The Bean Bags and the Glad Rags

Ages ago a made a couple of gorgeous 25p vintage tea towels into a "weekend bag". I got a bit carried away with it and, lovely as it is, it was actually big enough to contain an adult. As a result it was quite ungainly and either mostly empty or simply too big to move!

I ordered some bean bag beans, I had this idea for a "secret thing" that I would make some bean bags, and I had an epiphany. I decided to make my "weekend bag" into a bean bag - much more suitable as that; and really kinda cool...

This week was the annual Save the Children Women in Wales lunch at City Hall, Cardiff. I was lucky enough to snaffle a place from Jess and as a result was needing a new frock. 

I have an abundance of fabric at the moment as I have lots of dresses to make. I have a job to do today but I really do need to get a wriggle on with them. I snaffled an remnant (from a dress I've not yet made - bit of a gamble!) and a free pattern, added in a few extra Betty Red touches and robert's your mother's brother. A  FREE dress. I had loads of comments about it I could hear and loads of comments I couldn't quite hear that were either good comments about my frock or bad ones about my ink - either way I'm happy!

I got to "meet" Bill Turnbull - brilliant speaker and gent, I bet he's a right laugh down the pub, and Jayne James off of the BBC Wales news and I had a lovely chat - very nice lady and I was a bit star struck by Jenny Ogwen being there - she was on the Wales news as I was growing up. I was lucky enough to win the flowers off the table and a distinct high point was the fashion show of Alison Tod Millinery - I would give my right arm for one of those.

I'm hoping to put a bit of a table together for next year - fancy it? 

If You Want To Get Ahead - Wear A HAT

...or a bonnet.

I love Regency. When my mate and guest blogger Terry invited me to a fancy dress party I decided it just needed to be done. I enjoyed making the gown so much though that I have another one on the go already. I'm going to be doing some photos Regency style which I'm really excited about. I'll be able to share some more great photos instead of the shite ones I usually knock out; I'm rubbish at it these days.

My Mother in law collected me up a load of fabric remnants about 2 years ago and given that it was supposed to be a one off garment, I used 2 fabrics I already had, the pearls were also given to me as a broken necklace (plastic obviously), buttons came form my Grandmother. The only thing I bought for the whole outfit was the straw hat to make the bonnet. I've got the washing machine on currently dying another of the remnants to make another different one. The fabric started out as a horrible "hospital bed sheet" mint green, it's now "burlesque red". Photographers charged with the period photos please ignore the silly posing, the dress really is dead lovely - if about to be dyed also; I dropped McDonalds burger on it on the way home and I can't get the salsa stain out :( It's about to be dyed navy.

Speaking of great photographers; I met LOADS of new friends on Saturday at said fancy dress party and one of them is a FAB photographer - Denise pulled some blinders of the evening.

Much silliness ensued, Regency dancing to banging (incorrect adjective) funk and soul at Gŵdihw, Cardiff. A brilliant venue I've been to a couple of times and need to spend more time in. It really is a fabulous venue. Believe it or not, that was my first ever adult fancy dress party. I know. Not one to not do things by halves, I had to use the cash point AND put petrol in the car in my get up. I did enjoy both of those events (juvenile!). I always love meeting new people, it's for me the most important bit about going out, and this lot were particularly enjoyable. Next fancy dress party is hotting up already as the people who bailed on this one have realised how much they missed out on. It's my pet hate that. People moan they're bored, nothing to do, yadda yadda yadda, then when someone (usually me) tries to do anything, arrange something, put an event on, people don't get involved. We've all got busy lives, I actually have the very best excuse ever for not going anywhere or doing anything, but I don't like to let people down - and I know how devastating it is when the support dwindles. 

 We all need to party more. Fact.

Whisky Can Get You Into SO Much Trouble...

Girls and I were "raving not behaving" last night. Well, we went to the cinema. The American Reunion; definite must see. Much loling went on and it's so nice to spend an evening with fabulous company, even if one of us could start a fight in an empty room ... you know who you are!

I always find coming out of the cinema a bit of a strange experience, you've lived in someone else's world for the best part of 2 hours so I find it takes a while to reacclimatise. Surreal experiences don't help one bit, but my goodness did we lol again!

So we left my Mr. and Jess's Mr. to go up the local pub for a few. On Fridays we have a carer to get Steve to bed, so they made sure they were home in time to meet her. Of course, they weren't however that keen on stopping the booze flow, they were having a good time and wanted to keep the party going (Stifler would be so proud), so Steve set Mr. E about the task of locating the whisky. The one plus point of being sole carer and queen of our world is that everything stays where I put it, and no one needs to know where that is other than me.

Steve pointed him in the suspected direction of said whisky and he was rummaging around looking for the stash. Being blokes, they had the main light on and the living room curtains open, this was about 11pm. They were soon distracted from the hunt by multiple blue flashing lights tear arsing down the street, and curious as to where they were going, on our sleepy, silent, suburban street.

They were fascinated and a bit bemused that they appeared to stop adjacent to our house and when multiple ARMED Police shot down our driveway they were starting to think they were hallucinating. Had they accidentally run someone over on the way back from the pub with the wheelchair?!? Did someone stick a tequila, complete with worm, in their pints?!?

 "Is this your property, Sir?" said the armed, tazered up Police officer at the door to Mr. E, complete with the back up of 2 cars and a meat wagon. "No," says Mr. E "It's his!" pointing at Steve, who I'd imagine was probably singing a song about goblins by this point...

Turns out our lovely carer had arrived at the house a few minutes before all this, noticed unusually that the curtains were open, couldn't see Steve who was drunkenly reclining in his magic chair, and all she could see was Mr. E, complete with baseball cap, rifling through the cupboards in the living room! She'd panicked, thinking we were being burgled and called the fuzz who responded like the SAS.

Poor lovely carer, she was mortified when they'd established what had happened, she couldn't apologise enough. I shall assure her, however, when I see her that no apology was necessary - she's looking after my home, my Husband, my property AND gave me the biggest non film related laugh for some time. I think a bottle of wine might be in order, to calm her nerves if nothing else!

Being disabled is boring, I think not. Not in our house anyway!

Comic Heaven - Presenting Tom Boyle

Hello everyone, my name is Tom Boyle, I'm a 22 year old Comics warrior from Sunderland in the North East of England. I recently graduated with a first from Sunderland University with a degree in Illustration and Design, which was nice! To get the degree I had to make a Final Major Project and being such a nut for comics I thought it would be a sweet idea for my Final Major Project to be a Comic book, and so I began the lengthy and arduous task of making one! It was fun really, but it was a lot of work! I'm going to take you through some of the thinking behind this project!

So my first port of call was coming up with an idea, as I'm not the most inventive kid ever I didn't have a clue! Luckily at the time, I was reading a lot about Norse mythology and the Nordic legends, so I thought why not just pinch one of their stories cut my work load in half, sorted! So I delved deep in to the Norse creation Myth (The Prose Edda, it's a wonderful read) and came up with nothing... Yeah I had a bit of trouble trying not to make a comic about Thor, whose blockbuster film had just dropped in the Cinema, and I didn't want to use him and copy Marvel in any way, although he makes the briefest of appearances in the book, along with his Hammer! 

The narrative of the story I could not find so people told me to draw from personal experience. At the time though my Mam, Yvonne, was struggling against Terminal Cancer in the brain. It was tough to come to grips with and during my work time it kind of consumed my thoughts. There was no way I could help her get better. So using this as my motivation i thought of an odd way in which i could do something! in fiction I could make some sort of show of defiance against the Cancer, and so with my Mam's Cancer in mind, and sourcing a lot of the Norse Universe I created the Monster of the piece, A giant Tumour that was destroying the Norse Universe The 'Yggdrasil' or the Life Tree or World Tree. (Which is the name of the book and the setting of the story)

So now I had my Setting, my antagonist and after reading the Prose Edda  and slightly obsessively, I had a few favourite characters I wanted to use, namely The Valkyries, Hel, The Wolves, Jormuggandr, Rattatosk and of course Odin! Using my knowledge of the Norse Legends and using my own personal experiences I started to create the Comic, and it just came out in waves! I was working constantly for weeks, I even took my work to a house party a friend of mine had and after everyone had gone to sleep, or passed out pissed, I began to work until the early hours of the morning! Tough as nails me haha!

I work with lots of materials, namely Mechanical Pencils, Copic fineliners, Posca paint pens, Sharpies and some bottled ink. I draw the pages on Bristol Board paper, which is nice as when a page is finished it feels like an actual finished piece of art not something scribbled on some printer paper, which is fine by the way draw on whatever you can get hold of, but its just my own personal preference. I like to colour with both water colours and digital colours just depends on the feel I'm going for but my main strength is in the black and white pages!

So I kept working for a long time and the more work I got done the worse my mam's condition got, it was difficult to see my Mam die but during the entire time she was sick, she told me to keep working and keep striving for my goals. One time she wouldn't let me visit her in the Hospice until I finished pages for the night, I attribute this to being the main reason I got my Final Major Project finished and Printed in time for the Degree Show at the University. And my Mam got to see the book which I dedicated to her before she passed away, I've never felt more proud! I then had the idea to sell the comic in aid of cancer research and had 20 books printed which recently I sold the last of!

So now that I've graduated and reached my 200 pound goal for the Cancer Research Charity, I've started work on my next comic. This one is a collection of Science fiction stories all set in my fictional alternate universe, called ZPACE! I've been weaving together lots of ZPACE stories and ideas and it's getting pretty serious now! I'm experimenting and trying new things with these stories and hopefully they will lead to my main story idea I've had, which will be a cosmic ZPACE epic (hopefully haha) this one won't be for charity but it will mainly fund underprivileged comic geeks who are called Tom Boyle.

Hope that I've shown you a bit of the process of my work and some of the thinking behind it, and hopefully I haven't babbled too much! Main thing I learned from my time at Uni was that it doesn't matter whats going on in your life you can still do amazing things, as long as you work hard and work lots, like lots and lots to the point of madness haha. Keep an eye out for new books being printed soon and also re-prints of my old titles, if you'd like to see more of my work please check out:

http://pandafunkteam.blogspot.co.uk/

http://pandafunkteam.deviantart.com/

http://www.etsy.com/shop/PandaFunkTeam

Big thanks to Bethen for letting me spam her blog to bits haha and thanks to Bexy Bizzle for being awesome also thanks to anyone who had a read or just a look at the pretty pictures! Your solid gold!

Peace out peeps!

Tom B.

Here He Is Indeed.

Technically, I'm a rock girl. Technically, t's a rock club, but having seen the write up, I was curious and quite looking forward to seeing the Oli Brown Band at the Steelhouse, Ebbw Vale, last Friday. You see I do like a bit of blues rock, even if I don't really "invest" in it much.

I've seen some fabulous acts up there, but I was not really prepared for this one. I was "doing my face" in the ladies and chatting to someone who told me she'd been so impressed by the first time she saw him (at the ripe old age of 17, I found out later that this was less than 4 years ago) that she'd followed him ever since. Cue raised eyebrow.

Oli Brown, and his handsome, dapper, suited band of one drummer and one bassist, played a set of about 2 hour. It could have been a lot more, time was irrelevant to a packed crowd who were ALL instantly blown away. I have never seen such immediate love for an act from all ages/genres, the noise between tracks from the crowd was unbelievable, totally unprecedented.

Very few people I have seen have made music so visually elegant and seem so effortless. If you look in the dictionary under the word "tight" you will see "Oli Brown live - even with a dodgy lead". The quality of musicianship I have not seen the likes of for a very long time, maybe ever. I defy ANYONE who even just likes good music, to not fall in love within 2 songs.

Oli Brown's cover of Blackstreet's "No Digitty" (I shit you not) was incredible. And I wager that this handsome young chap will be packing out the Albert Hall in 5 years, although how he's going to manage his off stage guitar serenading there will be interesting to see. If Oli Brown plays ANYWHERE near you, I beseech you to seek him out and I defy you to not be blown away.

Ebbw Vale certainly loves him and I for one will be first in line for tickets for the next performance he puts anywhere even remotely accessible, even if I have to crawl.

Diamonds in the Park - and That's Just Us

Her Majesty was in attendance at the Diamond Jubilee Celebration "Diamonds in the Park" that we had been invited to attend on Friday.


Not one to pass up the opportunity to do some catering, eating, celebrating and generally making a fuss, my BFF (I don't actually know what that stands for if I'm honest, but you get the idea) Jess and I engaged "Project Picinc". As usual, we pulled a blinder.

I managed to see Prince Phillip, and H.M.'s hat, but not a lot else from our "grassy knoll" but that's closer than I've been before, and we opened a bottle of decent bubbly to celebrate, so all was good.

We made a new friend, and were repeatedly congratulated on our picnic quality and rain-based Dunkirk Spirit by passers by, who didn't even know that nearly everything was hand made - down to the bread, pizza base and chutney, the picnic hamper was a vintage heirloom (I still have custody of it and quite honestly I'm really not keen on giving it back!).

I've not been that muddy for AGES, Steve was exhausted, the drive home was erm, interesting and I pulled my back trying not to get even muddier putting the wheelchair in the car - and I loved every minute of it.

Chirrpy Chirrpy Cheep Cheep

Ok, so today I got to do one of my favourite things, I was on the radio. It was great.

You should listen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01f5012

I've been considering a purchase for a while now and today I put my money where my mouth is. I bought a bread maker.

I have resisted it for ages thinking that they can't do anything that you can't do by hand, but the fact of the matter is "they can". I made some hot cross buns this evening in it and I have to say that with all the kneading in the world I could not have got the dough like that. No way hose. So, I'mmediately I'm glad I have it, although trying to sleep with the smell of freshly cooked buns is not for the faint hearted.

And I put my Easter presents together for my family's kids.

As Steve was in hospital for Easter last year, I managed to miss out the whole thing. I bought an Easter egg chocolate mold, but I lost it in the move (along with Steve's old bread maker, ahem. In my defence it didn't have a "dough only" setting anyway - no good for H.C.B.'s) and I really wanted to make something for the kids - buying an egg in a box isn't really that exciting.

So I bought a variety of egg shape/size smaller eggs, saved some egg boxes, bought a couple of chicks and got busy with a tube of glue.

Ta - dah!