A few bits and bots

I've finished the crochet bag!  Horray!  The final bit joining the flowers to form a base was fiddly, but it turns out if you go back and read the instructions rather than making things up works well *sigh*  And of course, by finished, I mean 'up to the point where I have to sew a lining, attach to the crochet, work out a suitable handle and source all materials needed to do these things.

But I hated the baby blue thread.  Sadly, there wasn't a lot of choice when buying the thread since it was that, pink (double blech), cream or white.  So I've pulled out the dye stocks and had a go.

Here's before, in the original, baby blue thread.

And here is after I tried dying it in a mix of turquoise (blue), periwinkle (purple) and a hint of black.  The end result is a darkish, forget-me-not blue.

I have not decided what I'm going to line it with.  At the moment  I quite like the cream- a bit of spare calico- that I've used to show the pattern a bit clearer, but I'll have a think about it.

Finally, here's some jewellery that I've made.  The earrings because I found the kit when sorting out my beading stuff, and the bracelet that was something I had put into my beading stuff to be fixed and never got around to.

And this post is the last of my holiday posts.  It's closing to the end of the third week of school and sadly the large pile of marking, planning etc has sucked up all my time (free or otherwise!).  So expect irregular posts for a few months.

Discworld stamp Yearbooks

One of the last things I did on my break before pulling out the work I needed to do was to finish my most recent Discworld Stamp Yearbook.  It seemed particularly appropriate as this year is the 10 year anniversary of Discworld stamps.

These were inspired by stamp Yearbooks I have seen for Australian stamps.  Now since I don't collect them, I've only seen them for sale in the Post Office, but from what I saw, I loved the idea of information about what was featured in the stamp in addition to the stamp details and, of course, a place to put the stamps themselves!

For some stamps, I had fun researching the techniques that were used

Two of these were made several years ago, but I just finished the 2007 Discworld Stamp Yearbook and put my stamps in.  So now I want to show off my collection.

I love pages that have all the sports!

For others, I have wishful thinking gaps.

I only have one years worth of stamps to have my collection stored in as after 2008 I dropped collecting due to lack of time.  While I have bought the odd edition if it was particularly cool looking (one of these days I'm going to decoupage some of them for instance), I didn't have time to keep up as I always wanted to get the sports in addition to the commons.  Now I think about it though, I could start again with a reduced 'just the commons' policy....  *twitches*

If you would like to make a Discworld Stamp Yearbook of your own, feel free!  I've linked to the files below.  Read through my series on Bookbinding (starts here) to see how to print these out and bind them into a hard cover book.

Links (Word files)

Year 1 (2004-2005)

Year 2 (2006)

Year 3 (2007)

More info on stamps

The Cunning Artificer shop (where to buy them from)

The Discworld Stamp Catalogue (if you want to identify an unknown Discworld stamp)