Paper Animations

A mouse hug

 

Agreeable Sheep

A couple of weeks ago while looking for something else completely I came across robives.com.  It looked interesting.  I looked further, I realised it is amazing!

Rob has designed and created loads of moving paper models, or paper animations as he calls them, and you can buy and download the designs to make for yourself.

I had been filling very uninspired on the creative front recently (as you may have noticed), but it is easy to be inspired when you’ve got such exciting projects to create.

Or Goat - one of 3 logic goats

Dog ate my homework

Wag the dog

Of course I then have the problem of what to do with them once they are made.  The easy answer – give them to my work colleagues for Christmas.  They are just the thing to make a work desk a happier place.  So on the last day in the office, the team came in to find some little friends on their desks.  They seemed to go down well.  I look forward to making more.

Happy Christmas

This year we decided to make our own Christmas cards.  Last year I found a reindeer cutter in my local craft shop.  In April when our runner beans had just started to put forth their first leaves I came across one of the reindeer cutouts and couldn't resist sticking it to a leaf to see what would happen.  We were so chuffed with the resulting images we just has to use them.

Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year.  

An early Christmas present

I received an early Christmas present yesterday.

My Open University books arrived for the next course – AA312 Total war and social change, which starts in February.

In a way it is quite scary, this large box of heavy books, but it is also rather exciting.  It probably helps that we had a trip to the Imperial War Museum last week, which really got me thinking.  It is easier to remember that the two World Wars were very real when you have weapons and uniforms etc in front of you rather than just a text which takes about numbers of people dying which are just too large for me to understand.

It also had a very interesting section on conflicts since 1945 which helped give me a better understanding of why we are where we are right now.  This is something I am hoping will be expanded on by AA312.

I shall leave them in the box until after Christmas though.

Handmade gift tags

This weekend I finally got all my wrapping done.  To make sure everyone know's who their wonderful gifts are from I've made my own set of gift tags.  I found the star cutter and reindeer cutter in my local craft shop and with the right colours I think they look pretty cool.  This is the sort of project I love, where there is a proper end product.

Christmas wreath

I love Christmas decorations, the ones with delicate lights that sparkle and push back the darkness that seems to be here forever at this time of year – it doesn’t help that the window of my office faces a brick wall and makes it feel dark all year round.

We don’t have anywhere for lights outside our flat, but a wreath will brighten any door.  I’ve always bought a wreath for the door, but this year decided that I would try making my own.  After all how hard can it be?

With this in mind we went for a walk into the woods near the flat on Saturday to collect suitable material for a wreath.  Holly, ivy and conifer of some kind were all on my list.

With a bag full of evergreen foliage we came home and I put together my wreath.  As you can see it is not the best looking wreath ever, but I collected the materials myself, put it together myself and tied the bow myself (with a little help from YouTube).  
Sometimes the joy is not in making something perfect, but in the satisfaction of creating something yourself.

Flower book

I found this lovely flower wall paper ages ago.  I knew it would be perfect to make into an A4 book, the design would just get lost on anything smaller, but I've been too busy, lazy and scared to start it.  Busy with all the things life normally throws at you, lazy 'cos its so much easier to sit and read or do something else, and scared because it has been so long since I last made a book I was starting to fear I had forgotten how.  And under all that is the nagging wonder of what I am going to do with all these books I've made.
But as you can see I haven't forgotten how to make them, and although I didn't think I had left enough room round the spine, it fitted perfectly.  Nothing to worry about after all. 

After four months

November hasn’t really been a writing month for me.  In total I managed to write 3614 words in November bringing my final total up to 29,733 Not great then when the aim was 50,000 words.  (my best month was October with 12,121 words)

But man have I learnt a lot.  Number one, writing a book (I won’t say novel – there is no way I can compare what I wrote with a real novel) is not as easy as reading one.  I already knew this, but the fact I can write a complete short story had led me to believe that maybe a full book wouldn’t be so bad.  I was wrong; it is.  My respect for authors, or anyone who has managed to keep going for the full 50,000 words or more, is immense.

Number two, planning really is the key.  I had a pretty good idea of how to start, and a very rough idea of the direction of the end, but no real idea of how to get there.  When writing a short story, this isn’t so much of a problem.  Being so short we are focusing on just one or two issues.  A book requires so much more.

Number three, I’m not very good at writing every day.  Its ok when I have an idea or know what should happen next, but just because it requires me to write 410 words today did not work for me.

Number four, there is no way I would have written even this much in one month.  Without the time to think about how my story was to move forward it would have stalled – this is where the planning comes in.

There is more I could say but those are the main points.  I probably could have written more if I was happy to flesh things out with more detail or conversation etc, but part of why I like writing short stories is that you get to the point quite quickly.

It’s been an interesting project but I think I’ll concentrate on short stories for now. 

Minimalist

I’ve just started reading a very interesting blog on being a minimalist, called mnmlist.com.

It has inspired me so far to delete 8 pages of old emails that I really don’t need, and to finally empty a cardboard box which has sat there untouched since we moved into the flat more than 2 years ago.

But it is not just about not owning stuff, more about being aware of the things you do own, having less of things you just don’t need, and not just buying things for the sake of it.  Reading this blog has made me more aware of the things in my life that my grandparents would count as ‘luxury’ items, stuff I could live without, like the microwave, TV and dishwasher and more aware of items which I could live without but make my life easier like my car or hairdryer.  

In one post he tries to list his 10 essentials, but only gets to 8.  Over the last couple of days I have tried to come up with my own 10 essentials, but have found this near impossible without knowing what activity I would be faced with.  If I was making books I would need my knife, steal rule, pencil, needle, thread, etc, going to work, for a walk or run require their own essentials.  Basically I have bought into the consumer society and believed the advertisers when they tell me that I need all this stuff.

I think that I am on the beginning of a long journey to reassess my life and what is important in it.  The image above is of Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall and when it says ‘I want to be like Hugh’, I mean it.  I like his ideas about life and food, that our food should be sustainable, we should grow our own (we do a bit) and that our work-life balance is important.  I want to take all these ideas and turn them into a life with more time to do the things I enjoy with the people I love.