Christmas Cheers!

Because of mild weather and the kids breaking up late for the holidays, nobody here seemed to be feeling particularly festive. I completed my wrapping marathon and braved the supermarket. One of the things I enjoy the most about Christmas is meeting Mo and Tania for coffee, sherry and mince pies. We always choose each other little gifts that usually include novelty socks, nag champa incense sticks, mugs, chocolate and something home-made. They were pleased with their printed chiffon scarves and tie-dyed pillowcases so I will count those experiments as a success.

I felt that I did a good job of choosing an interesting selection of gifts for my children from Ebay, Etsy and other more obscure internet sites. They already seem have all of the gadgets anyone could ever need so it was a little challenging coming up with something that was a surprise. I tracked down some vintage guitar effects pedals for Fergus, Freya liked her vintage typewriter and Jane Austen temporary tattoos, and Fenella was impressed with her silver spandex leggings and waffle maker. 

I may have ruined or enhanced the black wool shawl for the top layer of the Purdah piece. I picked off as much of the grey interfacing as I could but there was a lot of powdery glue residue left so I decided to give it a soak in some washing soda before dyeing it with black Dylon, hoping that the interfacing would take up the dye. Despite setting the washing machine at 40 degrees, the shawl got well and truly felted and the grey interfacing remained its original colour but with a crinkly texture. I decided to work with the theme of Abuse and pegged it out to weather a storm in which it blew away and got caught up in some brambles. I have not quite decided whether to paint over the remaining grey bits with black fabric paint or even try some machine needle felting with some black sheep fleece. There will definitely be a need to come up with some sort of artistic flannel about this process.

There is only so much cooking, eating, drinking gin and watching action movies that I can cope with in 48 hours before I start to think what I could be doing instead. I bought myself an Appleton dress-making kit from www.cashmerette.com so I might pluck up the courage to have a go at that. Something that keeps niggling away at the back of my mind is the desire to write a novel of sorts. If I used all of the time that I waste searching online for things I don’t need on Ebay and Gumtree I could probably get it done in a letter of weeks! My best ideas come to the fore on dog walks but Welly always knows when I am not paying attention and uses the opportunity to go off on one of his detours. It would be great if someone would invent an app that turned thoughts into text - then my drivel would soon evolve into pages and pages of stream of consciousness.

In the meantime, I will keep jotting down things I should be doing and think of creative ways to use up all of the leftover festive cheese…