Peacocks and Peacock Feathers.

Peacocks and their feathers are a great inspiration for me, the colours in the jewel toned tails feathers is well just beautiful. The picture below is from Design Seeds website and I have another one pinned to my Colour board on Pinterest 

I have great memories as a child coming back from a trip to Brownsea Island with a few of the dropped tail feathers. One of my grandparents didn't want me to bring them in to their house as they considered them bad luck, these days I think that superstition is beginning to fade a bit. 

The one thing I would really like is to have a Peacock and Peahen but they are very very noisy and I don't think I would be very popular with my neighbours and maybe the rest of our village. So we had better stick to our chickens, ducks and quails.  

Lampwork Glass Peacock Bead

Until next time. 

Vic xx

Bloglovin

One of the links in the Mollie Makes Special I posted about earlier was for Bloglovin. I really like it as I can now read all my fav blogs in one place. So much easier than having to go through all my bookmarked links to see if there are any new posts.
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Blog Book Review

This post I thought I would do a quick review of a magazine and book dedicated to bloggers. The book is Blogging for Creatives by Robin Houghton and the magazine is Blogging the big guide to creative content by Mollie Makes.

Blogging for Creatives I purchased at the end of last year it really inspired me to look at my blog as a part of the creative side of me, not just a place I occasionally post. If you've never blogged before this book explains all about blogs and the different types of blog. The chapters are varied and cover earning money from your blog, creating an eye catching blog, being social and much more. There are mini interviews with top bloggers and much more packed into this book. I did find some of it not really relevant just yet but it is a book that I will be dipping into occasionally. Its a great book for someone who is thinking of starting to blog and I'm sure even a seasoned blogger would find something interesting in this. 

Mollie Makes is a great little craft magazine and when I spotted their Blogging special the other day I snapped it up. The magazine is jam packed with their usual gorgeous images and lots of interviews with top bloggers. There was lots to inspire me and its made me want to do do more with this blog. It also covered twitter, which is something I always forget about. My only complaint is they showed a lot of info for Wordpress but very little for Blogger, which I think was a shame. I've noticed they also do a Photography special which I may have to get. I think this special is great and its worth a look. 

See you next time

Vic  xx

Office Work

This week I'm busy but unfortunately not creating, no its the boring stuff this week and I'm sat behind my computer. So what will I be doing apart from blogging, well I'm tweaking my branding a bit, last year I revamped my banners but my work and focus has changed and I think I've outgrown them. So I've re made banners for this blog twitter Etsy and facebook, I will do the rest later this week or next week. I usually use picmonkey and or photoshop to make my banners but I found another online photo / design website that seems really nice and had what I needed.
Now its time to get back to the tweaking see you next time
Vic x

The making of a Steampunk Troll

So as you may have guessed I'm writing about the doll I finished this week, Professor Hargate Dawkins Wardle Trevithick, or H.D.W for short. He was inspired by Utes Vasina's Troll pattern and I've been planning to make him for a while. Unusually for me part of my planning included sketching out a few of the small details of the doll. So this week I finally had the time to make him, I did have to design the clothes myself and this is where the sketches and planning really helped.

The next step was to add a few extra details to the apron pocket, plus it needed to be a bit steampunk. Luckily I had a few cogs and a small key but it needed something extra, my Dad came to the rescue with a tin from his shed. Apparently the tin was from my Grandads shed and contained lots of brass screws, bolts and copper nails. I filled two small glass vials with some of the tiny screws we found in the tin and I placed a couple of large brass studs or rivets in his apron and hand.

The last thing to be added to the apron pocket was a monocle and I felt it needed to be on a chain and I had a bright idea of using one of my lampwork glass dragon beads as well. So the little dragon became H.D.W's pet baby dragon Errol who holds onto the monocle as H.D.W tends to lose it.

So there we are I've finally made my Steampunk Troll, now I need to start planning for a special halloween doll. 

until next time

Vic xx

Book Club and something new

Its been a very busy week as I've been getting my house tidy as I was the host for our Book Club yesterday. As usual I baked cakes, my Lemon drizzle loaf and Mocha cup cakes, hubby and the kids were very upset as they weren't allowed to taste the cakes until today. I also cooked Chili and Nachos with rice, tortillas and salad, I got the mince for the chili from our local butchers it was a lot cheaper and nicer than from a supermarket.
The book I chose for everyone to read was Accidently in Love with a God by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff, I love Mimi's books as they are full of humour and they are the ones I will reread if I'm feeling a bit low. I would've chosen Stephanie Hudson's Afterlife saga for everyone to read but there are only a few of us with Kindle's which is the shame as I'm sure I would get a few of them hooked on the Afterlife Saga.

So to something new, I have wanted to try bead embroidery for a long time and more specifically beaded dolls. I did a bit of research and found out what I would need, well I thought that the price of Lacy's stiff stuff and Ultrasuede was too much for dolls, not a problem for jewellery. So I went to my fabric shop and managed to find some faux suede at a good price so I got a half a metre plus I could always use the fabric for my cloth dolls if I didn't like bead embroidery. Well as you may have guessed I love bead embroidery and I found I can sit and make something in front of the telly so even more of a bonus for me. The doll I made turned out better than I thought and I will certainly be doing a lot more bead embroidery.

until next time

Vic xx

Godzilla the chick

My son wanted some more baby chicks or ducklings this year, well as we haven't got a drake or a cockerell  we had to find some fertile eggs to put in the incubator. So while they were collecting some female quails my husband and son picked up three fertile Cream Legbar chicken eggs from the breeder. They went in the incubator and we waited, my son candled the eggs and two were growing. We waited a bit more and then we could hear a tiny cheep and a scratching on the shell one was trying to hatch two days early. Unfortunately it just couldn't get out of the egg so it died which was a real shame.  But the next day the last egg  was cheeping and wobbling and had made a small hole in the shell, we were very worried it wasn't going to get out. We left it a bit to see how it would get on and see if it could hatch without assistance but later it was quiet so my son gave it a little bit of help by removing a small part of the shell and the chick pushed itself out so we finally had a chick.  

Chicks when they are first hatched are really ugly nothing like the cute fluffy thing they become by the next day. So we have one chick out of three eggs and it looks like its a cockerell which is a shame as we could do with a few more hens. He is a noisy little thing and he's nearly two weeks old, but I don't think I should've let my son name it though as he called it Godzilla but the rest of us call him Chirpy.

 

Until next time

Vic xx