The Womble Drawers of Awesomeness

Right, this is a bit of a labour of love, me and craft, well, I love it, but I'm not very good at it exactly, so this is me making stuff up as I go a long.

I have this unit that my TV is on, it's pine and sturdy but boring! I was going to paint it and for a bit of a shabby chic look, seems like a lot of work though, especially when I am fairly well known for my ability to screw things up, somehow hurt myself, or cover me or the cat with paint. For this reason it hasn't been done.

So I was going to post a before photo but it failed
and now it's half done, so here's a picture of my cat Riley!

I had what I believe to be the idea of the century, which is that rather than painting it I could decoupage it.

On a side note, I have rather a habit of trying to attempt to be an adult, doing all this "posh" well done, organised and elegant stuff. I think I have realised finally that that's not me! I'm not that! So anyways, back to the subject.
The decoupage! I had this cool idea of doing it with comic books, just the draw fronts (yeah, coz doing the whole thing would be completely crazy - obviously).
Therefore I needed to get some comics to do this with,  it actually turns out that it's difficult to buy broken or damaged comic books in the UK. Therefore I popped into my local Forbidden Planet to get some grab bags.

Ouch, 25p per comic for a grab bag, that's a mite expensive.... also, I kind of have a constitutional objection to actually taking comic books apart since that's like taking books apart, or damaging them, or that sort of thing. It's against everything I was brought up to believe!

You can cut stuff out with scissors or a scalpel

However, the lovely man working in my local Forbidden Planet went to take a little look out the back for me to see if he had any damaged stock. For some unfathomable reason head office had decided to take a few off sale or something so he had a load of comic books with no front covers (they have to make them incapable of being sold) which would have just gone in the bin! He gave me a pile of about 15 comic books! they're all copies of the same 3 but WOOT! Best part was they were FREE!

I kind of wallpapered the draw with half pages,
the key is to cover the whole of the drawer front

I've googled decoupage, bought some PVA, made a mix of that and water (about 50/50) in a little bottle, cut out a load of cool bits.
The internet says to do all the boring stuff like sand the drawers and clean them and all that sensible stuff.
However, that's not really me... therefore I put some newspaper down and just kinda went for it.

I then added my "feature" bits
to get a vague idea of positioning

I worked with a load of half pages to completely cover the front, painting the mixture on the draw front and the back of the image, then painting the top of the image, before sponging it with a damp kitchen sponge to remove the excess. Then I left it to dry (you're meant to leave it a few hours but in typical me fashion I left it only 1 hour) before getting the smaller motif images and pasting them on top. Doing the same thing as before, I painted it all down before sponging and leaving to dry again.

I painted the knobs with a mixture of
PVA and acrylic paint for a
satin finish

Then I coated it again and again in this pasty mixture as I have no varnish. about 4 coats should be enough to protect it and act as a glaze until I manage to find something else. Then I cut the hole for the draw pull (with a a screw) and added the newly painted handles (painted with acrylic mixed with PVA).

Or at least, I will, as I continue to do each draw one at a time, I've only done the one so far.

This is pure awesomeness!

What is twitter to me?

Twitter's "Fail Whale" (displayed during outages)
has now become almost as ubiquitous
as the Microsoft "Paperclip" once was.

I'm not even entirely sure why I'm writing this when I'm fairly sure that the only people who ever read this blog are on twitter already!

However, it's becoming abundantly clear to me that to "get" it you have to be in it.
It's like the Matrix; you have to see it for yourself. So I guess I felt I would try to put into words what twitter is for me.

Twitter is a cross between Facebook and an instant messaging platform; you are limited to 140 characters, so updates tend to be concise. I think what people don't get is the social bit of the social network aspect of twitter. It is honestly one of the most supportive environments I have ever experienced, it is as involving as you let it become and is much more than simple status updates.

Because everything on twitter is public (other than direct messages and messages from protected accounts) it’s a very open environment, because of the way it works you can see conversations between the people you “follow” take place in front of you. In this way you can jump in when appropriate (and sometimes not so appropriate). 

It very much has the feeling of being in a pub or a coffee shop with conversations taking place all around you; you can pick up and drop conversations more easily than in real life.

In my opinion, the absolute key to a successful relationship with twitter is numbers. If you follow less than about 60 people (and by people I do not mean celebrities) you just don’t get the interactions that make it work.

In order to know who to follow I would suggest simply ask someone who you already follow, if you’re completely new to twitter and have no ideas then maybe do a search on subjects that interest you, as your circle of followers and followees opens up you will probably need a client like Tweetdeck or Seismic to enable you to be able to truly experience it.

Twitter is like all the best and worst parts of social interactions, except there’s less rules to stop you having to endure the bad bits!

At this point I really wouldn’t be without it, I get most of my news from it (albeit I wait until someone like Reuters or the Beeb posts about it before believing it at face value) you learn what you can trust, same as with any other form of media.

 I tend to be better informed about current events than I used to be, however, there is the slight issue of being too connected, a twitter buddy once wrote a blog post about the difficulty in “switching off” (see @Puffles2010) and I understand the issue only too well; however, I feel that in general the benefits massively outweigh the bad bits.

What I do find is that other people just don’t understand why I am so taken with what seems to them to be a social network akin to Facebook or something, which seems to be filled with subversive political monsters or narcissistic celebrities (how the “mainstream media” tend to portray it) possibly dependant on the day of the week and the wind direction as far as I can tell.

I think one of the most important points about twitter is that it is, like life, what you make it, however, I really love the interconnectedness of this interface.

And yes, if I’m honest, it does feel a bit like being part of Borg v 0.00000.00027 but you know what? Bring it on! What could possibly go wrong? *winky face*

Am I completely insane to feel like I am part of a huge network people connected by ideas and art and humour and politics and TV or not? What do you think?

The hat of cunning!

some of you may be aware of the series Firefly, or the film Serenity, if you're not then what are you even doing here? Huh? HUH? GO WATCH IT NOW!
On the wonderful ship called Serenity there is a man called Jayne, there was once a song about him...

Right, so anyways, I decided I wanted to get me some of that mighty fine hat looking action so I got myself a fivers worth of wool and a pattern http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=339466.0 and with the help of @MargoJMilne I set about knitting it on straight needles for that was all I had.

I set about knitting, I knitted in front of the telly, I knitted in bed, I knitted on the bus, in a car, on a train, I knitted in Cambridge, I knitted in Leeds, I knitted a whole load of places is basically what I'm saying!
Finally, one cold autumn evening it was done! I stopped boring my twitter friends with inane innuendo about flaps, and instead started on the pom-pom euphemisms and shouting about tangled yarn.

So then I sewed on the pom-pom and sewed up the seem in the back and it was done!
and now I have a cunning hat, I look fabulous in it! Don't say I don't coz I know you be lying coz you're jealous of the hat, I have one, you don't!

the cunning hat!

The Party of Revolutionary Wombles (updated)

Due to doing yesterdays silly comic thingy, I spent a fair amount of time making a womble avatar!
This imediately caught on and I had a load of avatars to make!

These are the current ones I have produced, if you would like one of these beautiful avatars then just let me know! @cainglain on twitter, you know the drill.
Now 10 avatars produced!