It's been over a week since I blogged, a week full of frustration and indecision and nothing going right. Not for lack of ideas, I can't sleep for thinking what I could be doing only to find I'm so tired the next day everything I try turns into a disastrous mess. I have a half made stocking, half done photo's, a half made Advent calendar ..you get the picture. We are going to Brancepeth Castle a couple of miles from Durham for a three day fair from the 25th. It was an un-mitigated disaster last year ..... this is what it looked like!
The first day wondering if we were going to make it
The second morning
Beautiful to look at but a nightmare to travel in
After 3 days of snow
Not surprising the footfall was considerably down from the year before but it gave us plenty of opportunity to wander the halls and admire the work of other crafters, buy some Christmas presents and spend more than we earned. The castle, grounds and small church looked beautiful covered in sparkling snow when the blizzard took a moments reprieve. As you come into the castle under the tunnel some very hardy crafters had outside stalls and the first one was a display of garden ornaments, giraffes, hippos, gnomes, mushrooms and large birds all took on a similar shape under a foot or more of snow. Some stall holders never made it and other such as the farm produce lady lasted two days before frozen to the bone gave up and wasn’t seen on the third day. 15 foot of pure white snow!
Managed to get a couple more Advent Calendars onto Folksy today, I don’t feel the pictures do them justice, hard to convey the touchy feely squishiness of wadded fabric, the smoothness of cotton and the beautiful colours. They are both £22.50 at http://www.folksy.com/shops/Billybees
Apart from that I’ve had the pleasure of learning yet another new computer based skill (deep joy) as the pre-teen needs to do an Independent Learning Task which involves PowerPoint. Surprisingly neither her nor I have such a thing on our computers. Did find that my free Open Office download does have a similar soft wear programme and set to work on the simple task of creating a slide show … or in our case more a side show ….. you know, cringingly awful slapstick circus tomfoolery, which would have been a more appropriate title for what ensued. . Suffice to say, cross words were said and a few slamming of doors, the pre-teen, God bless her, took my tantrum all in her stride with little more than a few tuts and rolling of eyes.
My song choice for this afternoon to keep me mellow which is the opposite of how an evening on the Folksy help pages turned me into a quivering imbecile . It began with the ‘simple’ instructions on how to ‘Post an Image to the forum’
The example
This thread is a place you can use to test whether you can do it. Use ‘edit’ (just below your avatar) if it doesn’t work first time so you can go back in and have a look at what you may have missed out.
deep breaths and silently repeats the mantra ..calm as still water .whist sucking the dregs from the bottle and copy . checks. pastes. checks, adds, checks sucks, opps lost the straw ..adds long straw to shopping list and presses SAVE REPLY button
feels slightly deflated but not giving up but needs to open another bottle, cleverly join two straws together for the next attempt, re read re paste and re post … “I am just going to my fridge and may be some time”
well its an image ….not the one i was hoping for but i feel an improvement has been made …off to put my head in the oven ..its ok its electric so will only make my hair fizzy not actually finish me off for good ! :)
Everything I do is done in the same easy calm methodical manner
I'll leave my foray into the dangerous dark spawn of the Devil known as Facebook for another day!
I joined Folksy, a British based site where you ‘can buy and sell all things handmade’ and since I happened to have some handmade items, and my cousin is a dab hand with a needle and also had some handmade items, I thought I would give it a shot…this was about a month ago.
My initial thought was that I would start a shop and lots of people would see our fantastic items and be virtually queuing to buy them. I could then begin to make some more fabulous items between rushing to the Post Office and finding some inspiration with friends over a glass or two of wine celebrating my success. Tada ….easy peasey
This was not to be ……. My first dilemma was photo’s. I have hundreds of photo’s but not one good enough to compare with the very professional photos seen in the other Folksy shops. In all honesty Billy (my cat) could have taken better ones blindfolded with his paws in mittens.
This is Billy when he was a kitten
My cousin and I, I’ll call her Barbara, for that is her name, spent 8 hours photographing. I hammered a couple of nails in the bedroom wall ….. what we do for our art ! And hung some black velvet as a back drop. Dusted, polished (not that it needed doing of course!) the wooden drawers to use as a plinth and set to work. After flashing, lighting, zooming, macro-ing, sitting, standing, climbing ladders and using all functions on her camera we have what I hope are some decent photo’s of our work.
Hi everyone my name is Lu and I’m an internet numpty.
Although I have been in possession of a computer for a number of years, back to a time where you plugged your PC into a phone cable, or phone cable into your PC and waited to see what would happen, a time when a blog, face book, twitter, google and social networking was still in its nappies along with the people who have so thoughtfully brought all this bewildering array of gobbledegook.
It is only in the last month I’ve become acutely aware of how unable I am to proceed in any direction other than down that well trodden, at least my me, rocky road to confusion, like quantum physics, black holes, time travel, Dr. Who and the novel
Kill Kill Faster Faster by Joel Rose ….I just don’t understand it.
I feel as though I’m from a land that time forgot, an alien race, I have a missing gene I lived in a time where blackberries, apples and oranges were simply fruit. There is some joy in being middle aged, I don’t have to pretend my name is Jack Wills and I don’t care that I wear knickers as big as Texas …yee haa !
