Battleworn

I was on the front page yesterday! :D Featured in a lovely treasury by the even lovelier annejulie. The page won't work for me so it might have expired! Pity, it was a great one.

I've not had the energy to do much this last week due to being sick sick sick. I barely ever get sick- but every now and then i lay down and let it wash over. Usually while everyone around me is building tissue mountains and moaning about their cotton-wool muscles, I'm serving up chicken soup and announcing in a bracing voice 'I never get sick!!'

The whole process begins when the cold germs first hit- I'll feel a bit lethargic, a bit gunked up. 'No worries!' says I in my typically Australian enthusiasm, I'll just beef up the vitamins. A few more days later will see me slugging around the house stubbornly ignoring the worsening symptoms, yelling "I will not get sick! i refuse!!! so AWAY sickness!!!"

Most of the time this works- much to my friends' amusement, but then they still can't get over that I can order up car parking spaces from thin air and get flies to leave the room on command, so what do they know.

But if I once- just once- secretly and very quietly say 'oh alright then, I'll be sick'....then I get sick. And this week I said it. I know it's mostly because I've been stressed about something, a decision I'm teetering over. I'm not going to elaborate on it but it's one of those pesky 'crossroads' decisions that you avoid making because you know it will shift planets. And I don't want to see any 'you'll make the right choice...' comments, because I won't- I'm horrific at making good decisions. I have alot of talents, but that ain't one!

Anyway- one thing I have had the energy for is the studio. I love that room. Even in it's (most usual) pigsty bomb site mode it is still a glorious place to be, filled with potential and creative flame. I've started laying out some more wrist cuffs because I haven't made one in some time (so pre-occupied with the brooches, I just love making them!) and I'm getting back into paper collage again too, if only in the form of book scrap on buttons.

Speaking of paper, I thought you might like to see my packaging that items get sent out in. It's often changing depending on what I have about me, and I find myself needing to be creative with it.



If I could I would simply embellish gift boxes and use those, but not only are my cuffs to long for anything I've found so far, the gift boxes make the parcel too thick and my shipping charges go up by as much as $6.

One of the things I did today was another round of dye- this one was a bit of an experiment, as I finally decided to go ahead and see what the Dickens white dye would do. Yes, white dye. Or 'super blanc' as the label said. It looked like off milk powder and mixed to an offending urine tone with an even more offending odour. I decided at that moment that the back decking won out over the kitchen table for that dye run.

I wondered (in my usual innocence) if I could add a drop of black to it and make grey dye. Sounds about as logical as white dye does, so I gave it a shot. And lo- grey dye!

Okay so it doesn't look grey- it turned up a purple/blue tinge, as black dyes are always just really really really really dark green or brown or purple; I've never had a true black. I suppose white dye must just be a tiny packet of bleach, though it didn't smell like it.

Once I'd squished in all the lacework (I don't like to stir it too much as I'm less likely to get blotches) I trickled about 4 tablespoons of brown dye (pre-made up) over the top, and left it to settle without stirring it. There wasn't any salt involved in this dye job, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference so in future I may be able to do away with it. I'd like to learn natural dyeing anyway, but that's one of those things I never seem to be able to get around to.