My Creative Space.

I don't know how it got to be Thursday again so soon, but I just heard the garbage truck roar by, so oooooohparently it is, & here we are again in 'My Creative Space'.

I am still on the doll making I was contemplating last week, what is it they say... slow & steady wins the race....?! Here are the girls so far - don't worry, they're mostly 'armless. (HA! I kill me!)

I did something I'd never done before with the calico for their bodies - tea dying. I'd been curious about it for ages but just hadn't gotten around to doing any until last week. As is my style, I winged the entire process, also known as "making it up as I go along".

I put a bunch of teabags in a BIG pot of boiling water & waited for the water to get nice & dark, then I added a bunch of salt because I thought I had read somewhere that that helps the dye to take... that could be totally wrong, but hey, it's just salt & can't hurt...

I added the fabric & stirred it occasionally for about an hour (I took the teabags out when one started to leak tealeaves everywhere... oops!!), then I left it covered overnight. I rinsed it in the morning & it lost a little bit of colour, then hung it to dry out a little, before ironing it to dry while it was still a little damp.

Dry, it's a whole lot lighter in colour than when it's wet - so different that I freaked out briefly thinking I had the iron too high or something & had ruined it, but when it was all done I was very happy. I actually have a dress that I think used to be tea dyed until an unfortunate incident with some bleach, so I think I'll have to do a little more of this in the near future - it was fun stirring a big steaming pot of aromatic fabric - I felt like a sorceress putting an evil spell on someones cloak or something... *mwahahahaha*

DIY Make-Over. Sort Of.

In the spirit of handmade/DIY, last night, I cut & coloured my own hair.

I think that there may be a lot of advocates of DIY out there that would absolutely draw the line at this (the cutting, not necessarily the dying), but it kind of happened by accident, and turned out okay, so I'm happy.

I meant to just give my fringe a bit of a trim, as I have been doing, with a technique that I saw on tellie years & years & years ago on that bastion of respectable and informative television... Ricki Lake. The idea is you gather up your fringe so that the base, or roots of your fringe, form a triangle, then twist it around & CHOP! This results in a kind of choppy, layered look.

Well, I did this, kind of half arsed, not even bothering with the whole triangle thing, & ended up with an incredibly short fringe that just looked... wrong. So, I gathered up the rest of my hair & did the same sort of thing... a chop here, a snip there, until I ended up in a happier place.

Here I should probably let it be known that I am not a hairdresser, and have no experience or aspirations in the field... which I think you may agree is glaringly obvious...!

So there I was, with a sink full of hair & a completely new hairstyle, and, luckily, I kinda liked it, but I was kind of shocked by the colour of the hair languishing in the basin. It was dark. Really dark. Like, dark brown dark.

For someone that considers themselves to be a natural blonde, this can be quite distressing! I decided that I'd dye my hair too, while I was on a roll.

I've only ever dyed my hair with temporary colours, you know, like blue fudge or something else that is gone in 8 washes, and none of that since I was even in high school, so it is fair to say that I was pretty nervous hiding out in the bathroom with my disturbingly close to cat-urine smelling pack of hair 'solution', but, good girl that I am, I followed the directions to the letter & ended up with hair the colour I always thought it had been, nice & light, bright, and ready, oh-so-ready, for spring.