I'm back!

It may have been a little while... perhaps the two posts a week was slightly ambitious. I will try to post regularly from now on. Quite a lot of stuff has been going on recently, the most significant of which is moving house. I'm moving in with my boyfriend and his other housemates, so I'm just trying to slot my whole room's worth of stuff into half a room now. The plus side is the communal areas means there's room for all my books now!

The best part of moving is the neighbourhood cat, who we call Shouty on account of her mewing constantly. Her real name is something in Polish and I think she comes from the garden behind ours, but she's so pretty and visits us for attention which she always gets.

Shouty the cat

Butterfly Box

First, I want to apologise for this Sunday post not being a Friday post. I tried my best but I was away from home and had bought the wrong camera cable with me. I don't know where this other cable came from, but it was one of those awful ones that are only for one thing and yet you have dozens of them. All the pictures were right there waiting but I couldn't get to them!

In absence of the photos for what I wanted to write about, and in keeping with it being Mother's Day recently, here's the birthday present that I gave my mum last year. It's a 15cm wooden cube with a photo on each face, except I did a little cross stitch for the lid.

You and Me Against the Zombies

I don't know if this was just my school but they had 'Pivot stickfigure animator' installed on all the computers. I had a bit of a nostalgia-fest and made a rubbish live action version of this card I'm about to show you:

Pfft, zombies are always interrupting.

I'm the sentimental type. I like to keep little notes and doodles that people have given me, and I like to give them out. It's nice to give and receive little reminders of love and appreciation.

I also know a good thing when I see it; my current relationship is very very good, and likely to be my last. I fully trust him to have my back in the impending zombie apocalypse, and that's not something to take lightly. Which brings me to this impromptu card. It's not a special occasion or anything, just another day when I'd been feeling low and he'd set me off giggling like a small child at fart jokes. This is a "thank-you for existing" card.

Little K and Big K, zombie bounty hunters.

This card isn't particularly exciting, I know, it's just stamps and felt-tip pen. But it's personal, and sentimental, and I like that.

Zombie apocalypse, are you prepared?
L

It's Mum Day!

Today I learned that Mother's Day isn't very consistent around the world. It can be in every month except January and September, which is pretty strange. In the UK at least, it is today. So happy mum day to the British, the Irish, the Nigerians, and the islanders of Jersey (Jerseyans?), Guernsey (Guernseys?), and the Isle of Man (Manx, I think.)

My mum doesn't like soppy generic poems, or rude jokes, or cards that follow the theme of 'Mum runs around after the kids all day and this is her one special day of rest but don't forget you've got to wash my sports kit and can I have chicken nuggets for dinner please'- she just isn't like that. I'm thankful that I started making all my own cards now, because it saves me from standing, staring blankly at the cards in the shop, trying to pick between two cards that will both be received with a polite smile. Yeah, I'll skip that if it's alright with you.

She is, on the other hand, a florist. So it's safe for me to assume that she likes flowers, and I especially know she has a fondness for the wild roses that grow all along the dog walking paths where she lives. I raided my battered nature guide stash to find some pretty dog roses (interestingly named as such because they were used to treat the bites of rabid dogs in the olden days.) You can also eat the fruits of them, or at least I was a fan of scoffing rose hips when I was younger and wilder.

Nice try, internet. But you shan't know my name!

This simple card and matching envelope involved cutting out the flowers with a craft knife (mine is actually a budget scalpel) and then gluing onto a card base with some fetching pinky-red background. I used my favourite alphabet stamps as usual, and it ended up looking rather elegant. I also love precision-cutting with craft knives, it's very relaxing. Probably also a mental throw-back to the good old school days of cutting and sticking.

The moral of this is that (assuming your mum is nice) you should probably be reasonably nice to your mum all year round, because it's most likely Mother's Day somewhere else in the world.

Have fun, go bake some cookies or something!
L

Things I've Bought From Charity Shops: Part 1

...So it begins. A semi-regular blog feature, how exciting! Presented to you all this fine day are a selection of things I've bought at my local charity shops. Although you can measure how run-down a place is by the amount of charity shops in the high street (we have 7 on one short stretch, not even kidding,) they often don't get the love they deserve. Charity shops are a veritable treasure trove for people who like cheap stuff. You can never find what you're looking for when you want it, but if you have a bit of forward planning and don't mind buying your winter jumpers in July then go have a look. You could even consider volunteering at one so you can nab things as they come in and for some CV padding.

Apologies that I don't remember which charity shops these came from, but I like to wander up the high street and go into each of the seven in turn. Statistically speaking it'd be Age UK because we have two of those.

Without further ado, and all photographed on my lovely leopard-print bedsheets for your viewing pleasure:

March Update (Blue Hair!)

This past week has been really busy for me, my hunt for the elusive job is proving difficult. I'm in the awkward position where I'm not quite a student at the moment, so I'm not allowed to apply for the usual internships, and I have to explain what 'suspended for health reasons' means. Not so much fun. Still, I've made some new connections and have gotten pretty good at eating on a tight budget.

I don't have anything much to share today, unfortunately. I'm partway through writing a nice beefy piece on charity shops so you can have that on Friday. Also coming is a Sunday bonus post about the Mother's Day card I made.

I did dye the underside of my hair blue, however, so here's a photo of that! (Using Directions neon blue on bleached hair.) Priorities...

So bright, so blue. I'm wearing my -10°C thermals because my radiator is broken (again.)

Books: The Snow Child

I found The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey in one of the charity shops along my road, in the cheap student/Polish area of Southampton. The cover just beckoned me, with its snowy fairytale silhouettes on a dark blue background.

A Spot of Blacksmithing

This post is more of a short and sweet 'Look what I made!' than anything else. You see that vicious looking hooked thing below? I made that with steel and fire and brute force. Well, maybe that's not completely truthful. My brother helped me to do it last week. He's training to be a blacksmith and he's set up a forge in the garden which is made out of a metal bin and a lot of coal and a air bed pump. 

It's a hook that can be hung over the tops of doors, for people like me who aren't allowed to drill holes in their walls. Could also be one half of a grappling hook, or a weapon for the impending zombie apocalypse.

A Christmas Card in February

I went 'home-home' last week to visit my mum and brother, seeing as I had a bit of free time. I wouldn't say I regretted it, but it became apparent very quickly to me that I've outgrown the house of my parents. There was just something weird about it, I felt out of place. Maybe more on that in a later blog post, though.

Unbeknownst to me, we'd been booked in for dinner with the grandparents I haven't seen in a few years. My mum asked if I'd got them a Christmas card or present and said that she hadn't either so I'd have to make one. Oh and by the way we're leaving in an hour so I'll have to make it quick. Surely it reaches a point (like February) when you can just cut your losses and forget about Christmas cards, but she was quite insistent.

I made myself a mug of tea, grumbled to myself a bit, put on the tv, and sat down with all the craft supplies the house could offer. I miss my alphabet stamps already. *sad face*

Luckily for me, I found this pair of crimping scissors and set of rubber stamps in the cupboard that I never knew we had. I have no idea where they came from, and they needed a good wash beforehand.

The ink pad was all dried up and I didn't have my craft supplies with me so I experimented with using felt tip pens instead. I found one that took longer than the others to dry which was perfect. I had to work quickly to cover and stamp the thing before the ink dried and went patchy but the poinsettia stamp looked really pretty like that, so I decided to use that one on my card.

Using some shiny gold paper as the main background, I made a really simple Christmas card. Using the snowflake stamp multiple times on some blue paper, and the poinsettia stamp on a bit of crimped ivory card, I layered them at slightly jaunty angles. Unfortunately the poinsettia stamp didn't come out as nicely as I wanted in the final version because I'd practised on a different type of paper. I also used the snowflake stamp again with a blue felt tip to make a matching envelope.

Also, these matching bookmarks! Made with the same materials as the card with the addition of a hole punch and some ribbon. They were starting to curl up quite badly so I sandwiched them between some heavy books as they dried. I know that home-made paper bookmarks are something you usually get little children to make and give to people, but I don't see why they can't be refined a little for a more mature audience. I was really out of ideas and time, too.

And there we have it! A 30-minute(ish) solution to a family argument. (With my mum, not my grandparents. They wouldn't have minded either way. It's sometimes just easier to give in to what people want, though.) The visit itself went surprisingly well, it was nice to catch up. My grandma also makes amazing roast potatoes, and that made everything worth it.

Merry February!

L

Some Thoughts On Depression

This may be a little dark, I wrote it to try and explore my thoughts on a particularly bad day.

I still don't really know what depression is. I mean, I know what it is but I just don't know how or why it managed to creep up on me. I thought I was just lazy, initially. When my boyfriend left for work in the morning I'd just lay in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. It felt like I was punishing myself for not wanting to get up and do anything, by refusing to let myself enjoy not doing anything. I'd let myself get stuck in the guilty cycle of the procrastinator- not being able to let go of the thing you should be doing so your procrastination becomes guilty and impossible to enjoy.  I used to be able to drag myself out of that at the last minute and get my work done. It was always sloppy and I'd resent myself for not living up to my potential, but at least it'd be done and I could breathe for a little while. And then, one day, I started to let the deadlines come and go. I knew I probably wouldn't hand assignments in so I stopped picking them up. I let my record pick up zero after zero, and still I felt like it didn't matter. Who would notice? It's not like a friendly school teacher was going to pull me aside and say "I noticed you haven't been doing your work lately, is everything alright at home? Do you need some help?" And that's the thing, it was only me that was responsible for my failure.

I just wanted desperately for someone to see through my facade, to see that I did care deep down. I still don't know if anything would have pulled me out of that spiral of indifference, but it would involve people, I know that much. I feel like if someone, anyone, had looked me right in the eye and asked "Are you okay? You've not been yourself recently" then I would have broken down completely. I would have fallen to the floor and wailed as if everyone most important to me had died. Because I had lost a part of myself. I'd lost the quiet, geeky girl who loved to learn. She wanted to invent something important, to make the world a better place. Instead she'd found that physics was just an unfeeling string of numbers, and she herself was just an ID number in a computer system, only given value by how high her own numbers were. Her teachers and her parents had let her believe that she could do anything she wanted, that she was capable of anything.

The academic slump when you realise that compared to everyone around you're just mediocre really hurts. Maybe I just took it harder than most? I think I'd let it become too much a part of who I was. Maybe I'll find that lost girl some day, when I've sifted through my box of thoughts and pieced myself together again.

I think I'd better stop writing for now.