jingle bell rock

the other day we went to stevenage and then st albans to get some christmas bits and we were properly frozen when we got to st albans so we headed straight for starbucks and their massive mugs of hot goodness. it took a while before i could feel my toes again but eventually i was heated up thanks to the huge amount of hot chocolate and the toasties and the cakes which weren't warm but were awesome and we headed out for the shopping. seriously, only the hardcore can have a motorbike as their main mode of transport in this weather, it's a painfully cold way to travel.


i'd got up early that morning coz we had loads to do and it's the first time i've seen the sun come up from the flat. and it was pretty. we have a good view.

on thursday we put up our tree. it is the best tree ever. this is me in a bauble.

we bought a plastic green fir type ring base for our wreath then will got in the holly bush outside and attached holly all round it and i made a bow from some christmasy ribbon and attached it at the bottom and within a few hours of it going on the door it snowed and added to it's beauty.

this is will painting our salt dough decorations. we made some for the tree because we're like children. but better. and it was really fun. i definately recommend it. they have been attached to the tree with red and green ribbon and look brilliant.

i'm feeling really christmasy now. mum's coming down tomorrow to take us to the supermarket to get all our food and even though i know everyone in the shop will make me angry i'm still looking forward to getting all the christmas food.

in other news, i've got my first card design ready for my shop and once i get paid i'm going to order the envelopes and put it, along with more designs, on my website so keep an eye out.

i'm going to go wrap will's presents and eat soup.

bargains galore

will's nan and grandad came down last week and came with homemade gifts. jams, pickled onions and pickled cabbage. i would like to point out that the jam pots are a normal jam pot size. the onions and cabbage pots are quite a bit bigger (the cabbage pot is shockingly huge). i haven't tried the jams yet but we had some of the onions and cabbage with lunch today and they're scrummy.
homemade rules.

this bag is awesome.

we went round the charity shops yesterday and found this bowl. i think it's meant to be a fruit bowl, it's big, made of clay, lovely and only one pound. bargain. and will be perfect in the middle of the table with holly round it once we've decorated for christmas.

will saved some flowers from the reduced bucket yesterday while i was at work. they're really pretty and really nice to come home to.

in the same trip as the bowl finding i also found myself a little skecthbook covered in velvet. it's so cute...

...and only 75p!

i love cheap things.

wisdom teeth are stupid. fact.

the past couple of weeks have been a bit confusing. on the one hand a load of good stuff happened and on the other i've been in awful pain.
firstly i found this photo of will and i at dr sketchy's. we look like we're concentrating so hard.

will decided that for his birthday he wanted to go to the national gallery the day before and then have a film day on his actual birthday. so we headed of to trafalgar square for some culture.
i did this drawing.

while we were looking at this painting there was a school group being taught about a painting of the execution of lady jane gray. afterward there was a little girl near us with a teacher and she said 'has her head already been chopped off?' and the teacher pointed at the painting and said 'no, look' and the little girl said 'no, but in real life'. haha. child logic, what year does she think is being shown in the painting?

trafalgar square is pretty at night.

the next day was will's birthday. i woke up with a sore mouth but tried to mostly ignore it.
the card will got from his mum had a bit to tear off and make into a plane. it didn't fly very well but it was amazing.

she also got him some boots which he was very pleased with as you can tell.

we went to the pub for lunch. we shared a greek salad, nachos and some onion rings. this is the last nacho covered in everything. how nachos should be.


the next day i woke up in even more pain and actually phoned the doctor. this shows the pain because i always give stuff as long as possible to go away on its own before i go to the doctor so to make an emergency appointment the day i wake up in actual agony shows it was agony not just me whinging.
anyway, i went to the doctor and she said my gum was infected and put me on antibiotics. bye bye bottle of wine i brought yesterday but only had one glass of. and bye bye solid food. it hurt so much i could barely eat. whenever my tongue moved and touched my gum, it hurt and i couldn't put my teeth together without biting the swollen gum anyway.
9 days of mushy food and emotions followed.

then it was sunday, time to go and see alice cooper courtesy of mum and dad. ain't they good.

it was awesome. alice cooper was amazing as always and it was being recorded for a dvd which is quite exciting. and they were magic, on your way out you could buy a usb stick with a sound recording of the show on it. mum and dad got one. i'll have to borrow it and listen to its brilliance.

when i have less of a headache i'm going to go through the alice photos and crop the good ones so you can actually see them. i don't like to use the zoom too much coz i'm so shakey it tends to ruin the photo but i have some that look promising.

then the day after (yesterday) i had to go to the dentist. remember all that pain i mentioned? not so bad that its waking me up all night anymore but there's something wrong with it enough that i can't eat properley.

the dentist robbed me.
and shoved a syringe (pointy metal thing that she had to point out wasn't an injection because otherwise you wouldn't have known) into my swollen gum gap to wash out the infection.
it hurt.
and she's put me back on antibiotics.
and i have to go back for a 20min cleaning. which is where most of the robbery came from.
£50 to have my teeth cleaned. that amount of money would feed us for 2 weeks. bye bye food.(or anything else for that matter)
she also x-rayed my teeth which wasn't pleasant but at least it didn't hurt.
my mouth is feeling a lot better now though. still can't quite put my teeth together without biting my gum but it almost doesn't hurt at all now.

i have done a painting of a cute thing. it's going to be a card available on my shop once i've found the right paper to print them on and got myself all the envelopes and packaging stuff.

hopefully from now on my life can have so much going on without any of the pain and dentistry.
at least for a while.
and some more funding would be nice.

dr sketchy's

will and i went to dr sketchy's on saturday afternoon. we really enjoyed it, it was so much fun. the performers (buck fast and annette bette) were brilliant and the compere (spencer maybe) did his job wonderfully and kept it all really easygoing and comfortable. and the pub it was held in, the paradise, was beautiful. i could go there just to look at it for an afternoon. it was amazing.
here are a few of the drawings i did. i didn't do anything amazing but i didn't care because i enjoyed it so much anyway.

this is spencer maybe. we had one minute and weren't allowed to look away from him or take our pencil off the page. he told someone off for looking down and i got confused which is why his body ended up shifted across slightly.

buck fast 5 minutes.

annette bette 1 minute

the last pose, annette bette for 10 min and she sat down so all i could see was the guy that was sat at the front in the middle. hence him making an appearance in the drawing. i'm sure he got more in the way as the afternoon went on.

this is will with spencer maybe winning free entry to a future dr sketchy's with a drawing of buck fast being wrapped up by an octopus. well done will :)
by the way, the guy at the side in his pants is buck fast, in case you couldn't guess.

this blur of light is annette bette.

this is annette bette during her performance. the guy in the pink shirt is the one that's all black and in the way in my drawing.

and this is kensal green tube station.

overall, it was awesome and we're definately going again.

christmas cards

someone asked me to design some christmas cards and these are what happened.
these are also my proof that you don't need to spend 4 weeks doing 'research' in a sketchbook before you actually start any finals. you just need to get on with it. and keep getting on with it until you're happy with what you've got. which i think should have been allowed to happen at uni. but what do i know.
now i just need to find some good thick paper to print them on.

the devil is a loser and he's my bitch

will and i had a cinema day (3 films) and it turned out quite an amazing day what with the free coffee and a £50 asda voucher.
and none of the films sucked which is always nice.

we went to see the fourth kind which wasn't make you jump scary but 'oh my god it might actually be real if you really think about it why can't i completely disregard it' scary.

then we got free coffee because we were looking at the sandwich's and the coffee maker lady said 'if you buy one of these sandwich's your drinks will be free' and pointed towards the till so we purchased 2 of the 4 going out of date sandwich's which was awesome because free stuff is always awesome.

then we watched fantastic mr fox. i'm in love with that film.
'even these apples look fake. but at least they have stars on them'

then we watched jennifers body. which should have been better than it was but i still enjoyed it. i have a funny feeling we've ended up with a cut up version in an attempt to make us like it better than america did when really all i noticed it did was cut out some of the bits that are then repeated later as though you're meant to remember them saying it before but they didn't. and that's just stupid.
what wasn't stupid though was the sticker toilet.
diablo cody is a genius.

what was also stupid was the group of girls sitting near us. really, do i need to hear you squeal 'sweetie time' before you eat your pick n mix? one of them thought megan fox was a boy at the beginning when it does a close up of her scratching her arm and then chewing a piece of her hair before it zooms out and you actually see her. and then her friend laughed and said 'yeah like a boy would have long enough hair'.
imagine that. a boy with long enough hair to put a bit in his mouth.
i can't even comprehend it.

also at work there has been an incentive to sell as many opc cards as possible. they put us in teams and the team that sold the most cards got prizes. i don't work on the tills anymore so i didn't sell any. our team leader won us the competition on his own. literally. we had a total of 422 cards sold. he sold 405. the team that came second sold 400 i think. or something like that but he would have won without a team. and i got a £50 asda voucher for it!
which is amazing because we got a gastricity bill the other day and i don't even have enough money in my bank account to pay it so not having to pay for food for a few weeks will be nice.

p.s. amanda seyfried is better looking than megan fox. by a big margin. just had to throw that out there.

remember, remember

will is at work tonight (as one of us always is on days we want to do something, or just generally when the other one is off) so we couldn't go to the fireworks display at hatfield house. i could hear them and see them from our kitchen window. this made me sad. but i still couldn't stop myself from taking a few photos.
there was a tree in the way of the fireworks from my house hence the silhouette in the top picture. but i think it's quite cool, looks like a tree made out of sparks.

and it wasn't too bad because while i was sitting by myself feeling lonely my mum harnessed her psychic powers and phoned me which cheered me up a bit. and she told me it was all sorted that they were coming to take me out on graduation day. i have decided not to go to the ceremony, will decided not to go either but then his mum said she wanted to go so he's going for her so i'm really glad mum and dad are coming down because it would've been another thing i had to spend on my own otherwise. not that they would've let my graduation pass unnoticed if i wasn't going to be on my own.

i read the back of this bottle of mead the other day and was amazed.

i just purchased some envelopes for some christmas cards i'm making for mum. i was quite excited deciding which ones to get.
maybe i need to get a life.
or maybe i like that i get excited by envelopes.

halloween

will was at work for most of halloween but in the day i made a load of cookies and cakes and when he got home we iced them before i fell asleep and it was fun.

happy halloween

eat sweets, watch horror films, paint your face, dress up and just generally be spooky, it's the only day of the year you can do it with a valid excuse so make the most of it.
(i'm not suggesting you can't do it on other days, you just might get looked at funny)

shawn barber

shawn barber

i've seen adverts for his books in tattoo magazines but i've never looked him up properly.
i'm glad i finally did.

i'm demon speeding

this spider lived outside our front door for a while which also happens to be infront of my window. it tried to eat a leaf the other day that had got caught in its web. then it dropped it and i took this photo and then it ran away to hide in the gutter again. will has since moved it because i was scared it would make babies on our front door. and i was also scared it would fall on my head everytime i went in or out of the house. we went to london for the afternoon before will had to meet his sister and her friend and take them to see lostprophets (he hated it, he took them because he's lovely and they needed looking after) and went to the national gallery. trafalgar square had this screen set up as part of the london film festival, it's inflatable and amazing. the other day will went and got me cakes for breakfast (told you he was lovely) and he came back with halloween cakes! the orange one in the background had really thick icing and was so so tastey. the one at the front is a scary biscuit! actually what it's called in the shop. awesome. it was also really tastey.

he looked sad when will started pulling his legs off.

and slightly confused when he was left without any legs at all.

it was half term this week and 'micheal jackon's this is it' came out on wednesday which equals to lots of hours at work. i think my feet almost fell off last night after 3 days of massive shifts in a row. next week is even longer. i felt a bit dirty at work yesterday. we're selling t-shirts, posters and the cd to go with 'this is it'. and they had the cd on, quite loudly, in the screens and the foyer and the toilets. seriously 7 hours of it on repeat drove me insane. i don't like people trying to make money out of someones death. if he hadn't died it would have just been extras on a live dvd. i understand people want to see it because the gigs didn't happen but there shouldn't be merchandise for it. all people are interested in is making money, however they get it. nevermind.
there was a good point to work yesterday though, while i was wiping round the sinks in the toilets a lady patted me on the shoulder and said "you're doing a really good job." bless her. i must have looked really fed up for her to feel the need to be nice to me. contrasted with the lady that got angry at me because there weren't any booster seats left she was like a saint.
the booster seat lady was annoying. i'd already had to say to so many other people that i was sorry but they were all being used at the moment and she was the only person that didn't just say oh well and walk off. she actually told me to find her one. what am i meant to do? steal one from a small child?
not looking forward to a massive week at work. but at least it'll be more money.
also i'm annoyed that the only 2 days i have off next week are the only 2 days will's working because the person that does his rota wanted those days off too. including halloween because he's going to see x factor. seriously. on halloween! idiot.

i seriously need a new job. or once i've set up my shop properly for it to be an instant massive success so i can just live off that. what? i can dream.

anyway, we went to tesco today and got 2 pumpkins. one for the table and one for the window. i bet nosey lady will love it.

we are excited about halloween (even if will does have to spend most of it at work)

by the way, that's rob zombie on the telly. perfect pumpkin carving viewing.

the pumpkins are looking really good if i do say so myself. but i'm not unveiling them to the world till saturday.

this is our lamp avec halloween decoration. i think you'll agree it looks brilliant.

i'm going to go see what food colours we have in preparation for spooky food on saturday.