The slow, slow progress of the work in progress...

This one doesn't quite take the title of art work taking the longest to completion (that honour goes to a painting which took TWO YEARS! Whilst in no way looking like two years worth of work), but it's one I've been dibbing in and out of for a while. I don't think I've quite picked up momentum yet. Also I keep getting side-tracked by the rediscovered ability to knit, by fabric flowers (they are just so quick -almost instant gratification!), and thinking I am a seamstress. I am NOT a seamstress. I am embarrassed to show my attempt at a very basic top.

Anyway, seeing as the sun was out today allowing not too shabby photographs, I thought I'd show how I'm getting on with said assemblage...

Just need to figure out what I'm doing with the front now methinks.

(It just took me an ashamedly long time to figure that Blogger had decided it was no longer compatible with my browser, and that for that reason it didn't want to upload these pics. I am not made for the internet. I am of a simpler time. There goes my bank holiday...!)

Sweet Sacrifice

I have given up sweets for Lent. This may seem rather juvenile, indeed almost an insult to the sacrifice our Good Lord made for us, but it is practically killing me!

I am a woman of very few vices. I haven't drunk for over 3 years, I hate gambling (I even had to think about how to spell that!), I usually choose the low fat options. I am neither as 'Rock', nor as 'Roll' as I like to pretend I am. So it appears that taking away my sweeties is denying me the tiny pieces of sugary decadence I have left! A Strangelord without sweets is a picture of misery.

I'm not like a normal girl (in quite a few ways actually!) -I can take or leave chocolate. Confectionery heaven for me is a nostalgic boiled sweet -cola cubes, sour apples, rhubarb n custard..., or jellies (although controversially I'm really not that bothered about Haribo). Give me midget gems or sports mix back before they changed the black ones from liquorice flavour to blackcurrant, and I'm yours! Or pretty much anything from Swizzels Matlow. Parma Violets are a bit weird though, aren't they?!

So to get me through the next week of my Lenten abstention, I've made do with perusing Folksy for these candy-coated concoctions (of a craftier variety).

 

Clockwise from top left...

 

Linocut Gummy Bear cards by Woah There Pickle

Love Heart candy cross stitch kit by StitchKits

Sherbert Fountain t-shirt by Snollygoster

Peppermint candy porcelain stud earrings by SillyRice

 

 

Girly with an edge...

...is kind of my thing.

Here I am not only modelling for you the cheerful golden yellow we've painted our lounge (which makes me smile whenever I look at it), but more importantly my lil' cocktail-hat-cum-fascinator I made at the marvellous Button Tin with Gemma Nemer almost a month ago (see my post on the button! for when I went last time). And my, how time flies...

Gemma provided us with a treasure trove of vintage fabrics to choose from, and showed us how to make the ruffly rosettes which I adorned my headgear with. She kindly gave me a pair of vintage clip on earrings which were so me, and perfect for the centres of my rosettes. I brought along the chains, because for me, there is nothing in life that can't be improved by a few studs or chains!

I bought the dress on the same day, from Yella Brick Road -an emporium of weirdness and wonders that is basically what it would be like if my brain became a shop -spitting distance from the Button Tin in the Imperial Buildings in Rotherham (ladies spitting -now that's girly with an edge. Actually, I can't spit properly, I'm rubbish). It's by Iron Fist, and I simply had to buy it. It reminded me so much of imagery I use such as my butterfly/bones collaged combos -my obsession with sweet vs. sinister.

Like teaming scuffed up converse with a lace-trimmed slip when I was 17 (and dying to be Courtney Love), or getting my scribbled, drawn-with-a-biro effect love and kisses/let's cross out love and hate everybody tattoo -depending on which way you wanna look at it...

(now I just like how it reminds me of a bad time in my life I never ever want to go back to...)

And just to clear things up before you get over-excited, that square of flesh is the top centre of my back, and nothing else.

And I am so rock 'n' roll that I went all faint when the tattooist finished, and I had to get put in the recovery position!

It's like the fairy tales we were read to send us to sleep with sweet dreams of rabid wolves and murderous witches, the converging of opposites. Defiling the innocent, diluting the insane.

I suppose I like to reach the happy medium (funny, for someone who is never happy!)

The good little Christian girl who strives to be the perfect house wife and has imagined her wedding every day since she was five, whilst swearing like a trooper and stomping around to angry girl music.

I guess if I wasn't so conflicted I'd find it harder to stay strange...

Work in Progress.

Trinket box based on one of my favouritest quotes, Matthew Chapter 6, Verses 19-21:

  'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

  But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where theives do not break through nor steal:

  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.'

I'll let you know how it goes...