Where on earth did 2011 go!? I think I've contracted the New Year blues, where gift giving, booze and merriment have been swapped for staying in and being bored because all outside has to offer is bear wind and fine rain and cold legs.

I've had a grand Christmas and received some wonderful presents including The Making of Fantastic Mr Fox, My Future Listography and an amazing surprise from my favourite Welsh butty - a book made up of photos from our Turkish adventure last summer including a day by day story of what we got up to! I also received a projector, One Flew Over the Cuckoos' Nest, Up, Harry Potter, the necessary Crimbo pjamas and slipper socks and of course my Second Hand Secret Santa surprise, which turned out to be a Jane Shilton handbag in a beautiful shade of grey!

I wear grey all the time, I think it's much nicer than boring old black so this bag is a perfect addition to my wardrobe! Thank you very much Lisa from Mathilde Heart Manech, it hasn't been off my shoulder since Boxing Day!

Dan and I spent New Years down in Cornwall and I had my first countdown to the New Year outside of the North West of England! It was an awesome night spent in Plymouth which started off in View 2 with an awesome band and tasty cocktails.

 

We shouldn't have left there because the rest of the night looked pretty much like this:

and I've had Rhianna's, We Found Love in a Hopeless Place in my head ever since, which is terrible news as I cannot stand the woman, but at 12:01am on 1st January after you've been cut short shouting Auld Land Syne at the top of your voice you just don't care what you're dancing (or singing along) to!

Miriam and I took a trip to Liverpool today to have a look round some crafty shops, kitsch shops and charity shops. Whilst stuffing our faces with burgers and milkshakes in Rockerfellas, we had a good discussion about what we are making for the Cracking Christmas Craft Fair, where we have a stall and will take place in Preston on 10th December (2 weeks arghhh!).

I found some lovely books for 95p each that I am going to cut up and make new stuff with (although I'm keeping the beautifully illustrated Augustus and His Smile to give to my nephew as part of his Christmas box).

A New House for Eeyore, Vicky's New Hat, Augustus and His Smile

I also found an ordnance survey map from 1961 for £1.99 in Oxfam. I love old maps and intend on framing the ones I have collected to put up somewhere in my future home. So far I have one of South Wales (where I went to uni) and this one which I bought for Dan as he is from Liskeard and it has all the places we have adventured in Cornwall together.

Here is the blue canvas, owl fabric and ribbons I rooted out in the wonderous world of Abakhan where we spent most of our time admiring everything and being very indecisive.

Also from Abakhan, I got some grey, silver, purple and mustard velvet (each half a metre and 60p for all 4) and then a set of Reeves Watercolours (for £3! Bargain) to replace my trusty Windsor and Newton Watercolours (lost those ones - sad face) from the most random 'Craft Shop' I've ever seen in my life.

What a lovely looking blog this is! I've just finished playing around with the layout and I'm pretty happy about how it looks now. All the illustrations are done by myself (recycled doodles from two years ago) and I really like how fresh it looks with the white background rather than being grey.

What does anyone else think?

I have also been in school tonight painting some more. I only have a few photos because the camera is rubbish quality, and I don't want to mither what little followers I have with a million photos of unfinished fish, but here are two of my favourite finished fishes:

And here is a me finishing off the seahorse that Miriam started:

Last week I signed up to the Second Hand Secret Santa over at Eleanor's blog: Pretty Much Penniless. I have since been assigned to a gift receiver (eeeep! I love buying gifts!) and had a look at said gift receiver's blog and have loads of ideas of what to look out for, but I've also come to the conclusion that my own blog is pretty rubbish...

I've been trying to keep it professional so I can use it as a kind of free portfolio website (hence the boring grey theme (although I do love the colour grey)) so, I plan on giving this poor little blog a little overhaul, a little more love and a little more of myself.

I'm off to my nephew's first birthday party in an hour so I don't have much time to be messing about with the layout or going into hopes and dreams and whatnot, so as it's his birthday, lets start with a photo of my dribbly bezzie mate:

So today I've started to paint in some fish and this is how it looks now:

The little guppies, showing their heart to the beautiful mermaid, are the only ones fully finished and here they are:

I've had my week painting without children being in school, and I've got the main features almost finished (only the flippers on the mermaid to paint silver over) and this is what they look like:

 

I'll be moving on to the smaller fish some time next week, but it's going to get a lot harder as the children will be back in on Monday and so I will have to work around that, but hopefully it'll be finished before Christmas...?

A few weeks ago my local primary school (where, in January, I used to go into Reception class and create artwork with the children) asked me to paint them an underwater mural in the infant's cloakroom.

It looked like this at the time:

Not particularly child friendly...

So I drew up some ideas and we decided the main features would be an octopus, a mermaid and a turtle and then I would fill the rest of the wall with fish, seahorses, jellyfish, starfish, crabs and all sorts of sea creatures.

On the evening of the children breaking up (Friday 21st October), myself and two teachers rolled our sleeves up and stormed through the painting of the blue base coat and it looks loads better already:

Today I drew out (in pencil) and filled in (with white emulsion) the mermaid, octopus and turtle. I had traced my designs onto acetate and used an OHP to project the images onto the wall: