My First Go At Being Behind The Counter

The title of this post suggests that I've signed up for an after-school shopkeeping job, so I'll put your minds at rest by saying that all I'm doing is a small-scale tombola with 4 friends. Still exciting and definitely blog-worthy, though. Particularly when you're designing and making the tombola itself and also contributing to toy sales and craft sales (see my gorgeous little knitted blue mouse below). I've always wanted to participate in the organization of charity sales like this (if you're wondering about the charity, it's DEBRA, a charity dealing with EB or butterfly skin, a rare condition where the skin can blister or even cut at the slightest touch), and I honestly can't wait to see people buy/win stuff that I donated, even if it is a little saddening at first losing them. Anyway, it's a week on Monday (9th July) so I guess all that's left to do is decorate the tombola...

My homemade tombola

- DP :)

The fore-mentioned blue mouse (sooo cute, though I say so myself)

I'm Back (Really This Time)

Apologies for the lack of posts in May, it's one of the busiest months of the school year, what with exams and the madness surrounding them. Anyway, I'll start blogging again on a high by mentioning a new craft technique I learnt today, a version of embossing called heat embossing or in Dramatis Persona language "draw it, cover it, tip it, gun it", which if done well can produce fantastic glossy designs (I've even provided a video to help you). And it is easily done well. What you basically do is sketch a reasonably simple design (do it quickly - it won't work if the pen has dried for too long) in a special embossing pen - "draw it", then pour embossing powder (available in most colours - I chose my favourite colours, red and green) all over the paper - "cover it".  Next "tip it" by gently shaking off the excess powder (only the powder over your pen marks will stay on the page) and finally "gun it" by carefully giving the powder a hard finish by waving an embossing gun over it. Oh, and if you're wondering where I get all the fancy craft stuff from, there's a handy stamp store on Bury Place near the British Museum called Blade Rubber Stamps. Altogether a much more enjoyable way to spend Sunday afternoons than doing some of the homework I've been having.

N.B. This technique only works on ordinary paper, and NOT on newspaper. I learnt that the hard way...

Embossing dual pen

Red and green embossing powder

Embossing gun

How to heat emboss - in video form!

A 3D heat embossed cube

A design I made with heat embossed cartoon eyes and stars

I'm Back!

The hunting room, say no more...

Just got back today from a train, ferry and plane trip around Europe, visiting Vienna, Brno (the second city in the Czech Republic), Venice and various cities and towns across Northern Greece. I saw a multitude of blog-worthy things while travelling, some funny, some odd, some plain spectacular. So here goes...

Forget zoos and aquariums,this is the skeleton house!

If only today's fashion designers could see this!

Poor me, having to sit down here while my owners drink coffee...

Something to wake you up each morning!

Umbrellas are the new weapon!

Reptiles seem to be a theme at Vienna's Secession Gallery...

A step up from having horses pull your chariot...

Now I haven't seen this in England!

Can you hear from down there?!

Hats Come In All Shapes And Sizes

I recently went to a one-room exhibition of tribal hats and headdresses from around the world at a small art gallery called Raven Row, on Artillery Lane, Spitalfields, East London, which was great for perusing, but a downside to the exhibits was a huge lack of background information about each of the pieces. However, every downside has an upside, and the lack of fact has caused me to come up with an exciting fictional idea about how my favourite of these hats came to be and what its tribal significance is.

The Ritual Of The Pecking Birds

The bird being a sacred creature to the tribe who made and wore this exquisite beaded hat, the pictured hat was the celebrated subject of the major annual festival, The Ritual Of the Pecking Birds, held every January to celebrate the coming of the new chief for the new year. In the afore-mentioned celebration, honourable members of the tribe, plus the former chief, would carefully assemble the headdress upon their new leader's head, before all the other members of the tribe would quickly unleash a flock of brown and white pigeon-like birds (the most sacred species in the aviary) wearing specially made cloaks. As soon as they landed on the hat, the six birds started to peck away all the 1000 beads stitched onto the hat (clearing the new leader of his 1000 sins), which would take them, on average, 30 days and 30 nights, a period accompanied by many raucous festivities among the tribe. However, 100 years after the forming of the tribe in 56 BC, some former chiefs began complaining of niggling headaches that had been caused by pecking birds on their heads, so instead gentler mechanical birds were used to peck off the beads, which explains the unusual appearance of this hat.

- DP :)
P.S. I'm off inter-railing around Europe now, so I'll won't be doing any posts until the 22nd April. But hopefully when I come back I'll do another holiday picture post like the one from Edinburgh!

Unknown Ways of Spending Outdoor Days

As the weather's warming up now, I thought I'd do an outdoor activity review to fit with my indoor activity one of Junk, and it's a review of one of my favourite activities, something I've been doing for nearly six months now and it's very addictive. Hope you like my review, and if you try Geocaching, enjoy that too!

Geocaching

When they're very young, everyone wants to find a tiny bit of treasure languishing in a hidden corner of beautiful countryside (and, in some cases, cities). But, sadly, not many of us manage to achieve that dream. However, thanks to the twelve-year-old, international craze of Geocaching, just a few of us just might do. The most basic form of Geocaching involves walking around an area (usually the countryside, sometimes urban areas), using a GPS device or smartphone to find containers (ranging in size from film canisters and the occasional diamond-encrusted 3cm tub to large buckets and ammo boxes) of small trinkets (such as keyrings, plastic toys and Trackables, which are trinkets created to pass from cache to cache) known as caches hidden just out of plain sight, and subsequently registering your find on the Geocaching website. And of course all the best things in life are two-way processes, so Geocachers can also create their own caches in their local area for others to try and find, and best of all, the whole basic membership, containing opportunities to both hide and seek caches, is absolutely free (there is also a premium membership, costing $30 - approximately £19 - but there are few obvious benefits). In the time between now and when it started, Geocaching has grown to be much more complex, with current cache types including Cache Series (an often themed route of several Traditional Caches), Event Caches (a formal or informal meeting of Geocachers) and Virtual Caches (intangible caches involving going to a location and answering an online question about it).

Geocaching is an ingenious idea that makes all walks considerably more fun, and even the most un-outdoorsy person will never tire of endlessly searching around and rifling through Tupperwares. If I had to say one thing against it, it would be that geocaches are always impossible to find in cities, for ever-present tall buildings seem to make it difficult for the GPS to find the satellites, so I think geocaching is better off just done in the countryside. However, now  I've become so addicted to it, I also ponder how much I was missing never knowing about it.
- DP :)

Go to www.geocaching.com to sign up now.

Check out Dramatis Persona's (geocaching alias daftydodo) Cache Series Stour Path Sidetrack.

A geocache - this image isn't mine

The Unfortunate Incident Of The Panda And The Chopping Board

When slicing food on this chopping board (one originating in Denmark) earlier this afternoon, I couldn't help but notice the panda-face burn mark on the back. Although I only know this chopping board to have visited Denmark, I'm beginning to wonder if it's had a past in China's Sichuan forests. Just think, my imagination tells me, so this is the result of my instinctive storytelling ability. A small forest fire broke out nearby to the chopping board's location, and an unfortunate panda cub's burnt eyes, nose and face accidentally knocked against the board as the frightened animal scampered back to the safety of its clan. When the atmosphere became calmer, the curious panda cub and his clan ventured out to investigate the "effigy of our cub" that their cub had previously spoken of. The rather intelligent (for pandas) clan soon discovered the reasons for the strange mark, and had the excellent reasoning to think of it as a way to publicize pandas in the Western World. As it happened the religion of this particular panda clan was to always select things at random, in order to tell Luck that they supported her, and this principle applied to choosing which country the chopping board would be sent to. And the one selected was...don't all shout at once...Denmark! As pandas are generally not accepted on human public transport, the clan set off on an epic journey on foot, taking months on end, from Sichuan to Denmark, and then many more months to find a salesman that would accept pandas trading in a chopping board for bamboo instead of money, and then another forever to get back to Sichuan, until their short life in business was over. But back in Denmark, there was an unusual amount of demand for the chopping board, and somehow through the nature of trading the chopping board made its way into our house, therefore concluding the tale. Hope you enjoyed it!
- DP :)
P.S. The actual origin of the chopping board is not clear, but some suggest it was made by a panda clan living close to the subject of this tale, whose religion was not Luck, but Craftmanship.

The Amazing Things You Find In An Old House

As you might have wrongly interpreted the title of this post as being about the range of junk items in my house, a theme rather over-mentioned in blogs in my opinion, I'll start off by saying that it's not. It's actually about a rather unusual and interesting art exhibition I went to see recently, Waste Not by the Chinese artist Song Dong, exhibited at the Barbican Centre's Curve Gallery. Actually a collaboration between Song Dong and his mother, the exhibition consists of all the things Song Dong's mother hoarded because of the social turmoil causing difficulties in purchasing anything new. Song Dong's mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, would keep everything from old-fashioned hot water bottles and thermos flasks to old tubes of toothpaste and bars of soap, just in case they would somehow come in handy in the future, and as a result there are huge collections of things that most households would only have one or two of, such as plastic bottles and rucksacks. Perhaps one of the most memorable parts of the exhibition is the impressive shoe collection, with rows and rows of different types of footwear ranging from high-heeled courts and little red baby shoes to Wellingtons. It's very enjoyable to spend an hour or so wandering around Waste Not, for not only does it open your eyes to what it must have been like living in a house with this plethora of household goods crammed into it, there are quirky surprises hidden around every corner. Aside from the fore-mentioned shoe collection, some of the more humorous parts of the exhibition include various animal-shaped hats and bags, unappealing brown soap resembling caramel, a battered Etch-a-Sketch and, the highlight for me, a range of larger-sized cuddly toys and dolls, that had definitely seen better days and are now placed upside down, residing sadly on a heap of cardboard boxes! And there may be even more surprises yet to be discovered, and who knows what you'll discover if and when you see Waste Not.

                    - DP :)
                    P.S. If you see anything else funny at Waste Not, don't hesitate to comment!

Just some of Waste Not's fizzy drink bottles

                   

Zhao Xiangyuan's old toothpaste tube hoarding

An interesting way of arranging a multitude of plastic bags - none of these images are mine