Dog day afternoon

A successful day making recycled dogs

only one of which lost it's head.

Oil on troubled waters

I'm coming out of self imposed yoga hibernation to share with you a sad photo of an oil leak in our local marina. I took the photo hanging off the back of the boat. Small bier by oil slick standards. What on earth are we doing to our planet?

On a more cheerful note, here are my planet saving efforts. A mini bottle stuffed with plastic bag that I'll be making with the school kids tomorrow.

It reminds me of an old joke from my Scottish childhood. You would say to someone 'have you ever seen a green dug?' (dug was how we pronounced 'dog'). The answer you were hoping for was no at which point you could laugh scornfully and say 'you've never seen anyone digging their garden?' (green was slang for back garden).

We were easily amused in those days. Enjoy the green dug.

Giddieyup!

The boys in my jewellery making class are becoming bored. Not too surprising. Boys and jewellery making are three words not usually found in the same sentence, or am I being sexist?
Anyway, I thought they might find it a little more entrancing if they used boy type materials. Now I definitely am being sexist. I messed about and made a belt from bicycle tyre inner tube, cable ties and a bit of wood I found that looks like a horses head or some kind of wooden animal.

Being a girlie, I could resist foiling in a little golden eye with my hot glue gun then hot glue fever took over and I foiled the whole darn thing. Slight flaw in my master plan..........when you stretch the rubber as you have to do to get it over the horses head, the foil falls off.

A mere detail!

Sticky situation

Had a lovely time with my last lot of higher art students. The jewellery maker had fabulous success scooting hot glue onto cold water. You float on the surface of the water anything you want to trap in the hot glue. This girl used sequins and glitter but as you can imaging, the possibilities are endless!

Obviously there are huge health & safety issues here. Electrical appliances and water do not mix. I've since acquired a cordless hot glue gun. I've not had a chance to try it out yet but I'll let you know.


This young lady is adding strings of beads to her t-shirt



Sweetie papers trapped by machine stitching in pelmet vilene to make a lampshade.

I'm now working with a group of challenged children. Supposed to be making jewellery but we're veering off into the realms of graffiti. Should be interesting.

Rolls Royce Science Prize Exhibition

The kid's response

Having a slashing time

Does this look lke the kind of thing a teenager would like? Oh, and does my bum look big in this?

When there are this many slashes in it, you can wear it any way that takes your fancy.

How to be distressing

Sorry for the long silence but yoga is asorbing my every waking moment. A short schools projected has dragged me back to the land of creating. Four higher art students only. A treat! I know that one of them is working on t-shirt design so to give myself a starting point I've been messing about with t-shirts today.

A plain white one was my starting pont.
I secured buttons into it with elastric bands, make a spine of clothes pegs, trapped another with cable ties, slashed and splashed on the dye. Results should follow shortly.

String fellow

A while ago I crochet myself a string bag, with string funnily enough. A packet of blueberries burst over it the other day so I put it in the washing machine. My logic was it's cotton therefore it won't felt. It may not have felted in a fuzzy way but it most certainly shrank. These two began life as twins!

Like my string hand bag? At least it's one way to solve the problem of the leeks falling through the holes.

Jacket in

It's finished! And I hate it! Well, not as much as I thought I would actually. I took a huge seam on the sleeves to narrow them down and remove the woolly 'bingo wings'. Bad enough having those floppy pockets of skin hanging from your upper arms without them being enclosed by their very own cardigan sleeve extensions.

The reversing of the stripe colour gives you a weird white stripe on one shoulder only. But it's soft and warm and short. Mercifully short!

Puppet school

Just finished a session of puppet making with some special needs children. The simplicity of the mop and clothes line puppet and the paper plate frog were just the job. The kids were very into riping the fabric so we did that rather than cutting it and secured it with ribbon ties and elastic bands. Some of the puppets have a quaint kind of Jane Austin feel about them.



I'm deeply suspicious of the guy in the black PVC mac.

strongly suspect he had something to do with that plague of frogs.