Monthly Archives: March 2010

Higgins and the Robot

Ha! Now that’s got you wondering hasn’t it, and I’m not going to tell you about it till the end!

I’ve got quite a backlog of photos in the camera because all this tinkering with the blog and the studio has meant I’m really behind on posts. I was also full of good intentions to make pretty Easter things (I have to confess to 5 blown egg shells which didn’t get painted LAST Easter -I’ve forgotten the excuse I had then) . It’s been pretty inpossible to find any of my equipment however, seeing as it’s all packed in boxes in the spare room, and I’m trying to bring it all out slowly so I can sort it to avoid the minestrone type mixture of stuff I usually end up with when I’m working.

I did have wool and needles to hand though so I’ve been able to do a little knitting project AND write a knitting pattern so I have been putting in more than my twenty minutes of creativity a day.

Firstly, I managed to get a picture of the Twisted Hazel which I gave my Mother for Mother’s Day several years ago. It’s qite slow growing, and that first year had just the one catkin so it’s doing pretty well now.

The little daffodils sheltering underneath look so pretty. The miniature ones do so much better in this windy spot because they don’t get flattened as easily. It was even warm enough for not just one, but two ladybirds. I’ve only just spotted the second one.

With a birthday in the family this weekend and a celebratory lunch I’ve got the Easter Tree up and ready. This is where the painted eggs are supposed to hanging… Anyway, the little decorations look pretty, and the pink primroses set it off nicely.

Then there were the egg cosies, knitted in my favourite wool. (Hasn’t it gone a long way since I did all that dyeing last year? Time for a fresh batch with new colours very soon)

I’ve put the pattern in the tutorial section which you’ll find at the top under the banner.
And now for that robot… Several years ago a very clever person, someone who got their priorities in life just right, invented a robot vacuum cleaner. It was HUGELY expensive and I said at the time, if I ever win the lottery I’m having one of those. Well time went by …and I still haven’t won the lottery… but the price of the vacuum cleaner went down to a nearly sensible price, and Lakeland featured them in their catalogue and I thought ‘Why not?’ So Kryton came to live with us. He sits under the work top in the utility room until he’s needed, charges out with a triumphant little fanfare when he is switched on, trundles round the room humming and sucking away and spins frantically round on the spot with a blue light flashing when he finds a particularly filthy bit . Once he’s finished he wheels himself back to the docking station and parks himself with another fanfare before going back on charge, the light on top pulsing red like a heart beat. Occasionally we might have a little problem and Kryton stops, gives a mournful little toot and says, in a strongly American accented female voice, ‘Please clean Roomba’s brushes’ . I can’t tell you how disconcerting that was the first time that happened. Anyway, it’s great to be able to drink coffee and watch the vacuum doing its stuff without me and if that makes me sound totally lazy, well…

We also had an amusing moment when Higgins, as a very small puppy, went behind Kryton’s curtain and climbed on top, stood on the go button and rode out on top looking very surprised! Not a lot fazes Higgins, but you can imagine he’s not Kryton’s number one fan, especially when it chases him round the room with the filth detector light flashing. When I got to the end of the studio painting I took the vacuum out to clean the floor prior to painting it and, as Higgins does like to be in on everything, he joined in.

Sometime I must tell you about the day he met a seal…

The White Cube

The studio is finished and is scarily, eerily, white…. I feel I must exhibit something in there, this white cube. Actually Higgins has already done that for me. When Kit popped round to admire it and I proudly flung the door open there, in the middle of the room, was an artfully placed pile of poo…oh dear… a budding yBa?

It’s amazing what this whiteness does for a space. It means that whatever is placed in there suddenly asumes a huge importance. Even a pencil on a table, a coffee cup, a dirty sock becomes a statement. I’ve got to get in there with my stuff PDQ before the mystique scares me half to death.

The challenge is to fill it with colour and to stamp my personality on it and to get CREATIVE. I’ve been talking about it long enough. I’ve actually popped over to see Marmalade Rose and asked to join the Twenty Minute Challenge to instil a little discipline into the proceedings otherwise I could spend far too much time arranging things artistically on shelves…

In the meantime I’m going to add a little more colour to the blog. I’ve been popping out in the garden on and off wielding the camera and recording the fleeting moments of spring flowers in bloom. It’s a grey day today and the crocuses are over, but we can still enjoy them, and a little sunshine.

Underneath the weeping willow and the bottom of the garden, not fairies, but Iris reticulata…

…miniature cyclamen..

… the last of the snowdrops…

…and primroses.

That’s better. I’m now buoyed up to go and shift piles of books and start filling shelves…

p.s. If you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to put your name in the hat for the ‘Little Bird’ draw!

Grand Official Opening…

…and prize draw. Now, without further ado, I can announce that the new look Planet Penny is properly up and running. I would like to thank two people to whom so much is owed. Craig, the website guru who guided me though the incomprehensible aspects of ‘computerese’ with great patience, offering a virtual hanky when my whimpering got too loud to bear, and Thomas, author, illustrator and creator of the lovely flock of sheep munching the daisies in my woolly world on Planet Penny.

I must also thank Thomas for so kindly providing fireworks and refreshments for the party since I am sitting faintly in the corner covered in emulsion paint and clutching a glass, .

When you’ve helped yourself to glass of bubbly and a cupcake, do take time to say hello and introduce yourself. To celebrate the new look and the completion of the new studio (This weekend- Hooray!) I am giving away a little needle-felted bird sculpture to the first name drawn out of the hat, the felt hat of course. I’ll do the draw on Easter Monday to give you plenty of time to join in.

This little bird has been needle-felted out of hand dyed Merino wool until firm and then decorated with hand dyed Blue Faced Leicester yarn.

He’s very tactile, I do like making things which just sit in the palm of the hand. He sits happily on a shelf as an ornament, makes a great pin cushion and even works on a dressingtable as a place to pin jewellery.

So please leave a comment and get your name in the hat for a chance to give a little bird a new home.

In the meantime, Cheers!

Getting Sheepshape

Here we are, in the new look Planet Penny, where the sheep are more colourful and jollier than the poor chilly ones living in the fields nearby.

The doors are open and you are welcome to pop in and have a look round, but I’m afraid we’re still dashing round with paintbrushes and the vacuum cleaner so we’re not quite ready for the fireworks and cake just yet.

Besides, I have a headache…

Getting Plastered

I hope that I’m coming to the end of posts with pictures of building works, it may be informative but they are hardly the most colourful things to decorate my blog. I’ve been debating whether to put the latest ones on first and get them out of the way, or whether to save them till the end and start with prettiness. I’m really failing on the creativity front at the moment, with all my stuff in boxes, so I’ve been making the most of the colour in the garden and elsewhere.

Tim is away at work again so I am back on dog walking duty, and with the bright sunshine it’s been good to take the camera along. Bright sunshine, but still an iciness in the breeze so the walking has been brisk and photo opportunities taken speedily. I’ve just discovered that I have managed to delete the photos of Higgins on today’s walk so if anyone is waiting for an aaah moment, sorry but no doubt another one will come along tomorrow. He seems to have got the cute thing down to a fine art.

So, let’s get the exciting pictures of drying plaster out of the way. Actually that sounds as if I’m not excited, and I am. With any luck the studio will be all but finished by next weekend. I had been hoping to be painting this weekend, but the weather hasn’t been helpful with drying out.

and, complete with builder…

..and, you can see my stable door!

Meanwhile, out in the garden…

..actually Higgins has managed to get in on the act…

..I found the first primrose…

…tiny cyclamen under the weeping willow tree…

Delicate blue crocuses …

Bold and brash, purple and gold…

…and blue and yellow.

Meanwhile, back indoors, the tulips are going all unneccessary. Why do they do that?

..and down the lane there is lichen…

and moss and ferns…

Spring is definitely springing…

Here comes the sun…

…for at least two days according to the forecast (and then the snow’s back…)so I had a wizz round the garden with the camera. You’ll be glad to know my camera issues have been resolved so the moaning will stop!. With the help of Ebay I now have THREE cameras! When I went back to the nice and long suffering man at the London Camera Exchange with the new Olympus camera that I couldn’t get on with, I took along the ‘steam’ camera that Tim had bought on Ebay, a Fuji Finepix 6800Zoom which had seemed so ‘state of the art’ when I had one nearly a decade ago. I showed it to the nice man and said, ‘I just want a camera that takes pictures like this’. And he couldn’t sell me one. He said he had had the same camera for about four years, it has a fantastic lens, Tim had got an incredible bargain from Ebay and he gave me a full refund on the one I had had since November! What amazing service. He suggests I go back later in the year when the next generation of cameras comes in to see what would suit me. Meanwhile Tim went back on to Ebay to get a memory card for it and bought a second camera for the same price as a memory card, and finally found an F650 (again at a bargain price) which was the model that I wore out last year. So I have no excuse now for not filling my blog with lots of pictures – in focus!

As it’s St David’s Day and my daughter was born in Wales I have to include daffodils…

..but a little trip round the garden found things popping out in the sunshine.

It was interesting to see things from the perspective of someone very short…

Slightly out of focus, but Higgins hasn’t had a lot of photography practise so far…

Just to be completely greedy, I had a pink tulip moment when I went shopping this afternoon,

…and then in the ‘slightly sad and lonely’ bucket, I found these, which just begged to come home with me to be appreciated…

…and I had some help arranging them…

It’s amazing what you can train a dachshund to do…