A new dawn, a new day … happy new year!

Just a wee post to wish our readers all the best for the new year, here’s wishing all your hopes and dreams come true.

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day have a …

… HAPPY NEW YEAR …

… and have some fun!

A winter’s tale …

It all began yesterday, I had been chatting to the kids about our Christmas wreath …

… when they decided it needed something, extra, “a drop of the snow spray”,
they had pleaded and, well, it seemed like such a harmless idea. 
A bit of entertainment for the kids …

… but they just didn’t know when to stop …

… and then disaster!  The button stuck on and into the night the ’snow’ continued to spray it’s white fluffiness all over …

… by morning it had finally stopped but not before it had layered the land in it’s permanent homage to winters bygone.

You’ve got to love winter and we might have a white Christmas this year … if only it wasn’t so blinkin’ cold!

One Million Giraffes

I just found out about this great project today and had to share it.  It’s certainly ambitious but I don’t think it’s impossible.

Ola Helland is a guy from Norway who is trying to collect one million images of “hand made” giraffes by 2011.  Besides a bet with a friend, he’s got a deeper reason for this project.

Ola says:

“The giraffes cannot be drawn on a computer since the whole point of this project is to give the digital world a break and let humans be humans for just a little while.  People spend too much time in front of their TVs and computers.  It’s time to create something with your hands!  Something you can feel, touch and hold!  I don’t care how you make your giraffe(s) as long as it’s not on a computer.  Try being old fashioned for once, it’s actually a lot of fun.”

“Getting one million giraffes in such a short timeframe is impossible.  Or is it?  That’s what I’m trying to find out.  Yes,  I know it means that I need about one giraffe a minute.  And that I’m not even close to making it at this pace.  But at this point it really doesn’t matter if I make it to a million.  It would be mindblowingly cool if I did, but consider this for a second: There are people all over the world drawing giraffes right now.  Isn’t that cool?  I think it’s really, really cool.  I think it’s very interesting to see how many giraffes I will get, but it’s even more interesting and fun just to sit back and look at all the amazing giraffes that are pouring in.  Have you looked in the gallery?  There’s some really amazing stuff in there.  So.  If you think this is only about reaching a million you’ve kinda missed the point of the project.  It doesn’t matter if I make to a million.  I really, really want to and I’m still working towards that goal, but at this point it’s just fun to see people all over the world turning off their TVs, putting their computers away and sitting down and drawing giraffes.  Old school style.  People spend too much time being digital.  They should be analog, being human, creating something real (not 0’s and 1’s) for a change.  Most people love it when they try it.”

Here’s my giraffe (the image links to Ola’s website so you can see how your giraffe would look in situ):

You can upload yours to Ola’s website, browse all the other giraffes or find out more at the following address: http://olahelland.net/giraffes/

Go on, draw a picture and help Ola out…you know you want to!

a view of the scottish highlands

We’re back from our holidays both refreshed and exhausted.  There are almost 600 photos to sort through; it could be some time before we emerge from the digital darkroom!

In the meantime here’s a picture of Stac Pollaidh at sunrise.  The view from our holiday cottage to this hill was uninterrupted and seemed to change every time we saw it.

Click on the picture to see the full size image.

We spent all week longing to climb this and thinking we couldn’t because the kids aged 5 and 2 wouldn’t be able to.  Well, on the last day of our holiday we decided to see how far we could get with them and they surprised us by climbing all the way to the top, round the back and down again without complaint.  It’s amazing what you can achieve with some fudge and the promise of chips and ice cream!

We got some cracking pictures from the top…well worth the hike, which took us over some very steep terrain with the aforementioned nippers…did I mention how proud of them we are?

If you are ever in the Scottish highlands with your children looking for a hill to climb then we think Stac Pollaidh would make a good choice.  There’s a made path most of the way and on a sunny day at the end of a very sunny week there were no boggy bits.  A map showing the path is available from Ordnance Survey.

what to do with all those vintage buttons?

Over the years I have amassed quite a collection of vintage buttons.  This morning I set out to sort my buttons, after all what else is there to do on a wet and windy Sunday afternoon?  The following pictures show the results of a day of hard labour with the button tins.

first I organised them by colour

then I took some pictures

then I sewed some onto a piece of fleece and put it in a frame

and Alasdair took some arty pictures.

I have literally thousands of vintage buttons.  They’ll either be made into arrangements like this or sold as sets once they’re sorted and cleaned.

more photography … an exciting diversion from papier mache, wood carving and painting?

In the absence of any new handmade stuff to upload I thought I’d add another mini-series of photographs for your perusal and delectation … if exciting railway signage is your thing then you’ve come to the right place, if not check out the rest of our Stuff here!

As I mentioned in my previous post Leadhills was once a hub of activity where lead mining was a thriving industry, of course all this lead that was being extracted required moving and so it came to pass that, for a short while, this remote village was connected to the rest of civilisation by train.  It seems strange to think of it now, in a time when many rural towns lack such a basic and fundamental element of infrastructure.

The images here show signs that accompany the existing narrow gauge tourist railway that essentially leads to nowhere, a nowhere called Glengonnar Halt.  Here you can disembark, stretch your legs, and admire some rocks before deciding to walk back to the station you just left or hop back on the train for the return journey.

Of course, outisde of holiday season it’s closed.

For me photography is really not much more than a distraction, I do enjoy attempting to compose something interesting, or trying to catch a particular light or mood, alas though my real interest is far more tangible than the seemingly insubstantial world of digital photography.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve been spending so much time ‘playing’ with papier mache, flour, paint and wood … although not necessarily all at the same time! 

I should have at least one item finished by the weekend, something a bit new for me in terms of presentation, although I fear I cannot give away too much at this stage, I am looking forward to the finished article and seeing whether or not it lives up to my expectations!

Dereliction – a photography series

This is just a small series of photo’s taken one foggy afternoon on the outskirts of the village of Leadhills, which is nestled in the Lowther hills in Southern Scotland.  The village and it’s neighbour (Wanlockhead) have a long and rich mining history going back hundreds of years and each in it’s own time has been the highest village in the country … currently Wanlockhead holds that particular honour, although they’ve always tended to get a bit above themselves!

The mining is all long since ceased and all that remains to hint at it’s existence is a series of ruined and unmaintained works building dating back to Victorian times, there are also the fenced off mine shafts which descend into cold dank darkness deep beneath the ground.

The dankness seems to reach skywards and the weather often reflects the cold and the damp of the darker places under the ground, rain is to be expected when weather reports on the radio talk of low cloud it’s fog that residents think of.

mushroom photo a diversion from wood carving and papier mache-ing

When I’m not running around threatening perfectly good sticks with my whittling and wood carving knives or shredding newspapers and sticking them to unsuspecting moulds I quite often find myself taking pictures of a whole host of random subjects … I’ll maybe upload more in the coming days given that I’ll not be finishing any stuff in the immediate future given a shortage of inspiring lumps of wood, and a lack of motivation to go and chop the logs that would yield said lumps.

I have got a couple of papier mache projects on the go at the moment including a bowl and a small character that I can’t help thinking of as a teeny-tiny-pontipine … it won’t be, but currently that’s where it is in my head … actually, that concerns me a bit!?

Anyway, in keeping with Jolene’s mushroom / toadstool  slant at the moment (yup, there’s more to come on that front), here’s where the fairies really live …

happy new year

We’d like to wish all of our readers a very happy and prosperous 2009

We’ll be back next year with more crafty goodness and perhaps a few tutorials.