two retro-patterned babies I picked up in a charity shop yesterday for the grand total of £4.50:



I think they're old sheets. There's blummin' loads of the stuff, anyway. Not sure what I'm going to do with it all, yet, but I rather chuffed to have them!

NYRs: Clocked up a cinema trip today, but finding it hard to snap out of Nessa mode.

Bye, Bye, Christmas

And a few additions to the NY Resolutions:

1. Grow stuff on the balcony come spring/summer. (Definitely tomatoes, herbs and salad; hopefully potatoes and carrots, too.)

2. Go to the cinema more. (Already well on the way as Boyf and I both got a Cineworld Unlimited card t'other day.)

3. Stop talking like Nessa Jenkins. Now.

Happy New One

Plans and Schemes

Hello. Hope you all had good Christmases and all that.

So tonight is New Year's Eve. Time for reminiscing, taking stock, and planning for the year ahead. Hmm. I'm generally not that bothered about New Year. I think of September and the new school year being my fresh start. No one wants to turn over a new leaf when it's 2 degrees outside and there's still two tins of Quality Street to polish off, right?

However, I do tend to make the odd resolution, if only because I feel I should. Looking back over my blog, I didn't realise that I made no resolutions last year. I think I was just too busy finishing off all the books I was doing at the time! If I had made some, I would've put moving in with Boyfriend at the top of my list, followed by have a good rest come March, and then buy a new computer when the funds come in. Happily, I did all of those! Yay! Hehehe.

I'm quite pleased at the amount of reading I've done this year, though. Hopefully I can continue with that in the coming year. I've discovered some great authors like Stella Gibbons, Winifred Watson and Angela Carter, and rediscovered all-round genius-types like Oscar Wilde and Neil Gaiman.

So, more reading is down there. As is take better care of my teeth and get a dentist (not been for three years or so. Ouch). Experiment more with the evening meals is there, too. I have loads of awesome cookery books but tend to stick to tried-and-tested recipes, so I should read through those again for inspiration. I'd also like to go on a proper holiday this year. Not necessarily abroad or somewhere flash, but I want to take a full week/10 days off and go away for a goodish length of time.

Wow, actually, that's quite a list already!

Work wise, I obviously want to get more illustration work in. Since April I've been concentrating more on getting my bread-and-butter, part time work sorted into something more stable so at least I know the bills are paid, and living with Boyfriend now has taken the pressure off quite a bit. So now I'm going to re-jig my websites and do much more promo. A card every six weeks at least. I also want to go back to the print studio and get a few more screenprints done. Wolfie has been very popular so I'd like to do another print run of those.

I've found TeuxDeux has been very useful in getting organised, if only for providing somewhere I can just jot down what needs to be done and not lose the bit of paper afterwards, so I'm sure I'll continue to use that.

Plan, plans, plans. I'm sure I'll think of more things to do, but they'll do for now. Right, who's for a Quality Street?

Happy New Year, peeps.

Musical Score

Boyfriend and I went into town this morning to pick up our beef and chipolatas for tomorrow. Surprisingly, Brighton wasn't all that busy. Western Road was a bit chaotic around the general Primark area, but then it always is. Anyhoo, while we were in town, we popped into the Oxfam bookshop and I picked up this fab book from 1957:









Educational and awesomely illustrated.

And my free Moo stickers turned up in today's post. Two excellent early presents for me!





All the presents are wrapped and the food is begging to be eaten. Boyfriend and I are spending our first Xmas and Boxing Days together in our own place, then we're off ice skating with my peeps on Sunday. I got that illustration job, so I'd better do a little bit of scribbling on Monday!

Merry Christmas everyone! Back soon.

The Entertainment This Evening

4.00pm



4.17pm. I love that little weird blob of cloud in the bottom left there.

We're not cut out for extremes of weather in this country. Not down south, anyway. It reaches the heady heights of 26 degrees in July and we just melt into a big pool of rubbishness, complete with sandals and socks; and then with just two days of snow and temperatures bearly above 0 the entire transport system comes grinding to a halt. I had to help a friend dig her car out of the ice this afternoon. Half an hour using a hoe, a rake and a walking stick! Crazy.

Anyway, the sunset was nice.

A Snow Day!

So, you know that snow I was saying might fall last night? Well, here it is. No buses out on the roads, so can't get to work. There's sewing and crochet to be done and lots of tea and chocolate to be consumed. What more could you want?



8.04am



8.41am



8.49am



10.27am
(Check out my cheaty-Photoshop-created lens flare! Awesome!)



10.29am

Oh Yeah, I Wrote These...

These are the books that turned up last week which I had forgotten about. I wrote them back in the early summer for Korea Hemmingway, who I worked with last year. It's a bit odd just to do half my normal job! Once you've sent off your text that's it. No drawing. Very weird.



They look pretty good, don't they? They're illustrated by Stephen Lewis, who I'm ashamed to say I'd not heard of before these babies turned up.

Well, Christmas is approaching at a cracking pace. I've finished most of my Christmas crafting. All other pressies have been bought and some of them have even been wrapped. Boyfriend and I took over two hours to put the tree up on Saturday, and the Xmas food supplies are building up in the kitchen cupboard (that's the high cupboard over the extractor fan that's hard for me to reach. There's a reason for that and it's name is chocolate). Apparently it's going to snow like the clappers tonight, so I may get an unexpected day off if they cancel the buses up to Mile Oak tomorrow. Oo! Going to make beef stew tonight to warm our cockles.

The Folksy Festive Sampler

I got this through t'other day:



The Folksy Festive Sampler. Really good idea. A kind of crafty Christmas catalogue. Lupin has blogged about it here much better than I can, or you can go over to Folksy and read all out it on their blog. You can also download a PDF copy here.

There I am on page 5!

Today...

... I have eaten one of these* from CyberCandy:



And taken several pictures of this:


3.23pm


3.55pm


4.01pm

And thought it was high time I got around to sharing these:







I made these two bunny boys from a couple of felted jumpers a few weekends ago when I made the little tissue cosies. I finally got to give them to their intended owners (the lovely Penny who should be dropping her twin sproglets any moment now) last week, so here they are at last. I kinda just made them up off the top of my head. I wasn't entirely sure what they were going to be when I began cutting them out; monsters maybe. Anyway, they soon turned into bunnies and, judging by peoples' reactions when Penny unwrapped them, I think they'd be quite popular in the shop. I just need some more jumpers!

*It was OK, nothing all that special. Not quite as sweet as a regular Snickers, although you would think the fudge would make it more so, but a nice, natural peanut taste. 6 out of 10.

The Image Stealer!

So, as I mentioned in my last post, someone stole one of my images. I received a very helpful email last Monday evening asking me if I was aware that someone was using one of my images on an Etsy/Folksy-type craft site called Zazzle. No, I blummin' well wasn't! Not only that, but the person who had taken my image had stolen the idea for their item from Etsy seller boygirlparty, too. With a lot of Twittering, emailing, and flagging it up on forums and the like, the two of us, along with lots of other people who complained to Zazzle about the blatant copyright infringement, managed to get the shop shut down. Hurrah!

Here is my original Octopus image:



And here is a screenshot of the shop before it got pulled down:



You can see the Octopus on my blog waaaay back in 2006 when I first came up with it here and boygirlparty's original To Do List here.

The bloody cheek of it! We both sent the shop owner emails explaining why what they did was wrong. They're only 14, but they should know better. They do now, anyway. Mwah ha ha!

The sad thing is that the person who alerted me to it in the first place told me that there's a lot of that kind of thing going on on Zazzle. It seems to be somewhere where sellers think they can get away with anything, really. Avoid it if you can, but I must add that I was very impressed with their prompt responses to our complaints and that they removed the offending items within three hours. The power of the internet!

This Week I Have....

1. Been offered a new illustration job.

2. Had the BEST restaurant Xmas dinner EVER.

3. Received an AWESOME Secret Santa present...

4....and gave one, too.

5. Been the victim of an Image Stealer, but managed to get said Stealer's shop shut down within three hours.

6. Had my family round to see the new place.

7. Been in a bus accident.

8. Worked a multitude of extra hours.

9. Simultaneously sang carols, made coffee and checked out books.

10. Missed several deliveries.

11. Received a surprise delivery of books I'd almost forgotten I'd written!

12. Bought fake Xmas tree to go up this weekend.

13. Been rained on far too much.

14. Drunk far too much hot chocolate. (But how much is too much, exactly?)

15. Hardly seen Boyfriend at all even though we share a bed these days.

16. Sold a fair bit o'stuff in the online shops.

17. Written all the rest of my Xmas cards and posted them.

18. Discovered TeuxDeux, which is simple, yet brilliant.

19. Not blogged at all.

20. Washed all the underwear I own in one go.

Sunsets, 3.48pm and 3.49pm Today

These were taken this afternoon in the rather salubrious surroundings of Hollingbury Asda car park. Hollingbury is on the edge of the downs and so is much higher up than my part of the city. Fantastic yellow there. You know the winter Solstice is coming when it's nearly dark at 3.50pm!

Then I had some fun making them into planets:






I'm glad to see the pink clouds; hopefully it will be a nice day tomorrow. I'm on the Mobile Library tomorrow morning so I'd like it to be dry!

This Video ROCKS

OK Go - WTF? from OK Go on Vimeo.

I Gotz Me Some Art (And Some Biccies)

You may have noticed in my Gouache paints post last week the fab tin I'm now housing them in. The tin, and the biscuits within, were a little gift from Boyfriend because he knows I love tins (and biscuits, let's be honest) and "I thought you'd think that pattern was awesome." He weren't wrong. Well, lo and behold, checking Print & Pattern's blog yesterday I discovered that, without realising it, I now have a piece of the fantastic Sanna Annukka's artwork! She did Keane's Under The Iron Sea CD cover, amongst other cool, Finnish-inspired things. Her website is here.

And So It Begins...

December is now upon us and it seems like barely a few weeks have passed since Boyfriend and I were in York in the summer. Crazy. The weather this morning was of my very favourite kind (frosty and sunny, rock on), I've nearly played my Xmas playlist through in its entirety, and spent yesterday evening writing out my Christmas cards to send out as promos. I posted them off today, so hopefully my work will be winging its way around the publishing houses of Lahhdahhn Tahhn later this week.

So, after all that faffing about in October (!!) here are the finished cards:







A much simpler idea, as you can see. Inside, there's the letter RoboDog is holding in his mouth. It reads: "Dear Santa. Thank you for my ROBODOG. He is SUPA ORSUM. Love from Jake xxx". Hehehe. I'm so glad I got them done and dusted before we moved. It's just been crazy ever since and I have no idea when I would've got the chance to do them otherwise.

Right, (professional, not personal) cards written and sent. Check.

Crimbo shopping started. Check.

Crimbo present crafting well on its way. Check.

Thousand things to do in three and a half weeks. Check.

Awesome.

PS On this day last year, I tasted my first - and last - Watermelon KitKat.  Who'd have thunk it?