END OF YEAR MUSINGS - Christmas Eve 2020
This whole episode is audio only, but it will help to look through the photos below while listening. Click HERE to start...
Posts
THE MAKING OF GOD JUL... 17/12/20
As usual, if you'd like to hear this in audio, please press HERE But please do look at the photos and listen to the links! I am going to open this post with a link to a stunningly sung version of the old Swedish carol 'Jul, Jul, stralande Jul' (yule, Yule, glorious yule, Shine over white forests...etc etc) Back in September, I felt an overwhelming desire to keep in contact with people come Christmastime. I think the 'insularity' of this peculiar year must be responsible. I have not sent out seasonal cards SINCE 2015, so a) I thought it would be nice to surprise people and b) it would keep me busy - not that I don't have other things to do of course! Wonderful place that the internet can be, I just didn't seem to be able to find anything commercially available that appealed to me - and the cost - some of the nicer ones were £5 each....!! Being a staunch atheist, I have tended to shy away from the overtly religeous and have generally mad
FATTENING UP MANNY 06/12/20
Should you prefer the audio version, please click HERE As I said in my last post, I was somewhat dissappointed when it turned out Manny needed a few extra pounds on him <sigh>. However, once I finally got around to sorting things out, I realised it meant making him a padded waistcoat (a gambezon, basically). This involved first of all making a double-layed calico waistcoat to his current size - double layered so that I could glue the wadding in place without the danger of the glue seeping through... That in itself was quite a challenge. Then the padding: mainly a layer of foam carpet under-felt. Very useful stuff incidentally - it is pretty good at deadening sound and formed a major part of the sound-deadening I installed between myself and my neighbours several years back. This was followed by several layers of thin wadding, with a final layer of calico to smooth everything down and make it look presentable. A certain amount of hand-sewing was requ