I really suck at blogging.

Apologies, avid readers, for my once again unavoidable delay in filling you in on the trivial goings on in my craft life.

You know those times when life just seems to get on top of you? Yeah, I was feeling like that, and then the world decided to give me even more to deal with. On the plus side I'm now not poorly! But I do have a very important meeting tomorrow and it's half 4 and I can't sleep because of muscle spasms in my back. I have a feeling it's not going to go brilliantly.

Due to a miscommunication somewhere along the line I now don't have a craft stall on Saturday as I had originally thought. That's probably a good thing because I've been so busy I've barely had time for naps. And I love naps.

I've been having issues with funding for support services which I won't go into too much detail about but it's been stressing me out too much to even want to make things, which is a very rare occurrence but I did manage with some moral support to make a load of "Breakfast Pockets" thanks to a tip off from a friend. And then I made some gingerbread because gingerbread is awesome.

I managed this evening to do a big batch of water marbling so expect (not soon) some new earrings to be available! I'm particularly excited about some Saturn shaped charms.

I also had a late night craft moment last week. I was on some steroids for my really nasty cough and decided to dye my bathroom floor, as you do. I think the steroids were making me feel a little strange. Anyway, I was pretty pleased with the result and here it is with my brand new, eye-wateringly orange chair:

I've also played around a bit more with my 3doodler, making a festive rudolph!

And I've been wasting a lot of time playing with these addictive little magnets.

One very exciting thing that has happened this week is that my ever wonderful father has finished making one of my new desks, and here it is, in situ. It's a great height to work at in either my new chair, or, as pictured, my wheelchair. This means lots of options for reducing joint pain which makes me a very happy Colourful Crafter!

 It slides away! How neat is that!?

Anyway, I think that's probably everything even vaguely interesting.

If I don't get round to writing again beforehand, I hope you all have a very merry Christmas if you're celebrating it, a fantastic yule if that's your thing, a happy winterval if you're from Birmingham City Council, and a great festive season and new year, celebrating or not.

Janet

P.S.

Mau posed under my Christmas tree all by himself. I know I'm biased, but he is pretty.

A few new things I've made today

I had some fun today with the 3doodler again.

Here's a few things I've made. I love the marbling over the flower designs, and I'm really chuffed with the bone designs (I find bones fascinating because mine don't really work very well!).

Anyway, that's about it for now.

Hope you enjoy the new things!

Janet

I've been poorly sick, again...

So, apologies for my lack of posts, I've been rather poorly. AGAIN.

Got a really nasty cough which needed antibiotics but it also made my asthma flare up and all the coughing made me tear a bit of lung and dislocate my ribs and spine so I've been put on steroids and I haven't coughed once today which is incredible!

Well, I'm trying to think of what I've been doing other than being ill.

I did my second craft fair which was fun

Here was my setup for the day:

I also made myself a front support (rather than back support) chair so I can lean forward to work without slouching

It doesn't look too different but it's a different shape to what you'd expect with more padding.

Here's my diagram of it:

I've also invented a way of having some more desk space in my flat with having some desks on runners coming out from underneath my shelves. The plans look something like this:

I did some henna on people and drew some designs

But the most exciting thing that has happened is my 3doodler pen finally arrived! It's very exciting. I backed it on kickstarter back in March and have been waiting patiently for it since then and it is amazing.

I'm going to do a video of me making something at some point but here are a few of the bits I've made so far.

This is a glow in the dark "plutonium muffin" for Corrie to mark the second anniversary of her blog.

Still trying to shape this one but I love the idea

Anyway, that's all for now, folks! Hopefully there won't be so much of a delay before the next instalment!

Janet

Problems, solutions, adventures and prizes.

I'm slacking a bit in keeping this up, but in my defence I have been very busy. 

I spent this weekend away, first in a spa in Kent with the lovely Corrie of Plutonium Muffins, and then in Brighton with Corrie and JT. Corrie and I had much fun going round all the shops I wouldn't have wanted to drag JT round and had some awesome hot chocolate.

Here are some pictures of our adventures:

Dinner in the hotel/spa. Notice the teeny tiny pots of sauces. Corrie and I now have a LOT of these.

I tried to take a picture of the beautiful sunset we drove through, but it hasn't really worked.

And that's me being very uncouth drinking wine through a straw (as is my way) in the hotel bar before we (and a random pair of rich people) nearly drank the bar dry of coffee flavour cocktails.

In more crafty news, after my recent development of new stock I had been proudly wearing my lovely multicoloured gun earrings pretty much every day but one day when I took them off I noticed the colour had worn off in a lot of places.

Sad face.

Back to R&D.

Seeing as I'd made about 50 pairs of earrings up already, this was a bit of a blow. I discovered with some spare charms that the colour stayed pretty well under a coat of spray varnish so I dismantled all the pairs of earrings, sprayed them with two coats of varnish (one to seal and one for good luck), left them to dry and then rebuilt them and have packed up the two orders I need to send and they should be in the post today. 

Yesterday I also made some new things! 

I've been wanting to play around with salt dough for ages and finally got round to making some up. I loved playing with it so much I decided to make more in different colours and attempt to marble the colours as dough, rather than water marble them after as had been my plan.

The water marbling was.... Fairly ineffective. Salt dough likes to absorb water. Bit of a problem. 

The marbled dough was.... Fairly dull by my standards for colour but I think it picked up when I drew on the dried pendants. What do you lot think?

I also remembered making some cinnamon dough ornaments a while ago at a friend's house and thought

"Wow having a little gingerbread man necklace that smelt of ginger and cinnamon would be SO cool"

So I went back to the kitchen and I created.

Mainly I created mess. I realised the dough set too quickly to do much to without having a cutter of the right size (and my attempt at making a cutter did not go well) but I did manage to create a ball of cinnamon ginger scented awesomeness that I will probably find no use for, and these little fellows!

Pretty cute, yes? Sadly they don't smell too heavily but I think they will do more when next to warm skin, and if you sniff them they smell heavenly, but you do look a bit odd sniffing your necklace! 

If you would like to win one of these little guys, head over to my Facebook 

www.facebook.com/colourfulcrafter

And find out how!

I think that's pretty much it other than letting you know that pendants will be available soon in all types and designs. They'll be available on their own so you can attach them to any chain you like, or with waxed cord (as shown) or a thin 20" sterling silver chain for a little extra money.

I hope you're all well. Let me know what you think of the salt dough experiments!

Over and out

Janet

P. S. I also made this. I can hang useful reminders to myself on it too!

New varieties of stock!

A while ago, I used to make earrings like these:

I liked them, but my interests have moved on from simply buying charms and attaching them to earring findings, however I still have a load of charms left because I bought hundreds and then got bored selling them.

I realised yesterday, however, that I can marble the charms so here arises a new range of earrings which I think are pretty damn sweet. Made with the same technique I showed you yesterday, here are my multicoloured and silver earrings:

Uploading the pictures to this from my iPad is a bit tedious so to look at them all you will have to visit my rather lovely shop: www.colourfulcrafter.com

Check them out, only £4 a pair and cheap shipping!

I'm pretty pleased with myself, I've stolen quite a few of them for myself!

Other than making earrings I've had a pretty productive day, finally sent off some earrings I needed to, collected some things from the post office, ordered some things I needed and went to my henna course. While there, I did one design on me, two designs on fellow classmates and one on the college receptionist who came in to see the teacher and wanted some henna. I literally had a queue. I was pretty impressed with myself.

Anyway, speak to you lot soon, I'm going to eat a creme caramel and go to bed 

Over and out,

Janet

P. S. I got a haircut today too. What do you guys think?

Wednesday already?

Time really flies when you have two naps a day. Also I've been busy with some other work so that's been keeping me on my toes, however I did manage to find time yesterday to both play with some new marbling inks (more on that later) and buy a wonderful bit of crafting kit that I'm very excited to receive on Friday (Hopefully!).

The new crafting kit is a Silhouette Portrait, a machine that looks a little like a printer, but instead of ink nozzles, it has a blade so can cut out things for you. This is particularly awesome because it can cut shrink plastic, which is my main material right now. At the moment, I'm making a lot of triangles and that's because they're easy to cut out and they tessellate perfectly so I don't have any wastage. I've cut out more complex shapes in the past but always stop because my wrists can't cope so hopefully this bit of kit will allow me to do loads more designs and shapes.

I've also been doing some maths today. I tried yesterday and came up with a set of numbers but couldn't work out what they were meant to be telling me. It reminded me why I gave up doing maths when I was on lots of painkillers - numbers don't make sense when you're on opioids! However, I managed to do it today and have been working out the best value pack of shrink plastic and it turns out to be joint between the craft pack of shrinkles and artists grade polyshrink so I'm going to get some polyshrink because I already know how the shrinkles stuff behaves.

This was my maths:

So, on to the exciting thing I did yesterday which was play with some marbling inks.

They're fun little things that you drop onto the surface of some water, swirl it around, then dip the thing into. It's pretty awesome. 

Here are some pictures of what I got up to:

Pretty snazzy, but I think I actually prefer them before the marbling was shrunk so what I'm going to do today is make some fun shapes, bake them, then marble them and see how that turns out. Obviously that process will be a lot easier when I've got my Silhouette!

Anyway, I'm going to go do something useful now.

Speak to you all soon!

Janet