Tuesday 14th August

I should wash my hands before I start this - I've been doing some Sculpey blanks for new pendant work, and my hands are still a bit 'clay-ey' - is there such a thing as 'clay-ey'? I very much doubt it. But Sculpey air drying clay is quite harmless stuff - it seems to dry and brush off pretty much everything. The pendants I've been making at textured blanks - small, round, with a little hook in the top to hang them.  Did you read my post below on the leaves? Well at the same time that I collected the leaves, I collected a few seed pods, and rather interestingly, one of them's dried, and as it dries, it's opened. As it's this huge oval shaped thing (I've no idea what it's a seed pod of) it's opened particularly irregularly. Rubbing it over the top of the soft clay has left the most marvelous impression. Well, I rolled rather than rubbed, but regardless, I'm very pleased with it. I'll take a few photo's after I've painted them, and put them up. I'm going to coat them with a base colour, and then rub colours over the top, including possibly an old bit of gold wax I've somewhere around the place. It should look good.

Sadly alas, the leaves were a dismal failure. The icing doesn't dry quickly enough for the leaf not to decay underneath, and it would contaminate the icing which I definitely don't want. So they are all now in the bin! I've been piping out a few flowers - just a blob surrounded by other blobs really. They're not so bad. Tomorrow I'll get started on the template for the 'happy birthday' bit - I've been practising my swirls etc, and I also need a new piping bag. My old one doesn't fit all of my nozzles which is a pain as for the writing I need to use the finest one!

Lord I've got a documentary on Bergman on the box. It'll have to be - well, I don't know, turned down at the least, Scenes from a marriage is loud - at least the bits they've chosen to broadcast are. Bergman's not my favourite of filmmakers, I quite enjoy some of them, but oh dear very depressing. If I start paying attention to it, I shall need a good few chapters of something light and frothy before bed - do you find that? Sometimes, you need to be cheered up before you go to sleep. I find Wodehouse good for this, and I rather suspect that's at the heart of my enjoyment of Harry Potter. Light, Frothy and totally inconsequential. Together with a nice cup of ginger tea, it's everything you could want before falling asleep. So on that note, I'm off to bed!