A Dog Wearing Giant Sunglasses

The giant sunglasses came from a pound shop...2 pairs in the pack... and everyone in the family had a turn wearing them. My daughter walks the dogs of a nearby neighbour and when she brought them round to be fussed over, we tried the giant glasses on one of them!

That is one COOL dog!

Johnny Depp on Little Big Planet

Have you ever played Little Big Planet? It's Fab for creating stuff and for the gameplay. In fact its SO creative that for a while when I played it, I gave up making actual stuff from fabric because the game could make it so much quicker and amazingly well that there seemed no point me bothering in real life...but eventually I got over it and went back to hours of creative twaddle.

Well you get to decorate the 'Pod' your character lives in (mainly tartan, buttons and metal charms in my case) and combine a series of elements for your character to wear as he/she cruises through the game.

And here's mine looking stylishly like Johnny Depp. Other characters in the family include a zebra in a dress, a spanish dancer in wellies and a spotty fella with a rubber ring round his waist and carrying a frying pan!

If you're tempted to get the game, be prepared to spend hours playing and making, cos if you leave it and try to come back weeks later you can't remember how to use all the creative techniques BUT the first game in the series is MUCH more creative than the second. The initial game felt like it was made for grown ups who hadn't grown up (me), the second for children...so sad.

Private Beach

Unfortunately I don't have one of these but I saw what looks like it must be a very private beach when I was on The Isle of Wight. We went up to the Needles Old Battery, which is  preserved by the National Trust, and from the cage at the top...

 

...you can see the Needles in front,

but from the edge of the wall at the side you can see this amazing looking beach that you could only get to by boat and then dingy I would imagine.

There was no one on it and no way to it by land. It looked like something out of a travel brochure and I wondered how many people have ever set foot on it?

Hands in Yer Pockets Time

Time for a Socklet and these two would be in big trouble in the school corridor for slouching about with their hands in their pockets.

They seem pretty chilled and relaxed about life... a model I should like to employ for my life and shall endeavour to from now on.

Mario, Luigi, Wario and Waluigi

These are glove puppets made in felt for my son when he was younger and was hardly talking (about 8 or 9). He was more inclined to talk to puppets than people, I suppose partly because they don't really look directly at you and also they don't have changing facial expressions.

They were all the same outline sewn round the edges in their shirt colour, then different features and trouser colours added to the front. He had a clearout the other day and, although some items from his younger days remain, these were thrown out. He has moved on and now prefers real people to talk to.

Dirty Old Coins

My Dad gave me this purse which had been my Gran's. It was full of ha'pennies: not just old money but filthy oxidised, coppery old coins that were largely blue and sticky. 

Remembering my Blue Peter days I immediately got out the fruity brown sauce and slathered them liberally.

Then a few hours later, rinsed it all off with hot soapy water, patted them dry and then heated them in the oven for a little while to make sure they were completely dry.

  The result...

Clean coppery coins that are still old looking but not filthy or sticky. I suppose if you leave the sauce on overnight they might look like those completely new shiny coins that seem to appear in November every year, but that wasn't the look I was going for.

Chocolate

No particular reason for this except some days (like today) I just need to see it.

 

And eat it.

So if you have the same need...enjoy!

Look what she made for me : )

This is what Gorgeous Daughter sewed, deep into the late, secret hours of the night (when she should have been asleep), for my birthday.

The ones in the centre and on the right (lion and red panda, although I thought it was a raccoon) were from a page she saw on the internet (thank you whoever you are) and the tiger was entirely her own design.

They are plush cubes apparently and there are many designs out there in the world of creative people.

By way of recovery she did sleep in till nearly midday on my birthday, after first getting up and giving me these cuties. Thanks Brat-ling!

Fab Birthday Card

Lovely husband, who is a Shrink Plastic devotee, had a new delivery of Shrinkles through the post for the teaching courses he runs and road tested them by making me this fabulous birthday 'card'.

Here's a close up of the tags: 4 of them have a heart woven into the picture.

 The first one is family, the second Doctor Who...

 ...Pikmin 'cos I keep having to draw them or look up walk-throughs for our son, Paris 'cos that's my 50th birthday treat (oooh get me, never done anything like that before but it's a half century!)

...and Marmite 'cos we're a family obsessed, and three of us are members of the Marmararti (http://www.marmarati.org/)

Fan-Girl Geekery

My niece shares the same birthday as me but is at the wonderful, beautiful and Geek-ity age of 17, where Twitter and YouTube rule the day, and bedrooms are decorated with all the things you love, rather than one boring paint colour and a few well chosen ornaments that tone.
So after a hunt through Google Images for useful quotes and pics, I made her this...

There are 2 charms from each of 4 sources that she likes: Dr Who, Sherlock,  Legend of Zelda and Lord of the Rings. They are made from Shrinkles (See blog details from a few pages back on Pikmin Figures in Shrink Plastic) and this is the size they ended up after they had been 'cooked'.
With a bit of help from these:

                     
They became this...

 or this (but the Dr who one is back to front in the photo!)

These are the detailed pics of each genre in case you want to see a close up

Checkout neice YouTubed-ness at http://www.youtube.com/user/ANOTHERDAY2290

Dr Who, 50, Daleks and Cakes

Here are the finished cakes I promised you yesterday.

Some were chocolate and some lemon, iced, sprinkled with chocolate coated popping candy from ChinChin Labs in Camden (http://www.chinchinlabs.com/), and then swirled with blue icing in a Timey-Wimey style. The little champagne bottles were candles.
However...it doesn't all end there...no Sir!
They were only on the plate so they could be lit safely for birthday-singing purposes. The full range was displayed thus!

On the beautiful Dalek cakestand (from Lakeland).

 It stands about 2 feet high and is made of a shiny strong card...

 Which means that when you finish putting cakes on it, it wipes completely clean for putting other things of it (or putting it away in pieces for use another day but I can't bring myself to do that yet).

Oh happy day!

If you want to see other Whovian posts I've done, check these out
      http://socklet-world.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/tardisor-just-mad-woman-with-box.html
and http://socklet-world.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/melody-malone-amelia-williams-et-al.html
and http://socklet-world.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/dr-who-shoes-ormissing-you-already.html

Dr Who is 50 and so am I

According to one of the Who annals charting the history of loads of Who-ology, 50 years ago today the original theme tune was recorded. Also 50 years ago today I was born and so a long entwined history was begun.

Here are a couple of ways we are celebrating today:

1) The Dr Who cake making kit from Lakeland which comprises...

a lovely little cardboard Tardis containing cupcake cases and characters on cocktail sticks to put in the top.

I have now baked but not iced the cakes and will blog the finished article somewhere between done and eaten!

And 2) These lovely notebooks which the family gave me today.

There will be more Whovian birthday fun to come!

The Eye of the Telescope

My son bought a cheap plastic telescope on holiday in a pirate kit. We all tried it out in the Smuggler's Inn and then I couldn't resist taking a few photos through it.

 They remind me of the old opening credits of Dr Who...

...some kind of vortex...

...sucking the unwary traveller through time and space

...hopefully!

Socklet Fairy Godmothers

We haven't had any Socklets for a while so here are a few that I made recently. I found a set of small sparkly wands in a pound shop so I HAD to make Socklet Fairy Godmothers. The wands had to be sawn down a little on the end as they were still far too long for the Socklets, but otherwise were perfect.

Complete the set of Pikmin Figures

Here is the next round of Shrink Plastic figures we made to complete the set of characters needed (See yesterday's blog for the process and other figures http://socklet-world.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/making-pikmin-3-figures.html). There are a couple of characters here that he has made up, taking the idea from both Sonic and Super Mario Sunshine, so that when my son plays there will be traditional bad guys to take the roles he needs.

So this time we have the complete range of Pikmin from games 1, 2 and 3, the planet Hocotate, both Olimar and Louie's grandmas (from Pikmin 2) and a metal Olimar and a Dark Olimar: Metal Olimar being invincible and Dark Olimar being the bad guy who steals your stuff and your charcters which have to be rescued (like Princess Peach and Fludd in Super Mario Sunshine).

Coming out of the oven 7X smaller and 7X thicker, they are now robust little plastic toys.

He is not interested in making any of the animals and bugs on the planet because they are all bad and eat Pikmin, but as we had to draw out all 201 treasures from Pikmin 2 on cardboard, its likely that we will have to make all the fruit in this one. Food is a main motivator in life!