Blog Action Day for Poverty - 15 October 2008

Kitty Cavalcade, originally uploaded by Joey 7.

I will be taking part in the Blog Action Day on 15 October 2008, which aims to draw attention to people who live in poverty around the world. I'm not sure yet exactly what my post will say, but i've got plenty of time to think about and plan it! If you want to help raise awareness of poverty, click the link at the bottom of this post to go to the Blog Action site and register your intention to join in.

I feel a line of charity brooches coming up... The 25 "kitty pips" brooches you see above were made and sold in aid of the Children In Need annual appeal, and I raised £100! Which I was quite pleased about. :-)

Please check back on 15 October for the post! :D

Bunny Card for a Birthday Girl

Chloe's Bunny Card, originally uploaded by Joey 7.

I made this card the other day for my niece Chloe, who is 12 today! :D Happy Birthday Chloe!

I used the same bunny design from one of my painted brooches, then thought, "ooh! why don't I put a real paper windmill on the card too?!" Its surprisingly easy to make a paper windmill, but quite effective I think...

Starting with a square of paper, cut 4 straight slits going from each of the corners of the square, nearly to the centre, but not quite - you need to stop cutting each slit about 1cm before you reach the centre. Then starting one of the corners, bring it down to the centre of the square and hold it there, then repeat on corresponding corners of the other three sides.

You can secure the four corners with a drawing-pin if you want it to spin, or one of those cute metal paper-fasteners/'brads' with the little arms you fold out at the back if you're not bothered about it spinning. This is what I used, then stuck the bunny drawing on with a sticky foam pad, and covered the 'arms' at the back with a piece of patterned paper.

Here's a easy-to-understand tutorial for the windmill, with clear diagrams: Make a Windmill

Look at the fantastic range of paper-fasteners/brads you can get from sellers on Etsy:

The sellers are (top row, from left) party brads: CardBlanc, hearts: Cornerstore, fabric-covered brads: Aimoobaroo, shades of brown: BloomingFelt, (second row) snowflakes: Susan's Scrapbook Shack, canvas-covered brads: CardBlanc, screws brads: Susan's Scrapbook Shack, red apples: Susan's Scrapbook Shack, (third row) dragonflies: Susan's Scrapbook Shack, alphabet fabric brads: Cornerstore, trick-or-treat brads: Scrapbooker's Hideaway, moose brads: Susan's Scrapbook Shack, (bottom row) oak leaves: Susan's Scrapbook Shack, handmade Sculpey brads: Doridoo, patterned orange shades brads: Brittany's Photography, Scrapbook Art and Supplies, jeans buttons brads: CardBlanc.

If you are inspired to make a card like mine, I'd love to know and see a photo, so please get in touch!

thanks for reading! :D
Joey x

Cute Etsy Treasury

Thank you to Cutie Pie Company for including one of my painted bunny brooches in her treasury on Etsy!

If you want to see more of these bunny brooches, please take a look at my flickr set.

Check out Cutie Pie Company's Etsy shop for cute gocco-printed cards and stationery!

Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan

I really like listening to audiobooks. There's something comforting about them, maybe because it takes me back to being a nipper when my mum would read a book to me at bedtime (I can remember enjoying the "Ant and Bee" books, they have wonderfully naive childlike illustrations!), and you can just get on with whatever, washing dishes or more often, sewing or drawing while your mind can wander through the chapters.

A recent listen was Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan, read by Clare Corbet. I went and missed Channel 4's dramatization of the book, starring the wonderful Anna Maxwell-Martin (Bleak House, Becoming Jane). So when I saw this staring out at me from the shelves of Sheffield Central Library, I whisked it away to listen to, and i'm so glad I did!

The story is of two day patients, Poppy of the title who is dragged kicking and swearing into the Dorothy Fish psychiatric hospital, protesting that she is entirely sane; and the woman who befriends her who is simply and mysteriously known as 'N', who doesn't see a life beyond the Dorothy Fish. I did think it would be a bit harrowing, as it's a story about mental illness. But I was so wrong! It's very funny and entertaining, owing to the deadpan humour of 'N'. Through N's eyes we see Poppy gradually change from the smartly-dressed and feisty woman who didn't want to be taken into the hospital, to a tragic character who eventually falls apart.

Clare Corbet is a wonderful reader with a good repertoire of different voices which adds dimension to all the strange and colourful characters of such a bizarre place. I found the story very surreal and with not a little satire, when you hear about the government department called MAD (Ministry for the Advancement of the Deranged) and the layers of ridiculous bureaucracy which means ill people are discharged to commit suicide, while the sane and well Poppy has to fight for her freedom.

This audiobook is a great listen, and you'd be MAD not to!

Bunnies, bunnies everywhere!

Hello! I'm here now, don't be lonely! :D As John Shuttleworth would say... sorry for yet another long gap, I really don't know where the time goes! I have been busy though, I was happy to receive an order for lots of painted bunny brooches, from Ruby Lang of a sort of shared shop called SoLo, situated in the Cedros Design District in the city of Solana Beach, a seaside resort in California. I wouldn't mind a holiday there actually! Maybe one day... ;-)

Anyway, I really loved making these brooches. As with all my work, I started off with a load of drawings. Its good to draw your ideas out, even if you don't think you're any good at drawing. Its also a good idea to use a big piece of paper and do lots of small drawings, so you can compare your ideas, so you can see what you like best, and take forward as a finished creation.

The next step was to paint the design onto calico. Now this is the best bit, I used a light box to see the design so all I had to do is 'trace' it onto the calico. Even better, my little lightbox only cost me £3.79! The cheapest one i've seen in the shops is a very insubstantial one in WHSmith's for £9.99. I saw an instructable for a DIY lightbox, which is basically to put a small fluorescent strip light in an upturned plastic lunchbox, and hey presto! My strip light is a battery-powered one so isn't quite as bright as the one in the instructable, but it's plenty bright for me.

I placed the drawing on the light-lunchbox (secured with masking tape) and the calico on top, then with a size 000 brush, traced the drawing with Dylon fabric paint. This is a lot of fun, and if you vary the design, you can achieve a good balance of repetition and creativity which is quite relaxing! Hence the slightly different designs of bunnies. I made 20 of these, and picked what I thought were the best 10 to make into brooches.

For each brooch, I placed the painted calico piece sandwiched between 2 layers of calico, stitched together on my machine with a darning foot to make doing the curves of the oval a bit easier (machine stitching isn't my forte!), cut a slit in one piece of calico, clipped the curves with pinking shears and turned the whole thing right side out.

I sewed lace around the edge of each oval first. I really like using guipure lace, which is sort of embroidered and has a substantial, bold look about it. I also like using crochet lace, because it has a rustic, homemade feel to it. I've just bought a whole load from Sheffield Moor market in different colours that I can't wait to use! :D

I cut felt ovals in pink and blue, backed each with heavyweight iron-on vilene for strength and sewed on a safety brooch pin. Then I sewed the felt backing to the lace-edged calico oval with running stitch, which gives a decorative edge to the picture on the front. And that's it!

This is one of the brooches. See my flickr set for more pictures of the finished brooches: flickr

So if you're in Solana Beach, pay a visit to Ruby Lang's shop and you will see the brooches for real!

Ok, i'm going to do another post very soon so please check back!

Joey xxx

I'm a Cyborg But It's OK

I went to the cinema to see this, as you would. But this was the first film i've seen in a classroom which was pretending to be a cinema theatre. Yes, there were classroom-style chairs, a pull-down screen and light streaming through the gaps around the window blinds. It was being shown in "Showroom 5", according to a reluctant member of staff, because the film company Tartan has gone into receivership and they couldn't get a print, so they were showing the DVD instead. And indeed, there was the DVD's selection screen with looped soundtrack and clips from the film. They could have shown us the DVD extras if they wanted to! The whole strange situation affected the whole audience, and made for an excited, relaxed and chatty atmosphere. I just wish the seats had been more comfortable...
Tartan Films, RIP

Anyway, onto the film itself!

The film's heroine, Young-goon starts off life with her mentally unstable grandmother, who thinks she's a mouse and so eats radishes and stinks up the air... Granny is cruelly torn away from Young-goon to a psychiatric hospital and this event shatters Young-goon's own mind. She starts to think she's a cyborg, devoid of emotion, and an accident (she tried to charge herself up via the mains electricity) leads her to being admitted to a psychiatric hospital too.

The film is very funny and tragically sad in turns. Mental illness is manifested in this film as bizarrely humourous behaviour and beliefs, such as the beautifully-illustrated, albeit imaginary book of 7 deadly sins for cyborgs which Young-goon tries to live by ("no sympathy"). The way the film seemed to glamourise mental illness did make me wonder whether we should be finding the various events funny. Like how Young-goon didn't eat because she believed it would harm her machine organs, which brought her to the point of starving to death; the girl who could only look at people in a mirror; and the man who thought that everybody's misfortunes were all his fault and spent his days apologising. But this was made like a fantasy, and with a fantasy you tend to forgive a lot of inaccuracies and artistic licence. And if we didn't laugh, we'd cry, perhaps...

Plenty of attention has been paid to the look of the film, with some entertaining special effects and eyecandy supplied by Young-goon, played by Im Su-jeong and Il Sun (played by pop star-turned-actor Rain).

A slightly disturbing but delightful confection of a film.

Watch the trailer with English subtitles: YouTube English Trailer

Memories of Matsuko

This was a beautiful and very moving film, so I can't believe I've taken a whole week to get around to writing about it. But, the mark of a fantastic film for me is that I can actually remember it a week later! So here is what I thought...

Memories of Matsuko is the sad story of a woman's journey through a hard life, full of disappointments, betrayals and broken dreams. We follow Matsuko through her 60's childhood where she was overshadowed by her ill sister and tried constantly to impress her dour father. Then we follow her career path from school teacher to prostitute and porn star to hairdresser, and see her in prison along the way. The common thread which runs through her life is a succession of abusive boyfriends, and she's drawn to them like a fly to you-know-what.

In some ways, this was an incredibly harrowing and bleak melodrama, but I haven't said yet that it was a musical. Yes, a musical! With pop songs and Busby-Berkeley-esque dance sections which elevated the mood of the film. Just when you think that all hope is lost, along comes another song, and Matsuko is singing and dancing again. One of the highlights is "Happy Wednesday", with our heroine dressed like a 50's housewife in a bright kitschy kitchen with day-glo flowers all around. It's the sharp contrast of the bleak hopelessness of Matsuko's situation, against her faithful and forgiving approach to life, that makes the film so touching. It steers away from sentimentality, by showing her as a normal, flawed human being, who tries to deal with everything the world throws at her, slips into a downward spiral and strives to crawl back up.

If you don't shed at least one tear at some point in watching Memories of Matsuko, then you have a heart made of stone.

Watch this on YouTube for some of the best bits: Memories of Matsuko on YouTube