Efforts in creativity

Things have been a bit mad recently. I'll explain later. The long and short of it is I've needed to find ways to silence my brain, and to focus on one small task at a time. Otherwise the deluge of information and ideas is rather overwhelming.

I spent quite a bit of time over the Christmas period crafting jewellery, and I've picked it up again in the last few days. There's something rather zen about picking apart a piece of unloved jewellery and piecing something new together.



I was given a whole bunch of beaded jewellery by an old housemate before she moved out, which has bulked out my collection of materials considerably, but I've also made a few purchases here and there.



These interesting coloured chip beads came from Fishtail, Montana. The shop had strings and strings of locally sourced mineral beads. I had to limit myself to just the two colours.





I love them, and I want to make use of them, but the holes drilled in them are a little small for the metal findings I use. I'll either have to attempt to learn about using thread or wire, or find myself a drill.



Some of my creations are simpler than others. I have a few different colours to work with, and gold is not something I would usually wear. I'm quite tempted to try now that I've been playing with it a bit.

But these are probably my favourites...



I'm in the process of opening up a shop on Etsy, but being the sort of person who agonises over these things, it'll take me a while before I can summon the courage to get it up and running properly.

Spinach soup, rawhide, and a comedy of errors

The last few days have seen a series of errors on my part. Some were innocuous enough: turning up to the wrong class at university because I thought I was in Group 2 (like all of last year) and I'm actually in Group 1. Others were marginally more serious: discovering that the reason my company hasn't been receiving mail as promptly as it should is because somebody put the wrong address on the website. And that somebody was me.

Anyway, no lasting harm done. I spent a rainy afternoon in the kitchen, where I promptly made this error:



I was peeling a potato, happily thinking about good it was that we only have a cheap peeler and there's no danger of peeling through half a fingernail like I've seen other people do. I immediately peeled through half of my fingernail.

Once I had jumped around the kitchen, sworn a few times, stuck the nail back down and trussed it up in first aid supplies, I got back to cooking, and made this lovely spinach, nutmeg and potato soup. Souper (sorry) simple, delicious and terribly good for you. There are no photos of the process because I was concentrating on not peeling any more fingernails.



Chunk up one onion, two peeled potatoes (do not peel your fingernail off whilst peeling potatoes), and fry in some oil over medium heat. Add around half a litre of vegetable stock (I like Kallo, it's less salty than others), and let it simmer for about ten minutes to soften the potatoes. Then cram in as much spinach as you can muster. I had a big bag of true spinach - the sort with huge leaves and long stalks, not the baby kind you get in supermarkets - which needed eating, and I just threw all of it in there. It was probably a good 400g, maybe more.

Put the lid on the saucepan for a little bit to get the steam into the spinach to help it wilt. When it's soft enough, stir it into the water with the potato and onion and give it another few minutes. Remove from the heat and blend it up. Season well with lots of black pepper and fresh ground nutmeg, and it will likely need a good amount of salt too. Give it a few tastes and adjust as you like it. The potato bulk makes this soup quite thick, which is how I like soup, but you could make it go further and thin it out with more stock if you wanted to.

I'm trying to cut back on my plastic waste (First World Guilt), so instead of my usual method of freezer bags, I portioned it out into three Kilner jars and stuck these in the freezer. Make sure your soup has cooled completely before you freeze it in glass containers, to prevent cracks. Mine appear to be intact. Phew!



In the meantime, Cowboy has a new project on his grubby hands. This, my friends, is a cow hide:



He's been commissioned to make some custom tack for a few riders in his area, out of braided rawhide, so the first step is to obtain a cow hide from the butcher, and stretch it out somewhere far from where you live to keep the stink away. He's borrowing a friend's barn for the process. I have no idea what you do next.

In other news, the banana oat cookies freeze wonderfully in freezer bags, and defrost nicely inside the plastic bag (guilt). They still taste soft and delicious once thawed. Hurrah!

Fixing dried out Mac Fluidline

Thank goodness for the internet.


The other day, I went to apply my favourite eyeliner (Mac Fluidline), which I had foolishly left with the lid off in the hot weather.


It looked very sad indeed. Dry, cracked clean down the middle, and there was no way I was ever going to coax any of that black goodness to come out of the pot and on to my brush, let alone stick on my eyelids.

I became cross with myself for being careless and foolish. I did not want to throw away something perfectly usable, if only I could fix it. Then I became determined not to be defeated by a pot of make up, and began to hit up Google for some solutions to my problem.

When I found one, I was so bemused at how it could work, I put off trying it out until the next morning. It involved eye drops, which intrigued me.

I had some cheap and cheerful eye drops in a drawer, from when I used to commute to work on the underground and my eyes would get very sore and scratchy. I had First World Problems.



I squeezed three drops into the dried up pot, and admittedly, I was a little disappointed that it didn't magically fix itself immediately. The drops sort of rolled around in the crack, and nothing seemed any different. I grabbed a kirby grip (that's a bobby pin to you guys over in the USA - hi!), and started to scrape the eyeliner off the sides of the pot and stir it around with the eyedrops.

At about this point, I thought I had lost my mind and should just throw it all away.



"Never, never, never give up!" Winston Churchill boomed in my head. Besides, I've got an unpleasant tendency to give up something that I am not immediately good at, and that's not a good way to approach life when you're 27 years old and need to get good at something.

So I forged ahead. Once I'd mixed everything together well and smoothed out the paste (and flicked some all over my white desk, hands, fingers, clothes etc), I took a cotton wool bud and started to restore some order to the little pot of horrors.

It took some patience, but it eventually looked like this:



I had to clean up the rim of the pot, and then clean everything around the pot with some make up remover, but I was pretty pleased with it. The gel itself was now the perfect consistency to apply to my eyelids, and gives a good clean, bold line.

I am now obsessive about replacing the lid on the pot, even though I'm armed with this fix now.

Thank you, internet. Specifically, thank you to this page for the original advice that I found.

Edited 12/03/2014: Since I posted this originally, I've had to undertake this whole process twice, as the pot keeps drying out. I'm not that good at the whole lid-replacing thing. I also actually prefer the eyeliner with a softer consistency, and would suggest using four eye drops and making the paste a little thinner. This might prolong the time that it's usable before it needs fixing again.

Upcycling

I'm a bit of a hippy at heart, and have a deep-rooted love of composting, recycling and reusing things. I hate to throw things away that still have life in them.

The other day I decided to go through my overflowing jewellery box and clear out all the old bits and pieces that I never wear any longer, and which are just gathering dust. I had quite a pile by the end of it, and had streamlined my jewellery into just a few key pieces. I must be getting old.

Amongst my discard pile, I had several necklaces with beads, shells, and other dangly things on them. I've recently discovered how to make my own simple earrings, and might branch out into bracelets and necklaces too, so with this in mind, I set to work with my pliers and removed as many beads and dangly things from the chains as I could. I accumulated a (reused, previously houmous) pot of various beads that I could reconstruct at some point into something I might wear.

Here are two of my upcycled creations - two pairs of earrings. I use silver plate, because my ears are sensitive to cheap metals, but I can't afford sterling silver. Life is hard.

My craftsmanship is a little rough around the edges, but I'm getting better. I'm rather pleased with these two pairs. I have plenty more materials from the old jewellery to create some more pieces.

I'm considering selling on Etsy or similar, but I'm not sure how successful I'd be.