Cork Stamping

So, new years wine was drunk... over slightly longer than just new years eve. Which really just goes to show what madness my life has become. No bottle of wine would have lasted that long before. Oh well.

So I had used the wire wrapping for Christmas decorations, so what else could I use? I can't help but feel I am a long way from having the confidence to work with glass so what did that leave?

Yup. A cork. Now there are lots of things you can do with corks, but most of them require multiple corks. So I decided to go with something simple and to make a stamp out of it. There are many tutorials on this. It's quite simple. You draw what you want onto the cork and then cut around it with a craft knife. You cut it very carefully. I managed to not cut myself. Hurrah. I wanted something I could stamp upcoming projects with, you'll see... So I went with the following.

Now, those who are smarter than me will have already spotted my mistake. Oh well. Yeah, I will hold my hands up to this one. I could blame it on the stinking cold that I have, that has left my brain feeling as though it is filled with cotton wool, but I think that's only one of a range of factors. I was so scared of my craft knife and all he fiddly bits, I forgot to do the important bit.

For those who haven't spotted it immediately. My lovely B-14 will not work. It doesn't work as B-14 anyway. But I like it. It's kind of abstract. Here it is...

Yes, it's backwards, but I feel that says so much about my craft ability that I can't help but smile :D

Sustainability, society and you: A FutureLearn Course

I first found out about FutureLearn at some point last year, and I signed up for quite a few course. I maybe got too keen too quickly as over the Christmas break I had a few busy days catching up with some of my old course.

But this week is the start of a new learning experience, and in line with this blog it's all about sustainability, and one of our first articles is a thinking exercise on sustainable choices which posed three questions.

Which is better for the environment - incineration of waste, or disposal via landfill? 

I think we are all aware that non-biodegradable waste sitting in a landfill is not a good thing in any sense but I know that a lot of folks also don't like waste incinerators, irrespective of the power generated being used back into the lcoal network. I think incinerators are quite scary things, and certainly not something that you would want in your back yard, but they have to go somewhere. I guess if you can't reuse or recycle it, better that it gets burnt that sits inertly for the next thousands of years...

Which do you think is more sustainable? Drying your hands with hot air dryers or using paper towels?

Just how many times are paper towels recycled? Most paper towels are in public toilets aren't they? Most of them probably just get shoved in the bin, so not very often I am guessing. Yes, air dryers use electricity, but how much power is used in recycling the paper or even, heaven forbid, actually chopping down trees for their manufacture. Hmmm... I might not actually be thinking about this one, I feel that I might have already made my mind up in my head.

Having a nosy on google brought me this as well: Guardian Article on Paper Towels & Hand-dryers

If you have the option of using a dishwasher, do you think it is more sustainable than washing up by hand? 

I did have a dishwasher. It's broken. We haven't fixed it. What some people don't seem to realise is that you can't push terribly dirty dishes in, they need a rinse down before they go in. I think this question might be a matter of numbers. If you only have a couple of glasses, then wash them up by hand. If you have a full load it might be more economic to use the dishwasher. Water wise anyway. You then have to factor in the electricity. Does the dishwasher use hot water or does it heat it itself? You know I don't know. How weird is that, you just accept that these appliances do their thing and don't look too deeply.

Another bit of google-fu tells me that a dishwasher uses about 3 gallons or 13-14 litres of water per cycle but that an average kitchen sink has a capacity of about 20 litres. Who knew!

New year... New Christmas decorations?!

Well here we are on the first post on my new blog. It's telling that I have started with something small and that I will likely make and then put away for almost a whole year. But then planning has never been my forte!

And so with that, the tale of how I chose to do this began. And as for most crafts projects these days, it started with observing the tutorial on pinterest. I am not going to say which one, as there are a hundred and one tutorials on this one (actually a quick googling suggests about 431,100 results!) so you can find your own if you really need to. My Christmas tree was fairly sparse this year, as the cat does tend to climb it, and has spent two years systematically smashing all the baubles that I used to have, so I thught I might try colonising it again with slightly fewer breakables.

So what am I making? Mini pom-pom Christmas baubles!

There's the ingredients list. But I think it's only fair to point out that in this case, it's sadly not the wine I am using, but the very thin wire mesh that is wrapped around the bottle. 

So for the process, it's simply wrap yarn around the tines of the fork, tie off and then cut down the loops on either side. That's how to do it according to every single tutorial out there. But what I didn't find was, how many times to wrap it round in order to get a sensible shaped pom-pom. The first one I did was a bit like a bad hair cut; short on the side, long on the top and bottom. So I tried again, I thought maybe I hadn't wrapped enough, so off I went again, far more loops this time. And yes, whilst the pom-pom was bigger, it was still naff. Cursing the beautiful photos on pinterest that had brought me this far, I tried less wraps and actually it didn't look too bad. Nothing like the pictures I had seen, but far closer than any so far.

So here are the first three in action. They had a bit of attention (I rolled them between the palms of my hands in order to try and round them) but you can see the first two are far wonkier than the third. So lesson is learnt. Mini pom-poms must stay mini.

Finally I clipped off stretches of the wine wire in order to wrap around the centre of the pom-pom and affix to the tree. Simple. Once you know how anyway.

So here is one on the tree. Delightful red yarn from who knows where getting used up slightly. Although if we're honest, it's just being moved from a box in my craft cupboard to a box in the attic for the next eleven months!