Congratulations Dr Who

I did sit down to post this last Saturday, on the 50th Anniversary of Dr Who, but time ran away with me as always.

As I'm sure you'll realise, if you've read any of my earlier posts, we do like to spend as much time as possible in the English Lake District.  Largely for holidays, but we also thankfully live close enough that we can just visit for the day too. 

Until 2 years ago when our favourite place to stay became unavailable, it was our habit to spend Easter up there - it was always something to look forward to during the shorter cold days of winter and was a lovely time to be there; with new lambs, daffodils and the first signs of spring.

So, in 2007, we were staying up in our favourite place and whilst out and about one day, saw the oddest, surreal thing.  I never did find out anything further about the incident and it remains a delicious mystery to this day.

We were traveling over Kirkstone Pass, a slightly wild, high and barren moorland stretch bridging the gap between the Troutbeck and Patterdale areas.   As a passenger, it is my habit, when not nodding off to sleep, to look out of the side window at the scenery etc and I always scan tree-lined areas for deer. 

As I passed this particular item just off the road, there was a two or three second delay whilst my brain did its best to comprehend what my eyes had just seen.  When it did, I asked my husband to stop and as there were no other cars, to reverse back to what I thought I'd just seen.  Nope, I wasn't imagining it, there was Dr Who's TARDIS nestled amongst the boulders. 

When we saw the opening sequence of The Day of The Doctor last weekend, where the TARDIS was 'parked' on some moorland, for a brief moment, we thought this was the scene we had witnessed, being filmed.  Until common sense took over and we realised that was 6 years ago and on watching it back, it wasn't the same stretch of road, even though initially, in our excitement we thought it might be.

But at least we know where The Doctor takes his Easter holidays.

I've lost track of what I've been up to lately work-wise - I seem to spend a lot of time re-making older designs as I get orders for them, so my new designs take a back-burner sometimes and I work on new stuff in short bursts between looking after customers - and my productivity hasn't been helped with a recent root canal issue - the tooth was as painful as anything I've ever experienced and it seemingly triggered frequent migraines too (in that they've stopped now the tooth is better, suggesting that was the cause).  Thankfully, after several hours in the dentist's chair and doing serious damage to my credit card balance, it is all fixed and feeling significantly better.   So I'll just post some of my recent work.

This ivy leaf design was a birthday gift for my Mum - it has 4 independent leaves, two in copper, two in bronze, each riveted to a backplate which allows it to be worn as both a pendant and a brooch.  The back ended up much more of a task than I was anticipating - largely because I'd decided to rivet the leaves in place, which precluded some of the pin ideas I had in mind as I needed to allow space to rivet in 4 places, then position the pin. It looks simple enough, but it seemed to take me a while to get there.

I wanted to set the pin slightly off to one side, so that it could be worn horizontally, as well as vertically, without flopping forwards away from the garment at the top-most edge - if the pin is down the centre, it will tend to pivot forwards due to the weight of the metal.  Now that I have it sussed, I have some more leaves ready to make another to sell.

I also made a pair of earrings with the same copper ivy leaves on teardrop antiqued copper hoops.   The photo I uploaded looked rather better than this - Blogger seems to have decided that it knows better than me how my photos should look and is seemingly adjusting the 'exposure' as I upload them - it's bad enough that it takes me several attempts to add each photo - and therefore an age to make each blog post - without them looking horrible when I'm finally successful.

This coral and copper bracelet was made as a birthday gift for a friend - featuring a large copper clay leaf toggle and red coral beads.  I have a few more like this, with different beads, coming through to sell - when I can magic up the time to work on some photos, that is.  Was it ever thus!