I am too extremely very busy.

This is a holding message. I am the busiest person in the world at the moment and consequently the worst blogger. Normal service (i.e. sporadic but not completely non-existent) will be resumed as soon as my friends stop all getting married and I stop all being in plays and all going to meetings and all hoovering the sofa (which takes up a great deal of my time due to the fact that my cats have taken the slight increase in ambient temperature in Southern England very seriously and turned into dandelion clocks who can seemingly release a cloud of fluff at will like some sort of defence mechanism, sort of how a lizard sheds its tail when you pull it).

In the meantime, you could do worse than popping over to the slightly-mad-in-a-good-way Fiona T's blog Words From Fiona's Brain for your fix of blogginess. She has recently baked scones AND catalogued her socks. Just make sure you pop back here to calm down when the excitement has become too much for you.

If you're in need of a quicker hit of internet smack, here is a picture of Doug being a retard.

We worry, but the vet says he's normal.

Or if you're really bored you could even go and buy something over at the Lemur Lady shop. Like this cute mirror with frogs on....

Two of these are princes. The others haven't been kissed yet.

Back soon (ish).

Road Trip! Part 1: San Francisco - Crescent City

As promised, here is the first instalment of my Great Big Adventure diaries. I have spent some time squinting at all the pieces of paper I scribbled notes on, and have decided that the best option is just to try and replicate them here, as best I can, for posterity. I will attempt to make some sense of them as I go along.

Error. Massive error.

So. We began in San Francisco. Well, technically, the adventure began at Heathrow Airport, where we boarded the plane in great excitement. Within 37 seconds (a personal best), I had managed to change all of my seatback entertainment controls to Japanese and had to make SO fix it for me. I then watched 4364623423 films, including War Horse, which was rubbish.

My notes for San Francisco read as follows:

• Mechanical Monkey Band
• Terrifying laughing Sally thing 

Both of the above are from our trip to the 'Musee Mechanique', a truly fabulous rainy-day outing of a place featuring a collection of antique coin-operated machines. Many of them utterly terrifying, such as the giant Laughing Sally puppet mentioned above. If you click on the link (which I wouldn't advise), you will be treated to a glimpse of her which will ensure you don't sleep for a week. The Mechanical Monkey Band, however, remains one of the best things I saw all holiday. Or ever.

Best. Game. Ever.

• Deathstar (Star Wars Arcade Game. See above)
• Clam chowder
• Cablecar (obviously)
• Pirate Shop
• Baboon with wings

The pirate shop refers to 826 Valencia - San Francisco's only independent pirate store. It is exactly as brilliant as it sounds. The last point refers to the shop next door to this, which stocked the most incredible array of bizarre taxidermied animals I have ever seen. It was purely import laws and luggage allowance which stopped us from spending the rest of the trip carting around a full-sized angry baboon with peacock wings grafted onto its back. Because I don't have enough of those.

• Aquarium with chinchillas.
• Hotel smells of chinese soup.
• Scary Christmas shop (SO insisted we buy cable car Christmas tree decorations. Sometimes I worry, I really do).
• TERRIFYING CAR DRIVING HILL ARRRRRRGGGGHHHH

This last point is written in SO's writing. Due to the fact that I went down with the Worst Cold Ever as soon as we landed and was basically flu-ridden for the first week, SO was designated driver in San Francisco. You've seen Bullet, right? It's just like that in real life. Only scarier and with more screaming.

• Hat shop (didn't go in)
• EPIC hat shop (hat regret).

The hat regret was because - for reasons I can only attribute to temporary insanity brought on by an overdose of cough medicine - I decided against buying this:

I'm choking up a bit now, just thinking about  what might have been

Man I loved that winged horse hat. *sigh*

After San Francisco, we followed the Redwood Trail north along the Pacific Coast and through endless forests of ENORMOUS trees. The minutes of this journey look like this:

• Many big trees.
• Bendy roads.
• Smoke in trees.
• Bored of trees.

Occasionally they are punctuated with moments of excitement, such as:

• Elk.
• Gualalalalalalaalala (I think this was the name of a town we stopped in to buy crisps. I can't be sure)
• Drove through a tree!!!!! 

See? Drive-through tree.

The rest of this page of notes is one big scribble, pertaining to the fact that SO walked into a glass door and that this was 'my favourite thing so far, better than the Monkey Orchestra'.

I leave this instalment with a picture of our view from the Crescent Beach Motel window. The Pacific is beautiful to look at, but bugger me it's noisy to sleep next to.

Pacific Ocean - a noisy neighbour

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads...

Crumbs - I've been away from this place so long Blogger has completely changed its interface since I was last here. Apologies if this turns out upside down, or bright pink, or accidentally in Comic Sans or something... [EDIT: I just previewed this post and it genuinely had turned my template into Comic Sans. I nearly had a conniption]

Anyway, the main reason why I've not been boring you with my exploits recently is that I have been on a Great Big Adventure. Having got married last year, the Significant Otter and I decided that for our Honeymoon we would take a real trip of a lifetime and do a road trip around Mid-West America, seeing places we've never seen, seeking out new life and new civilisations, boldly going...no, hang on, that's Star Trek. Well, you get the picture.

Aw, the route looks a bit like a heart. I did not notice this, but this is because I have no romance in my soul.

We knew we wanted to start in San Francisco then visit Portland, Oregon (mostly for the beer), before striking out East towards South Dakota so that we could go and be sweary in Deadwood before heading down to Colorado and flying back from there to Los Angeles at the very end. We booked nothing but the car hire, our flights there and back, and the first night's accommodation. Oh, and a cocktail bar for the first evening in San Francisco. Because thirst is a dangerous thing.

What followed was three of the most amazing, fullest, busiest, most exhausting but wonderful weeks of my life. My intention to document all this in the form of a mobile blog as we went along failed almost immediately, mostly because a) I couldn't type in the car because I'd be sick and b) I'm very lazy. Instead, every night at whatever dodgy motel, diner or saloon we found ourselves in I would fish out of my bag some stolen hotel paper and a stolen hotel pen and we would write a bullet-point retrospective of the highlights of our day. I am going to use these beer-stained, garbled, badly spelled notes as the basis of my attempt to record our Great Big Adventure for posterity. 

Bear in mind we did go through eight different states, three different timezones, and drank our bodyweights in strangely-named American micro-brewed beers with pictures of wildlife on the bottle, so I'm not going to try and recount everything in one go. These posts may be sporadic, but I promise I will get there in the end!

A few statistics to start us off:

States we travelled  through: California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado.

Miles driven: 3349

Number of different hotel/motel rooms stayed in: 17. I think. Might have to come back to that one.

Amount of toiletries stolen: lots.

Local wildlife accidentally killed: almost one duck.

Horrible colds caught within hours of landing: 1

Acceptable cups of tea: One. On the last day.

I will be back with an account of our first week, which took us from San Francisco to Portland. But for now, here's a picture of me pointing at a buffalo. You're welcome. 

And this is how we spend our evenings

Sitting watching TV with Significant Otter last night, commercial break comes on.

LL: OHMYGODDIDYOUSEETHAT????!!!!

SO: What?

LL: There was just an advert for a bed and the bed had a TV that went up and down into the end of the bed! [attempts to mime a TV going up and down into the end of a bed. This is harder than it sounds] And it was only EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS!!! That's, like, how much a TV costs on it's own, plus you get a free bed!! IT'S LIKE A BED FROM THE FUTURE!!!

SO: Firstly, there is so much wrong with how you judge the value of things. And secondly those beds-with-
TV's-in have been around for ages. I've seen them in shops. I've even played with the buttons that make the TV's go up and down.

LL: [looks at SO like he's just admitted to having had a pair of Marty Mc Fly hover-trainers for the last six months and kept it a secret] So TellyBeds are, like, a Thing? You've known about these magical things?

SO: Yes.

LL: And we still don't have one?

SO: We don't watch TV in bed.

LL: That's because we don't have a TellyBed. We've just got a boring, ordinary bed. I hate our bed. It's got no technology in it at all. It's not digitally entertaining in any way.

SO: [with a cheesy wink] The analogue entertainment is good though.

LL: [choosing to ignore this terrible attempt at innuendo] I bet EVERYONE else has a Tellybed except us. This is so embarrassing. This is like being the last people to have a VHS player. We have a Betamax bed.

SO: I'm really not sure they're as popular as....

LL: Of course everyone has one! They're only EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS. [taps on website on phone]  I can probably get one with Paypal right now...

SO: We are not buying a bed with a TV in it.

Silence.


LL: If we had a telly bed you could sit in it all day and play Skyrim.

SO: And you could bring me snacks and beer and bottles to pee in?

LL: If it meant we could have a technologically advanced televisual bed from the future, yes. I would do that.


I'm still not sure if I won. But I'm not letting this one go.....

I'm saving you from yourselves.

This has not, in many respects, been the brilliantest of weeks.

I'm suffering from is-it-can-be-holiday-time-nao ennuie (five working days, and counting); the sun is shining - which should be a marvellous thing but I work overlooking a glorious park full of sunbathing students and Australians who silently mock me as I sit under the artificial office lights; and I have been forced to deal with a greater-than-usual amount of idiots over the last few days. For example, I had this phone conversation with a Local Government Representative yesterday:

LGR:  I'm afraid the application that you put in has been refused, because you didn't give us the mandatory ten working days to process it.
LL: The one that you have already processed and approved, you mean?
LGR: Yes. We are going to have to cancel the approval because you didn't give us enough time to approve it in - we state  ten working days. You only gave us nine - because of the bank holiday.
LL: But, you approved it within two days. I was actually impressed with how quick and efficient it was.
LGR: Yes. That was a mistake. It should have taken us ten days.
LL: So. Because I didn't give you ten days to do something that you managed to complete in two days you are going to cancel that two days of work AND give yourself an extra lot of admin so that YOUR HEAD DOESN'T EXPLODE WITH THE CONFUSION OF THINKING FOR ITSELF??*
LGR: It takes ten days.

*this bit may have taken place only inside my head. 

*sigh*.

The underlying cause of all this grumpiness, however, can probably be tracked back to the fact that my faithful servant, Juki the sewing machine, threw an immense wobbly at the weekend and has had to be put into machine-rehab in order to think about what she has done. I've been like a bear with a sore head about it all week.

Not to be beaten, however, I've been working on other ways of using fabric.The pendants have proved popular and I have now introduced an accompanying range of compact mirrors. Though I say so myself (which I do, look, I'm about to say it right now), these are a fabulous way of showing off slightly bigger prints. Also, a pocket mirror is an invaluable thing to have in your bag. You can use it for:

• doing your makeup on the bus
•  looking under the sofa for lost treasure/Maltesers/cats
• checking to see if someone is dead in a Victorian thriller
• signalling to ships when adrift on a desert island
• peering round corners without being seen to check if the zombies have gone
• lighting small fires in a survival situation

...and all manner of things. I guess what I'm saying, really, is: buy one of my mirrors. It could save your life.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

 

Pick up your Survival Mirror here: http://www.lemurlady.co.uk/ourshop/cat_570128-Compact-Mirrors.html

Pendants' Corner

Crafty Pirate Pendant

When I first started making and selling my creations, I had a carrier bag full of fabric. This soon spread into a storage box. And another. And another. I'm reaching critical fabric mass now at home and soon will have to actually deal with this - possibly by tidying and filing it all away neatly, or perhaps just with the use of a lot of binbags and a massive tantrum, I haven't decided yet. 

Space Invader Pendant

One box that causes me great consternation is my Scraps Box. Any offcuts that measure above a couple of inches but below the size of a coin purse get stuffed into an old Star Wars shoebox, where they remain, trapped in the dark, for ever. I have vague ideas of some magnificent patchwork project, although the only way this might happen would be if I was suddenly transported into a parallel universe where there were 72 hours in every day.

So it is with great joy and pride that I am able to announce that I have finally found a useful way to bring some of these forgotten pieces of fabric back out into the light and let them take centre stage in my new range of pendant jewellery.

Just look at his boggly eyes...

I've scoured my stash to find the cutest, tiniest, prettiest, and coolest little snippets of designs and placed them in copper-tone bezels, covered with a crystal clear piece of resin to preserve their loveliness. Carrying on the fabric theme, they come complete with a coloured voile ribbon with a clasp and extender chain.

Lemur Lady has always been all about showcasing the fabrics that I find, and what better way than by literally framing them. Tiny little works of art. It's what they deserve, after all that time in the shoebox.

Pendant necklaces are available now from Lemur Lady's Awesome Emporium, for £7.25 each including postage. 

CRAFTfest, this week!

Tomorrow sees the start of CRAFTfest, an online 'virtual craft extravaganza' run by the lovely people behind Creative Connections. From 10th - 18th March, from the comfort of your own home, you will be able to browse over 100 craft 'stalls', showing off a huge variety of the crafting talent out there. No hanging around in draughty village halls or drinking tea from a polystyrene cup in a rainy car park (although I have to admit to secretly liking the 'chip van' tea experience, but that's another story), you can shop with the click of a mouse and buy directly from the crafters themselves.

In case I haven't whet your appetite yet, here's my pick of some of the lovely goodies on offer - click on the shop's name to check out their stall.

Altered Era has some drool-worthy steampunk and Victorian-inspired jewellery. I especially love this bracelet made from old typewriter keys:

This adorable bear may look like he belonged to your grandmother, but in fact he is brand new and painstakingly created by Northfield Primitives, who makes dolls and animals inspired by toys of yesteryear. This chap even stands on vintage Meccano wheels!

I've admired the lovely applique work of MinXtures for a while now. Her PE bags are ostensibly for children, but if I was ever to need a gym bag (like, if the only survivors in a post-apocalyptic world were the ones who could attain a certain level on the stair-climbing machine), I would so end up with this sad-koala. MinXtures also makes fabulous Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario cushions and bedcovers, so you can recreate the console wars of the 1990's in the comfort of your own bedroom.

All these and many many more (including Lemur Lady's Awesome Emporium) will be on display from tomorrow at CRAFTfest. Do pop along and have a gander - when else do you get the chance to visit a craft fair without changing out of your pyjamas? Well, without getting arrested or sectioned, anyway.