Giraffes!! Reloaded!

Here is my latest giraffe for The One Million Giraffes Project.

My 'Giraffe Flower Fairy' on One Million Giraffes:
http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/?id=6762

My previous giraffes can be seen in this post.

Fire.

I had almost forgotten that when the husband and I went down to watch the bonfire for Sankt Hans Aften at the Århus Boat Harbour, I had taken a few little videos of the fire with my very dodgy old digital camera.

Unfortunately, this dodgy old camera refuses to record sound and the picture quality is really trashy, but for now it suffices. The fact that it does not record sound though means that I get to be a little creative and add my own.

Thanks to some great open source sound mixing software called Audacity, and to a fantastic website called Freesound.org, (a huge collection of Creative Commons licensed sound and music samples), I was able to come up with something slightly realistic and ethereal to add to my little silent movie.




To learn more about Sankt Hans Aften, I found this little explanation to be quite insightful:
http://www.epinions.com/content_1470341252

Summer Lanterns.

The summer solstice has just past here is the north, and I'm officially on holidays from danish classes for a month and a bit. What better way to celebrate both, than with the creation of some now traditional seasonal lanterns!!!

I was having a bit of trouble trying to decide on a design for these ones. I knew I wanted to have them have something to do with the sun and light in general, but I also wanted something a little different from the others I had done.

I sat down and started scribbling and came up with this design:


As usual, it is a watercolor painting on a fairly thick type of artists sketch paper. I find that the light that filters through from the candles is quite subtle and pretty when I make them this way, so I guess I'm sticking with it for now.

Right at the last minute, before attaching them to the glass jars, I had the idea of poking holes in the white 'suns' to let little pinpricks of light through. I'm so glad I did, cause now they kind of twinkle as the candle flickers.





After doing the intricate painting on the swirls, I was thinking if there could be an easier way to make them, and of course there is. Just make them in Photoshop and print them out. Unfortunately, we don't have a printer. That didn't stop me though, from throwing the design together in PS anyway. In the process, I came up with an alternative design, which I now think I like even more. With funky 'sunburst', go-faster type stripes and swirls that look more swirly and full of win.

With a little help from Block Posters, I created simple PDF files of the two designs I came up with, so that anyone that has the urge, can download them and print them out.

The first is the simple design:

Download the 'lantern' file via MediaFire

And the second is the funky new 'sunburst' design:

Download the 'lantern w sunburst' file via MediaFire

If you would like to have the sparkly pin-pricks of light I have mentioned, all you need to do is get a nice thick needle, and poke it through the paper from the back to the front, in a little pattern on just the white parts. This way the little ripped edge of each hole will be facing outwards and you'll get a bit more light from the candle inside. Cut the design out and wrap it around your jar, securing it with a little non-toxic paper glue, and 'hey presto' a funky little summer lantern! You could even put some citronella tea-lights in there to keep the bugs at bay and use them on a outdoor table, for when your sitting, BBQ-ing, drinking and talking bollocks on warm summer nights.

A FEW SAFTEY TIPS

Remember, your talking about fire here.

Fire is bad.

It burns and stuff.

Make sure that you use thick glass jars for the inside of the lanterns. I use some old coffe jars that are about 8cm wide and 12cm high and I only ever put a regular sized tea-light candle in there. I find that these don't get too warm, but even so, it is important to never EVER leave a burning candle unattended and to make sure that it is placed in a safe position so that you wont do something daft, like set fire to some curtains or something. Keep the lanterns out of reach of pets and children as well and you will hopefully get lots of joy from them.

Giraffes!!!

There is this guy called Ola Helland and his friend Jørgen doesn't believe that Ola can collect one million hand drawn pictures of giraffes by 2011.

It's a tall order I know, but I totally have faith that it can be done. So much so, that I submitted this picture of a giraffe to the cause just this very day:

Link to my OneMillionGiraffes submission:
http://olahelland.net/giraffes/?id=3808

If you too would like to help Ola prove Jørgen wrong, go to The One Million Giraffes Project and submit your giraffe now. Ola is counting on all of us to make this a reality.

We can make a difference.

(This post was bought to you by the awesomeness that is StumbleUpon and it's ability to keep me amused for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours...........)

Update:

Since the number of giraffes one can submit is unlimited, and since Ola is still well below his target, I decided to create another giraffe drawing. This one a little less... um...graceful looking :P

The Giraffe Bike on OneMillionGiraffes.com
http://olahelland.net/giraffes/?id=4216

More giraffes to come....possibly.

Craftster Challenge Entry: A Catalogue to Cherry Blossoms

You may remember me mentioning the Craftster Craft Challenge and the fact that I was going to make an entry. Well, here is the result and a little bit on how I made it:

I have always loved cherry blossoms, and as such, have always wanted to have some in my house or garden. Problem is, at the moment we live in a little appartment (so no garden) and we're on a tight budget right now (so no buying frivolous things like cherry blossoms either).

So when this catalogue arrived one day:



I decided to cherry blossom it up with a little bit of papier maché madness.

First I made the "Vase"


In the process of doing that I decided that I would not use any paint on this project, so all the colour would have to come straight from the catalogue itself. And so, while the glue dried on vase (helped along as you can see by some trusty rubber bands), I went through the catalogue and cut out hundreds of colour 'swatches' from the pictures of the clothes, the backgrounds and even the fonts they used.

Soon, the vase was looking like this:



Next came the branch. Here, I tightly rolled some big pages and stuck them together to make something vaguely natural looking. This bit wasnt that easy as the wet paper meant that the branches would naturally want to droop. I ended up having to work with it laying flat, thereby making it dificult to evenly wrap the paper around in some places. Soon though, I had this:



While the branch dried, I started on the flowers. Again these were made completely from using colour swatches from the catalogue.



Finally, using lots of pieces of black to colour the branches, and a few strips of a hot pink (which was a part of a truly hideous baby-doll dress that is apprently the hight of fashion according to the catalogue), I pulled the whole thing together to look like this:



And here it is in it's new home on the shelf in our living room:



And you know, it has (for now) satisfied my cherry blossom craving to a T.

My Craftster Craft Challenge #39 Entry. Vote if you can!

"The Chatterer": MS painting Hellraiser

Over on my forum, we play a little game called "Paint Scene". One has to recreate a scene from a specified movie using only MS Paint or a similar drawing program. It's not a new game, or even original, but damn it is fun, and sometimes quite difficult. Especially if you have never seen the film that is on the table for interpretation.

The last film that was up for painting was Hellraiser. Now while I am a great fan of Clive Barker's novels and short stories, I am ashamed to admit that I have never actually seen the film. I only knew one image from it and that was the well known vision of Pinhead. I didn't want to do that one so I ended up having to do a bit of an image search, and found The Chatterer, who to me is even more creepy than ol' Pin-Noggin.

So here, in all it's MS Paint glory, is my version of The Chatterer:


And as you can probably tell, we also like to caption our images a bit.....the sillier, the better :P

Papier Machê: It's the new WoW.

So recently, after almost 4 years of playing (phew, that seems like a long time) I decided to give up World Of Warcraft. The husband, who was also an avid player, threw in the WoW towel a few weeks ago and has felt better for it. I found myself wanting that same feeling of freedom and so chose to follow his good lead.

Obviously there are loads of good reasons for giving it up (money/lifestyle/not getting into stupid innane conversations with 12 year olds over the chat channels about Chuck Norris) and yet I could find only one bad reason: What to do with my time?

I should never really worry about something like that though I guess. It just means more time for crafting, art, writing and reading. A whole bunch of things I love to do and yet never seemed to have the time for because of WoW. So in actuality the only bad thing about giving up "The Warcrack" is in fact one of the best things.

In the last few days, just to amuse myself, I have been getting messy and fooling about with papier machê. Mainly inspired by the amazing pieces at Ultimate Paper Mache but obviously nowhere near as awesome and full of win as them.

Firstly, I decided I needed a little stand to hang my laptop headset on when I'm not using it and thought, "Why not a little statue?" And so I harnessed my inner MacGuyver and, using only some flour, water, paper, a wooden skewer and an old vegemite jar lid, I ended up with this:



After a good drying in the oven (low heat - 50C - with the fan on and the door cracked open a bit) and a lick of paint, my little headphone stand was ready for use.


I was a little worried that she wasn't going to be strong enough to hold the headset, but as she has dried more, she had become firmer and now is almost completely solid so there seems to be no issues there.

The other piece I made was a kind of scrapbook. We are often given (and find) articles from newspapers and magazines on self sufficiency, gardening, cooking, home hints and things of that nature to read and keep. For ages now most of these clippings have been scattered about the place cause we had nowhere solid for them to live, but after a little more papier machê-ing, this was constructed:


I quite liked it when it was at the raw stage, but I made a bit of a hodge-podge of it when I added the paint. At the end of the day though, it's job is to store clippings in and, after adding some ribbon and some small bits of dowel as a binding mechanism, it does what it is supposed to do to a T.



After all that, I have decided I definately dig papier machê. It's messy and fun, it makes you think a bit creatively with construction, it is quite practical and it's an awesome way to actually use all the free newspapers and advertising we seem to get here. I was chuffed to bits then, to find that the latest Craftster Challenge is to "Repurpose a Catalogue". I am totally going to be entering that one, and have already started on my piece......

.....but thats a post for another day.

Spring Lanterns

I seemed to have started a little tradition here. For each season, I create a new set of tea-light candle lanterns. It started with the samhain (autumn) ones I made last year and was followed by the Yule Log ones I made for xmas.

For spring, I decided I really loved all the wonderful fresh green colours the trees are sprouting. They all look like tasty, yummy salads. I decided to try and capture that a little, along with some of the colours of the flowers down in the garden.

(^ I quite liked the little bird on that one)

(^In the background there you can see my lovely sister-in-law and half of my brother-in-law as they crossed the finish line of the Copenhagen Marathon last year. They are full of awesome and win those two.)

I wonder what I will do for the summer?

Abandoned books, green window-sills and dreams of fertiliser.

My husband and I have a plan.

Sometime in the next year or so, we want to move out of this cosy little appartment and hopefully onto a property in the countryside around Vejle - just south of here and closer to my husband's workplace.

The idea is going to be that while he goes about his archaeologist shenanigans, I will focus on trying to make us at least semi self-sufficent through maintaining a kitchen garden, maybe a small brood of chickens and anything else that crops up around the house. Now some might see this as being a bit old-fashioned, the woman at home while the man brings home the bacon. But we dont see it that way. We see it as a fair balance of the workload of our combined lives together. The husband has actually just said that he would love it to be the other way around, so that he could be at home pottering in the garden. But at the end of the day my grasp of field archaeology is pretty weak so I dont think his workplace would let us swap. :P

I look forward to it. So much so that I have actually lately been feeling that my life is a little on hold untill the first moment I dig into the soil on our own little piece of the world. I've been ploughing the internet for sites on self-sufficiency, organic fruit and vegetable gardening, raising chickens, composting, basic capentry techniques and anything else we might need to know to get the rest of our lives underway. I have even started trying to maintain a little windowsill garden here in the flat, just to get into the swing of things.


The other day the husband placed an order through amazon for "The New Complete Book Of Self-Sufficiency: The Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers" by John Seymour, and it got me to thinking about all the groovy books I left behind in Australia on just this topic.

I have wanted to live a semi self-sufficient lifestyle since I was in my late teens. When I turned 18 and inherited a sum of money, I even seriously looked into buying a share on a commune outside of Nimbin, on the far north coast of New South Wales, just to try and live that dream. Unfortunately, the banks (whom I still needed because my "sum of money" was not quite enough) didn't see my dream as being very profitable to them so they denied my loans over and over again.

Now I really wish that I had kept all those great books I had on permaculture and gardening and generally being a green-thumbed hippie. I cant for the life of me think why I didn't bring them either. I knew from very early on in my relationship with my husband that he had similar dreams, so there was always the possibility that we would end up pursuing them. The only reasons I can think of for my stupidity are:

A) They were all pretty big books, and therefore fairly heavy, so the added cost of shipping them was something we didn't really need.

B) Most of them were based on Australian and southern hemisphere climates, so I somehow didn't think they would be useful in Denmark.

C) I'm a right, royal nincompoop.

I'm going for the C option right now, kicking myself over and over for not having them here next to me to look longingly at while we bide our time before making it all a reality.

Forums

 
I love online forums. They are the platform of the procrastinator, the dias of the dawdler, the lectern of the lackadaisical. On a forum, you can be whoever you want, or just be yourself. You get to meet new people, chat with old friends, talk bollocks and generally have a blast.

I have also found forums having a profound effect on my life. I met my husband through the forum for a doom metal band called Type O Negative. We got to know each other through reading each others posts there, via private messages and later through Skype and other messenger services.

Over the years, I have met others on forums who, although we have had no contact with one another in real life, I now consider to be good friends. I care about them and what happens in their lives. I open up to them when I'm having a bad day, and I try and be there for them when they are in the same boat.

Sometimes, a community like this can inspire and amuse and at other times you wish you could reach through a computer and slap someone. Not everyone gets along in the real world and the same can be true on a forum. Except on a forum there is that added benefit of being at least partially anonymous. You can really lay into someone if they get under your skin, or you can ignore them completely. To me its always more fun to lay in. Sometimes people just need to be told how ridiculous they come across.

Considering the joy I get from online forums, I'm surprised that I never thought to try and start one before. Recently though I was looking at ProBoards and thought I'd give it a shot, mainly to provide another avenue of contact with my friends back in Australia and around the world. I have been told that ProBoards can be, and I quote, "kind of icky", but I figure it's a simple and free place to start.

And so opens The Bungalow. My little experiment in creating a net haven for friends.

And, of course, it's purple.


Everyone is welcome to join, but I cant promise that it will always be full of hugs and niceties. There will be swearing, flaming and general nastiness at times probably. Some of us like it that way :P