Best Gift Ever!

My friend Brittany went to America and brought me back the best gift ever: three American deoderants!

I make no secret of how much of a snob I am towards any deoderant from elsewhere in the world (they just don't work as well!) so I was very delighted with these. Every time I go to America I buy about six. It's important to smell good!

Beading Weekend

This weekend I'm going camping in the bush with some girlfriends to make Masaai jewellery with a cool company called 'Maasai Women Art'. We'll take workshops with Maasai women and make stuff all weekend long. I love the Maasai beaded jewellery, so I am more than a bit excited. Photos of the results to follow next week!

Potato Clock

Do you ever feel that every blog you read is secretly trying to tell you 'My home is better than your home'? I do, and it's annoying. But in this particular instance, my home actually IS better than your home. Unless you too are lucky enough to possess a stylish potato clock:

 It looks fantastic and really works: we've had it up and running for about a week. We have ours in the lounge but I think it would also look cool in a kitchen or in an office, particularly the kind of office with cubicles where everything is kind of blah. I'm no scientist, but I guess that if the potatoes run out of power, you can replace them with some new ones!

To make the potato clock I think you really just need some potatoes and some bits of metal and wire, along with a clock fitting. We used this nifty kit that we got from Amazon:

It doesn't only work with potatoes! Also with lemons and soda, according to the instructions. I'd love to try it with pineapples! What are your ideas for things to test it with?

Top Ten John Hughes Movies

This afternoon I had a great time watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off and it reminded me how much I always enjoy John Hughes movies. Not all of them are good: Flubber, anyone? But maybe a third of them are awesome, and I wanted to dwell on this fact. So here they are: the good ones, from worst to best.

10. Planes, Trains and Automobiles

I didn't watch this film for the longest time... mostly because it was my German teacher's favourite film, and I thought he was strange. Once I got over that and actually sat down to watch it, I really liked it. Its super funny and surprising: you never quite know what's going to happen next.

9. Home Alone

Home Alone is like every kid's favourite fantasy meets worst nightmare. Watching this film when you're seven, it's way scarycool!  Even when you're twenty five, it's still a little bit scarycool!

8. Beethoven

Whenever anyone mentions Beethoven, I think of the dog. They're usually not talking about the dog, which I find disappointing. Clearly I need new friends.

7. Some Kind of Wonderful

Teen Angst! Love Triangles! A semi awesome female lead in love with a wimpy, disappointing guy! The very recipe for film success!

6. Uncle Buck

I used to watch this film a lot with my mum and aunty while I was too young to really understand it. It's kind of interesting to watch as a child, but a lot funnier as an adult. Buck is great because he's totally himself.

5. Weird Science 

It's like Hughes took the essence of a fourteen year old boy's brain and distilled it into this film. I know it's technically stupid, I know it was literally written in two days and it totally shows when you watch the movie, but I love it anyway. Rediculous hilarity!

4. Ferris Bueller's Day Off

So Ferris is like, halfway between being a douchbag and the coolest guy you ever met. He's a terrible friend and a wonderful friend both at the same time. The premise sounds mundane: a guy takes a sick day from school. And the film kind of is mundane. But also wonderful. And the line that comes up twice: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I pretty much try to live by that.

3. Pretty in Pink

Probably the main reason why I enjoy this film is because I enjoy Mollie Ringwald looking sullen, but whatevs. It's a fun film with teenagers, high school, prom, punks. I mean really. What more do you want?


2. The Breakfast Club

The breakfast club is more like a play than a film. Objectively, if you haven't seen the film in a while, you might start to think, 'All those kids, becoming friends like that. That could never happen'. But whilst you're watching the movie, it's totally believable. It's the kind of thing I always wish would happen in real life!

1. Sixteen Candles

Sixteen candles. Ah, sixteen candles. Every time I make somebody watch this film with me, they agree that it's pretty much the best thing ever. The basic premise is that it's this girl's sixteenth birthday, and her family all forget. But there's so much more to it than that! There are so, SO many things I enjoy about this film, but probably my favourite moment is the one where Sam gives her panties to a geek:

If you haven't seen it yet, go and watch it. Right now. And if you've already seen it... why, watch it again of course!

Carving Lessons: Hippos

Here's something else I made in my carving lessons: two little hippos! Okay, so I didn't make them all by myself: Jeremiah carved the tails, eyes, nostrils and ears. But I did ALL the sanding. Which took like, 3 hours. They're super smooth. Smoother than stones.

Art A Level: Kinda Big Oil Pastel Portraits

Following on from my other oil pastel portraits I wanted to do some which were a bit bigger. These ones are slightly smaller than A3 size. I probably can't do very many more because I pretty much used up all my most useful colours of oil pastel.

The second one was inspired by mermaids: I've been reading a mermaid series of books recently and very much want a shimmering tail and to eat sushi under the sea (where do they get the rice?) My reading habits are not very mature: my excuse is that I'm currently writing a novel for teens. My other excuse is that a lot of teen fiction is actually really good!

The Year Of Her Majesty

Every year is a Royal year for me (I love the queen), but a couple of new additions allow me to more fully express her Royal Highness in my very own home. At the top is my 2013 calendar, which I bought in England in April 2012. Below that is my new biscuit tin, bought by my mum inside the confines of the VERY PALACE ITSELF. Plus she worked out a way for me to fraud my way in by pretending to be her next time. Go Mum!

In Finland I've got some excellent embroidered tea towels from Buckingham Palace, and in England I've got several vintage mugs from the silver jubilee, bought from car boot sales for 50-100 pence each. I wish I could show you them because they are so cool! But another time, perhaps. There's also two badges. The bigger one was another car boot find. I wore it recently when Prince Charles was on his royal visit to Tanzania. I don't like Charles or anyone else except the Queen really, but it was a good excuse:

The small badge was my Mum's. She must really love me (or not understand my obsessions with the queen...). The final photograph is of a postcard I bought when I was last in London. It's the Queen of Diamonds... in the year of her Diamond jubilee! Of all the Queen Elizabeth II memorabilia, I feel it is perhaps the most perfect.