Recovering and Renovating

I let my guard down for one moment, one tiny instant, and the germs attacked. As soon as I got caught up and breathed a sigh of relief they pounced. I've been sick as a dog for almost a week. I was a terrible hostess through Easter and can only assume I made it through the holiday with the boatload of drugs and smelly home remedies I took.

BUT I'm feeling better now. Hurrah! So it's on to better thing and bigger messes.

In a previous post I mentioned a new-to-me doll house. I saw this baby on kijiji for $25 and jumped all over the listing despite it being 3 hours away. Thankfully it was close to my mum and she agreed to pick it up.

It's massive! The thing has to be about 2" wide... much larger than any of the other houses I've worked on.

This is the condition it arrived in. I haven't even given it a proper look over yet. There's a lot of work to be done, and I'll likely completely overhaul the gorgeous beast. I'm thinking this is going be a long term project, one that I can savour and put real treasures in. *girly giddy dance*

In the meantime I've got to get cracking on the goblin pub! The Brighton Art's Council is putting on a  spring craft show in May and I'd love to show it off... get cracking indeed!

We are but dust and shadow.

Before Christmas I was approached to paint a custom skateboard.

I agreed and that board sat in my to-do pile for eons while the gentleman who sent it to me waited patiently.

I finally got my act together and started on the board. About 80% of the way though I decided the design was terrible. I started over.

The gentleman still waited patiently.

And today, after ages and ages, the board is FINALLY done! Here she be....

The words are "Pulvis et umbra sumus" which is Latin for "We are but dust and shadow."

I'm pretty pleased with it and would love to see it when it's truly complete: stained, sealed and decked out with wheels and stuff. I really hope that nice fella likes it too after his wait which was FAR too long (poor guy).

Apparently he's the jealous type

A robin came to Pixie Hill last week, and we were certain that the lovely fellow was an extra special herald of spring. Silly humans. Our red breasted friend has been making quite the fuss.

Who? Surely you can't mean me?

Don't fall for that innocent feathered face. He's been trouble I tell you!

Nonsense. I am a delight and you are lucky to have me.

For over a week now this fellow has been flying into our windows. All of them. Over and over again. The windows are an absolute mess and, as much as I love pirates, I'd rather not have the 'poop-deck' jokes write themselves.

When spring arrives and birdy love is in the air, things get territorial. Seeing his reflection in my spotless (ha!) windows our feathered friend has become agitated that another male is encroaching on his bevvy of girly birdies. The more crazed our robin becomes, the more crazed his reflection becomes. In no time at all you've got bird gang-land warfare.

What to do? For the time being, it looks like there's a birthday party going on in the Pixie house. Balloons and tissue paper cover the windows that are attacked most often. Padfoot stands guard... which really does nothing because even the birds know he's a big softy. Now we wait and hope that our robin gets over his jealous rage because there's no way I can cover all of the windows in the house and I'm already none too pleased about the cleaning job ahead.


xoxo

An altered fairy chip board book

I've had this chipboard book sitting around for quite some time. When I came across it while cleaning a couple of weeks ago I was inspired to jump in with both feet and just do it. And so, after many, many hours it's finally complete! You may have seen a couple of the pages but here's all 10 layouts and some of the chunky goodness...

  

 

 

 

 

 

I kinda love the pointing finger on the back.

I removed the ring and opted for an extended Chicago screw to put the thing together. It's quite a fussy to rotate the pages because of the 3dimentional bits but I'm really pleased with them. There are a couple of slips of sort of gossamer between a couple of the layouts but I might add some vellum and parchment between the rest for protection sake. Besides, a little extra chunk never did any harm ;)

P.S. Great Wolf Lodge has restored my faith in customer service! They sent us a bit of a refund and said they sent the maintenance crew in to fix the air/heating unit in the room. Huzzh!

Postage Pixie

I worked on this collage last night. I'm not 100% pleased with it. There's some funky stuff going on with the paper the girl is printed on that makes her nose look rather piggish in certain light.

She's currently sitting in one of three fantastic frames I picked up from the reduced counter. They may not be to every one's taste but I sort of adore the classic ornate scrolling. I didn't recognize it at the time but they give the impression of a postage stamp.

I think I'll run with that happy discovery and create some postage pixies to fill them. That will mean this gal will have to be rehomed but hopefully she won't put up too much of a fuss.

P.S. Because I think you're so very nice, use coupon code 25percent and get 25% off your purchase! This offer is valid for a very short time so hurry over to the etsy shop.

Surprises, chocolate and wolves.

On Monday we packed up the truck and headed out to Niagara for a wine function...

 ... at least that's what D thought.

You see D's birthday was the other week and we had a couple of surprises up our sleeves.

Our first stop was actually for a private tour of Chocolate FX located in St. David's, in the heart of Niagara-On-The-Lake! It's pretty fabulous there. The production area is glassed in so visitors can see the whole process and take in the scrummy chocolately scent.

Don't even try to tell me that working in a chocolate factory isn't fun. Just look at this gal!

Afterwards we headed to the showroom for chocolate samples and candy!

Next stop? Look for a cheap motel so dad can get ready for his wine thing...

Or maybe mum and dad lied, there is no wine function, and we're really going to spend the night at Great Wolf Lodge! Woo hoo!

D has wanted to go here for ages but #1 it's pricey, #2 we have a dog and chickens that need tending so we never skip out of town #3 we live 4 hours from the place. Thankfully my mum drove up to take care of things while we were able to save a few pennies for this giant birthday surprise for D.

We checked in and headed to the water park which was fantastic and tons of fun. You don't have to worry about towels, and believe it or not, the lighting is such that not a soul looks pale and ghostly. The down side? The change rooms are pretty lame and we had to pay $20 for a locker for our clothes! $10 is refunded if you return the key before the area closes, but $10 for a locker seems pretty damned steep to me.

It was 5ish when our tummies began to grumble and we decided to get changed and see if our room was ready. We were supposed to be messaged, but we had to go to the front desk to find out our room number. And here's where I get a little ranty...

If I'm paying $250 for a room, for one night, I expect a certain level of quality. The room was clean but... well... look at this....

The kid themed area of the room was terrible. It was badly scratched and looked frightful. I'm sure that they would not allow this type of damage in the lobby... why would they allow it in a child's sleeping area? I'd rather see a plain clean wall than this mess....

... apparently, so would D who chose to sleep on the couch instead. (Note: The couch was a pull out.)

The bed was comfy (though I'm pretty sure it was a double, not the Queen size stated) and I was tempted to swipe some of the lovely pillows but the walls were pretty thin. I'm sure the family above us were tap dancing on roller skates, kids were running up and down the halls, and being located directly beside the stairwell we could hear the 'clunk clunk' of the door every time someone opened and closed the doors. No worries, being a family hotel all that slowed down around midnight. What did not stop was the heating/air conditioner going on and off and waking each one of us several times throughout the night. I'm not sure if it was faulty or what, but it didn't matter what setting we put it on, it was like having a hair dryer go off beside the bed every hour.

And just to rub a little salt in our sleepy wounds...

DECAF?!?! What the hell!

Thank heavens we brought our own food and small store of chocolate and candy to ease the disappointment :P

Happy Dance!

*drum roll please*  I'm thrilled to bits to announce that I'm an official Alpha Stamps design team member!

Each month they'll send me some of their fabulous crafty goods and I get to make glorious messes with them. How lucky can a gal get? Yippie skippy! I can't believe I've managed to trick them into letting me play with the big kids :P

You can check them out on facebook, join in some swappy goodness with their Yahoo Group, or follow them on twitter.

** Phew! It feels good to let that out. I thought I might burst keeping it a secret :)

I've finished up a few more pages of the chunky book I'm working on. I am about halfway through and I'm starting to think about how the heck I'm going to put this thing together. Here's two more pages....

The place seems to filled with half finished projects at the moment. Here's the work table this morning crammed with a fresh batch of mossy teacup towns waiting for their finishing touches.

What you don't see on that table is the HUGE doll house my mum brought for me. The thing is a 2'x2' monster of pure potential... but we'll save that story for next week.

xoxo