Woops

I gotta stop saying that I'm going to keep doing something forever, because apparently I tend not to...

For the entire of July I may have taken around five photos of me for the whole month. Woops indeed. What I did manage to do, however, was keep a fairly accurate sleep diary throughout that time. Apparently, leaving Uni accommodation and moving to Cardiff did wonders to my sleeping patterns!

I'm not actually there right now, I'm back in my home Shire at my family's house. I need to get some plans made and in action for some income. I've got a little saved up to live off, but my cashflow is far too negative at the moment. I could probably quite easily go out and get a job, but my heart is set on getting some passive income on the go, which does mean that my Artfire shop has been suffering a little neglect. Instead I've been painting and drawing a few things, with the intention of turning them into posters or prints for sale online.

If you ever went on Kaneva, you might recognise one of my symbols...

I actually forgot that I was capable of drawing, until I found the life-drawings I did back in my first year of uni. How does someone like me just forget something like that?!

A photo a day.

Well... the page-a-day didn't quite work out. I think the problem was that I got discouraged when I found I was having so many blank pages on days where I wasn't feeling in a particularly arty mood, and ended up losing track of the whole thing. Never mind, I still have the pages to doodle on when I want to.

Instead I've started a new 365 project. I take a photo of myself everyday for a month. And again the next month. And again and again until I make 12 months! But I don't just take a picture of my face like Noah did. Sometimes I edit them, practising and experimenting with digital tools to see what effects I can come up with and achieve.

Okay. I confess. It's partly an excuse to make pretty pictures of myself to put onto Facebook and to put into a book of my own for when I'm older or gone. A part of me wants to have lots and lots of sweeeet looking pictures, but I'm not a model... And I thought that since I'm not a model, then I shouldn't be taking or making pictures of myself and editing them like I wanted to put on display anywhere...

I think Alice Cat changed that belief. She wasn't a model. She was just a sweet looking little girl a couple years below me in school, and then a few years later, BAM! Now look at her. She's working away at a career she loves and she's looking pretty damn fine doing it. It's awesome. It's inspiring. It made me start taking a picture of myself everyday, and hopefully everyday for at least a year.

And sure, maybe I'm not doing it with a career in modelling in mind [or maybe I am.. I've never had a solid vision of a career path in mind], and maybe I missed one day and sneaked in a screenshot image of my sleep pattern diary, and maybe some of the photos are really lazy ones where I haven't even edited or colour corrected them, let alone tried to do anything arty.

But even the unedited ones still show something of who I was and where I was that particular day in the series. Not to mention how I really like how a few of them have turned out. If I can, I'd like to keep this up for the rest of my life. Join me! Feel free to post any links to your similar projects in the comments :)

Roath will be happy days for me, I think!

Okay, I suppose I deserve a slap on the wrist. Not only have I not been doing anything on the book designs front in the past few weeks, I have also not been doing much in the way of Uni work either, and my 365 page a day project has been neglected for... I'd say around a month. I am a bad, bad girl.

But wait! I have not been doing nothing!

I've been heading out to Cardiff a lot lately, first to find and view and choose a house to live with some friends. There are eight of us, six of which will still be in Uni next year, but we have split up into two groups of four for the purposes of house-finding. I'm going to be living with Claire, Dave and Todd, who I can affectionately refer to as The French Actress, The Dark Dove and The Wizard Rockstar... Really need to come up with some good names for the other four guys. I'm also not sure what nickname I would have, although I've been told by the DarkDove that if I were a Pokemon I might be a Persian, and that the French word for cat is pronounced the same way as the first half of my name. Perhaps I'm The Petit Chat?

Almost us: This image drawn by The Wizard Rockstar includes members who won't be part of the Cardiff crew, and is missing out a couple of people...

We've all managed to find houses and flats in Roath, literally a couple of blocks away from each other, which is fantastic. We won't have a garden in the flat my half will live in, so I was looking up allotments in Cardiff and found some cool things going on.

Then I found out all about the Roath Market, and the Craft Market too, as well as an apparently abundant craft culture in Roath [see here too]. Needless to say, I am now even more excited about the first post-Uni year of my life than I was before!! And unfortunately more distracted from my current Uni coursework....

Come now Petit Chat, don't get too ahead of yourself!

Let's get it started! *

I have really been lagging behind on this Business.. business. I've researched adequate packaging for shipping, checked out what other people are selling, had a few ideas, made some things... But I feel I haven't really gotten stuck in yet.

I haven't actually made any products for listing, and ArtFire's 45 Day Guide suggests having at least 100 products to list. So last night, I began to make a small 100 page notebook to fill with product ideas and material requirements and probable costs. I definitely don't have 100 ideas in mind yet, but it's okay. I have a few to get started with.

It just needs some holes and some stitching together. I could have stitched it simply last night, but I want to try something experimental with a macrame spine...



* Have you seen the movie Hot Tub Time Machine? I loved it. Check this out - although I reckon it's better in the context of the actual movie! :)

Sheep Poo Paper, Make Something a Day & Tumbleweed Tiny Houses

Whew! Today was the hand in day for my dissertation first draft. Before today, I felt a little bit guilty every time I was doing something other than coursework. It was my 21st birthday on January 10th, and I actually spent the morning working on the dissertation! I did treat myself to a nice long day at the Camp Sossage [translation: the house my guy-friends live in] playing Rock Band and drinking cocktails the next day though, as a reward for being well behaved enough the previous night to catch the bus in the morning and make it in to my first ever lecture at the new Newport City Centre Campus.

Speaking of birthdays, it's my sister Abi's birthday today. I have told her already, but, Happy Birthday!

Now I've uploaded my draft and can relax a little while I let myself work on some other things...

What I got up to today...

I found out something I didn't know. There are people here in Wales collecting sheep poo to make paper out of the cellulose fibres they didn't manage to digest... It sounds gross, but the process sterilizes everything, creates good fertiliser as a by product, and actually creates decent looking paper. You'd never know it came out of a sheep's back end! Here is their website.

My browsing of the the Internet has also lead me to 365, a website all about making something, anything, everyday for a year.

I've been feeling so stuck in a rut lately - that is, until I complained about my lack of time to do what I want to my friend Dave. He told me, in true Dave "Mr Motivator" Ware fashion, that I had nothing but time. Strictly speaking, that's not true... but what I think I need to realise is that I can spare ten minutes every day to complete a little 2inch by 3inch page, in the art journal I made for myself today after watching some videos by Moxylyn. Such as this one:

365 has presented me with the challenge of actually doing it. My little art journal only has 120 pages including the cover pages, so I'm going to have to make a couple more of the same to have enough pages for a year. I have no pictures of it yet because I haven't actually sewn it together [I'm thinking a nice bit of Coptic Stitching]. I made it specifically to doodle in because I definitely don't spend enough time out of my own head these days, so using some paper once a day should be good for me!

Something quite unrelated to book making but a wonderful example of design [and also creating something that I now really want to own for myself] is the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. Check it out, I actually love the look of these things.

The tinier ones can be built on trailers and can technically be considered RVs, even though they look like tiny houses! My favourite at the moment is the Weebee. I really really want one, but I don't think right now is quite the right time to get one, what with having my nice big standard Uni room for another few months and my dad busy building a nice extension to the side of our house. And don't even ask me where I'm planning to live next year when I've graduated... Current ideas involve moving to Cardiff with a few of the Sausages, one of which has already graduated. The others will be in their final years doing film degrees [ = free access to really good cameras].

I think I would like to live there with them. But I'll need to get some work done and start earning some income if I'm going to keep on top of rent without blowing my savings of the past few years!

Lovemoney.com

I've recently decided to check out Lovemoney's free online banking service to help me with managing my money.

Originally, I was just typing in numbers on a spreadsheet from my online bank statements to work out my net outgoings and income each year since I've had a bank account. I found out about Mint.com's service today, but then I realised it was for people living in the US. While searching for a UK version, I found out that I was too late too for the no-longer here Kablax, but there is another website called Money Dashboard, which uses the same software as both Mint and Lovemoney.

After a quick bit of browsing I found some complaints about Money Dashboard using some sort of Microsoft Silverlight software or something. Something about it eating CPU something or other. I didn't feel much motivation to get too engrossed on the details.

Having not really found any major complaints about Lovemoney, I've decided to give that one a go first. I got a little chuckle reading the terms and conditions:

"We only provide aggregate, non-identifiable information to our current and prospective advertisers and business partners. For example, we might tell advertisers that we have 120,000 registered members in Metropolis, but we won't tell them that Superman is one of them, and we won't tell them that his email address is ckent@dailyplanet.com."

Should be good, but we'll see how it goes.

Oh, and incase anyone wants to read the post that started me off today in the first place, here it is: How To Understand (and Create) A Personal Financial Statement Each Month In 5 Minutes by Brian Armstrong

Calendar/Notebook

This week I've been working on this design:

Made from a sheet of white A4 paper cut into four, it has one station of four sheets and the covers are made of the same paper as the pages. There are enough pages for a page per month. The spine is decorated with four light blue metallic beads [these ones were cheap ones I bought from the local pound shop in Saundersfoot - unfortunately the metallic blue wears off quickly, but leaves a nice translucent white plastic underneath] with macrame square knots in between, and the excess thread from the knotting can be used as a book mark. Didn't follow any instructions for this one, it's a simple design I worked out myself.

Inside can be drawn a month calendar on each page, with space below each for notes. In mine I have written in the daily Chinese "earthly branches" and "heavenly stems" in pencil with the intention of painting the squares in a pattern using those colours as a guide. I'm not sure why I like that theme so much. Maybe it's the way the simplicity of the five elements and twelve animals can build up into something really complex when they interact.

And because it's winter, here's a pretty picture I took of the view outside my window before I left my Uni bedroom for the holidays:

I might draw this on the cover for decoration. I might not.