Yey, I'm a Versatile Blogger :0)

I found out yesterday that I have received a ‘Versatile Blogger Award’ from jewellery designer / maker Shirley! You can see her gorgeous work on her blog Mamasakio.... Thanks Shirley! X

As part of the award I have to reveal seven facts about my good self. I’ll try to do this without being scary   ( or boring)    :0)

1

I love to laugh. This is a good thing, but sometimes it can get me into trouble because when I am nervous I tend to get a bit too giddy. I think some people might think I am too loud at times which is a shame... I’m like the anxious puppy who wants everybody to be happy, bouncing up and down too much wagging my tail and knocking over furniture. The secret truth is I am actually quite shy, this has been may way in life of dealing with it. I adore comedy in film and on TV... I love Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton so very much that sometimes I get teary because I can’t stand the fact they are so long gone! Seeing Monty Python’s Life of Brian at the cinema when it was very first released – was for me, a poor Python-deprived teenager (my parents weren’t fans) a complete comedy revelation. When I feel really down, I watch Matthau and Lemon in The Odd Couple or Curtis / Lemon / Monroe in Some Like it Hot. Spinal Tap makes me laugh hysterically; I love Ealing Comedies and Ben Stiller movies. TV programmes like Family Guy and Green Wing, Spaced, Black Books all have me snorting with laughter, BUT, here’s my comedy ‘dirty secret’.... something I have never announced in public before so please don’t tell anyone else. I never, ever (not even once) found Seinfeld funny. Please don’t hate me.

2

One of my most favourite fiction reads ever is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Please, please read it if you haven’t before. It is magical and achingly sad in parts but well worth it. Just keep a hanky with you! I’m a professional librarian so I had to get literature in!

3

As I noted in my previous post, I once sat on a wasps nest. I was playing hide and seek with friends in the local woods and I found a big tree to hide behind. As I settled down I heard a ‘buzzy’ noise get louder and louder. As I stood up I realised I was surrounded by really annoyed wasps and that was when I saw the smashed up nest. I ran, the fastest I have ever run back home. It probably took me a good seven or eight minutes but I kept up the speed the whole way. When I got home I had been stung everywhere and still had the odd wasp in my hair, on my socks etc. I was actually being looked after by my lovely elderly neighbours that day – they were my adopted grandparents, and they were mortified when they saw me. Now, if that happened to a seven year old child today you would be rushed to A&E pretty swiftly. Back in 197? The cure for all my sting wounds was a liberal application of Dolly Blue. I don’t know how many of you remember Dolly Blue. It might have been called something different outside the UK. It was a substance put in a clothes wash to give your whites that ‘bluey whiteness’ all good people crave. Back in 197? it was already really old fashioned, my mum didn’t use it but thank goodness for Mr and Mrs Dunning’s Dolly Blue! I don’t know what it contained but it took the pain away from all my stings and once I had stopped crying I loved the war paint all over my body!! I can still see the look of horror on my mother’s face when she came to pick me up later that day. I looked like William Wallace.

4

I would love to get a tattoo of a sparrow – a proper, photo-real image of a sparrow sitting on a cherry blossom branch (again a botanically correct drawing of the blossom) but I am too scared to do it  :0\   Or am I?  :0/   I probably am   :0|   Ooh, but I would like one.....   :0)

5

I love music... I carry my iPod everywhere with me. My all time, forever-favourite band is Rush. My main love is rock / punk / grunge and I play music very loud. I love going to gigs and have seen most of the artists I would like to see. I shall finally be seeing Nick Cave in October (woo hoo!!). Of the artists I still haven’t seen, the one I must see before I die is David Bowie. Some favourite live shows: Eels, Buzzcocks, Futureheads, Rush, The Who, Iggy Pop, David Byrne, The Hives, Mark Lanegan (oh too many to list). Most tedious live show – The Blue Aeroplanes... I was given the ticket.

6

In another life, where science instead of the arts are my forte, I would be a geologist. My alter ego is actually a paleo-archeologist / geologist :0)   But I was useless at physics etc so I’m not. I am an artist with a large collection of rubble.

7

I like to go for long, long walks – get away from everything. I don’t get to do it as often as I’d like at the moment. I like to have a sketchbook and a camera with me and just dawdle along taking everything in. If a particular walk is supposed to take around three hours, I need to allow at least six, because I have to look at all the flowers, paddle in streams, sit and watch birds, sketch, climb trees, collect rubble, make daisy chains - you get my meaning. I am very much a rambler.

See here I am, just sitting again... I was watching some finches flitting about in the trees.

I think there are actually way more than seven points there.  Point 8 = I’m value for money!
Now the next part of my award entails me selecting 15 blogs that I would like to pass the award on to. This is a toughie because I subscribe to many blogs and I try to keep up with them regularly and I could very easily have chosen many, many more! So, please know I love you all, every blog I have ever left a comment on has been written by a person who has inspired and held my interest or made me laugh in some way, but here are the fifteen I managed to select, blindfold, with a pin:

1 Debra Morris Sketchblog
2 Down a Dusty Lane
3 PAMO BLOG
4 Impoftheyard's Photojournal
5 Mimilove
6 Dan's Canvas
7 Image Maker
8 Raena's Sketch Journal
9 Winna's World
10 Weekly Art Assignment
11 Nanke's Stuff
12 Inklings
13 Colour Blob
14 Andrea Joseph's Sketchblog
 and last but absolutely not least this wonderfully inspiring blog:
15 Patrick the incurable optimist  I can't remember which of you lovely blogosphere people led me to this site, but thank you, whoever you are x

So, all you winners, if you would like to - cut and paste yourself the award badge from my site and then, if you feel the urge - give us seven interesting facts about yourself, then select 15 other lovelies to receive the award.  You don't have to waffle endlessly like me! xx

Buzz if you like, but don't sting me

Didn't realise how little I had been posting recently.... partly because I've been busy in the proper job and partly because I have been producing some new artwork both for my jewellery and a couple of EDMs on the boil (so to speak - will post these over next few days whan I have caught up with everyone elses offerings).  Here is my latest Wild Thing... a bee!

I have a sheet ready to print so that I can start preparing some soldered bits and pieces.  I am going to make some little charms and pendants with a 'Halloween' Wild Things theme.  Yesterday I started a painting of a spider... now, let me explain that I have a very stupid and irrational fear of spiders.  I live in a country where spiders are not a threat, yet just the thought of one scuttling along makes me want to run for the hills.  Ridiculous!  So I am finding myself as normal, totally engrossed in the painting I am doing and then, every now and again... shuddering at the subject matter.  I have no real fear of any other living thing.  As a child I once sat on a wasps nest (long story) and was stung everywhere.  Am I frightened of wasps / bees / stingy things?  No.  I once had the little finger of my right hand almost ripped off (no seriously - I have a cracking scar to prove it) by a rearing pony.  Am I scared of all things equine?  No.  As a child I was bitten several times by dogs - once on the face (again small scar to prove it) - I'm not frightened of dogs, never have been, which is why I got myself into so many scrapes with them because I always threw my arms around any dog I saw as a child  :0)

Being scared of spiders is silly.  I have never been hurt by a spider, never had a spider trauma... apart from the time my friends child held the biggest one up under my nose saying 'Look what I found Lesley....'.  I was horrified, my instinct was to leap over the fence into the neighbour's garden, or worse still chuck the child and her find into next door's garden.  I told her I thought it was beautiful and she should put it back where she found it because it's family were missing it, which she dutyfully did.  I think (hope) the rictus smile and my googling eyes passed her by. I would hate to be responsible for imprinting the same fear in another generation.

So, deep breaths, keep calm Lesley, and get that painting finished!

TTFN, xx 

Street art by C215

Hi all! Really quick post here because I have been meaning to share this with you all for ages. I am really into street art... by that I mean the clever, thought provoking stuff. This guy's work, I think, is simply beautiful. I kept my eyes peeled on my recent trip to London & Paris in the vain hope of spotting one of his works, but I didn't, one day! He is known as C215 and I think this video sums his work up. What do you think? Hope you like xx

Rainy days can be good

I am nearly half way through my summer holiday - though this last week has been so rainy and blowy it hasn't been the expected week of day trips and ice cream I had thought it might be.  Still, just being off work is bliss, and the weather has meant I have felt justified in getting on with more making of Wild Things.  So, here is a very quick post about my newest item, just listed in my Etsy shop, a necklace made using my seahorse painting.  I'm really pleased with this piece, I have used chain instead of ribbon for the necklace and think it works really well.  Fingers crossed someone else will love it too :o)

I'm off to work on a big, fluffy bumble bee painting that will hopefully be used in some jewellery pieces too.  I'll be back soon, hopefully with bee complete and some sketches from days out I will have when the sun comes back out - because it will, it always does!  Maybe I'll get a proper chance to have a play with my shiny new camera kit too!!  Watch this space.

It's all OK I used a rubber.....

It has taken me ages to come up with an idea for EDM 206 'Draw something familiar to you that you know is called something else in another region', but I have had real fun with this.  I'm not trying to match the comedic level of the extremely talented Andrea Joseph when she tackled the whole 'fanny' issue (insert lots of English blushing & - see her post for February 19th HERE - you will need to scroll down a couple of posts to see it).

I have had the odd idea for this one then last week, while going over my Paris sketches I found a page I had abandoned.  In true EDM spirit I decided I should try to mend it, but I just seemed to make a bigger mess.  That's when I thought about using my rubber.... and that was it, an idea was born. 

I set to with the already messed up page, made an even bigger mess - and loved every minute of it!!  Then I painted a RUBBER on some watercolour paper, cut it out and stuck it on top of the pencil scribbles. 

You see I know that generally speaking a 'rubber' to my lovely friends across The Pond has an entirely different meaning - you know what I mean boys and girls ;o)  Yet here in the UK it is absolutely an everyday term for well, a rubber.  You would never get anyone here asking to borrow an eraser to rub out pencil marks. Even typing the word doesn't seem right!  It's funny isn't it how things can have such varied meanings?  But it all leads to fantastic innuendo (or as I prefer to call it 'In Your Endo) - which is VERY British humour.  Google the 'Carry On' films sometime (Oooh, Matron!).  And, more importantly it's all part of the beauty of the English language that adapts and adopts fer more than any other language (probably).

I found this British - American glossary online and think it's wonderful, thought you might like to see it too?  You can swap it round between countries, which makes it even more useful.

Armed with this glossary my American chums can now also appreciate this little anecdote from my childhood:

I would have been possibly 10 or 11 years old and at school pen-pals were being organised between the school I was at and the school we were partnered with in Lille, France.  We all had to write a letter to a pupil at the French school.  These letters were to be passed around the pupils in the equivalent French class and they would reply to us.  I was very taken with this idea and laboured long and hard over my letter, illustrating it (of course) and sticking pictures to it.  After a couple of weeks, friends in my class started to receive responses from the French pupil who had picked them.  I began to get more excited.  Every morning I ran downstairs and asked if my French letter had arrived.  I was obsessed with receiving my French letter.  I told everyone I met, family, friends, complete strangers, that I was going to get a French letter through the post.  I didn't flinch when I noticed the strained looks and stifled grins on the faces of the adults I told this to.  After I can't remember how long, my lovely Dad could take it no more, sat me down and told me why I should re-phrase what I was saying.  I have never been so mortified in my entire life.  Well I have, but those are other stories  ;o) 

Now I leave it to you to look up French Letter in the glossary I have supplied you with!!!  More blushes!!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend xx

Is it really already a month ago?

I have finally got around to photographing some of the sketches I did in Paris - here's the first, a sketch I made at Pere Lachaise cemetery:

It's not the best sketch I have ever produced by any stretch!  It was a very hot day and my paint was dry almost as it hit the paper!  I also ended up having to use several different drawing implements so - the lines are a bit messy - and as for the perspective!!  Still, I really enjoyed painting it, and as with any on-the-spot painting it evokes so many memories, the smell of the trees, the sound of them, the overgrown plants and patches of grass - and of course the heat!

I'm going to class this as EDM # 29 Draw something architectural - I think it fits that category fairly well and it is an EDM I may have otherwise avoided doing. Cheeky I know!

More to follow when I get my act together, hope you are all having a lovely weekend. :o)

Finally, I make and list my wolf necklace...

Just a quicky (ooh err).  I made one version of this necklace, managed to scratch the glass in the process and then in the most ridiculous, slap-stick accident that Buster Keaton would have been proud to choreograph I managed to smash the piece completely.  !!!!

I salvaged the bead dangle and the silk ribbon necklace and produced another soldered pendant, so here he is...

He needs to find a new, secure home before Mrs Clumsy handles him too much - so he's alread been listed in my Etsy shop!  :o)

TTFN, L xx