Make your own totally* free rubber stamps

*Okay, not totally free but almost.

I had this idea the other day, it's probably been done before (for the net is vast and infinite) but I was hit by a flash of inspiration and had to try it out. Graphic patterns like chevrons are really in at the moment in various crafts and certain kinds of design. I wanted to be able to use them in paper crafts without a) printing them out or b) forking out a lot of cash. See, I like rubber stamps, but they can be pretty pricey and sometimes I don't want to use the same shapes again.

Basically, I made simple stamps from rubber bands. I cut up some Amazon packaging and taped it together to make a sturdy base then used some strong double-sided tape to stick bits of rubber in place. Now I did say almost free. Obviously we paid for the stuff that was delivered in that cardboard, but corrugated card is easy to pick up at the supermarket. Free. The elastic bands? The postman regularly leaves them on our porch when delivering said merchandise. Free. The tape though, I did pay for.

These are just pages from my sketch book (and I only have black ink) but I think they work quite well. For free. The flags are my favourites. I could have cut all the little pennants out of paper, but this was fast and has a nice hand made feel. Maybe that's why I didn't want to just print them out? I do that kind of work all day, when I get home it's nice to play with more tactile art forms.

Obviously these are not sturdy pieces of kit. Yes, some areas are still sticky where the tape is not covered. Yes, that meant they stuck to the sleeve of my jumper whilst I was reaching for the cmd button just now. But, who cares? I enjoyed making them and it's a super fun way to recycle.

Recent triumphs and disasters in the kitchen

Well, hello there. Today I want to talk to you about some of my recent culinary adventures. In the main my savoury endeavours have been triumphant and my baking more on the disastrous side.

My baking inspirations have been about being a bit more calorie conscious. I've found a couple of recipes that sounded ... viable whilst not being insanely calorific. Not that I'm against a calorific piece of cake. Chocolate fudge cake is one of my favourites, but if its 550 calories, its obviously got to be an occasional treat (or else I've really got to step up the exercise!).

First up - Chocolate chip blondies that are supposed to be 75 calories a slice. I pinned the recipe from Chocolate-covered Katie. They are made from chickpeas. I found them just about edible, Marc said they were horrid. Before I even told him what they were made of. Fail.

After that, I thought I'd go a slightly different route. There are lots of recipes around that use bananas to sweeten cakes. So I had a go at Banana/oat breakfast muffins. These were also not nice and actually give me a terrible stomach ache. Epic fail.

You'd think I'd learn after these escapades that cake is calories. If you remove the sugar/butter/flour there is no tasty cake left ... but I felt like one more go. So I went with 'World's Healthiest Chocolate Chip Cookies?' I can tell you right now that they are not. They did actually taste quite nice, which is good compared to the previous two. But they are not even low in calories. They are about the same as a Bourbon biscuit. And technically you get two in each of those.

My savoury inspirations have been about upping the variety in the cuts of meat I use. My interest in this is twofold. Firstly I want to eat more of the less popular bits of animals. I'm not squeamish about handling raw meat and I know where it comes from. But I do think we should eat as much of the animal as we can. Someone who is really into this is my friend Di (who blogs at Veg Box Chronicles) she is an awesome cook and uses odd bits all the time. WIth delicious consequences. The other factor is cost. These are also usually cheaper cuts, and saving cash is always good right?

In the last couple of weeks I've cooked a ham hock and pulled pork (pork shoulder). Both are dishes which are full of flavour but need low and slow cooking. Using the slow cooker is great for this. It takes 6-10 hours to cook things, but you don't have to do anything. Just chuck it in and then its ready at tea time.

I really enjoyed the ham and Marc loved the pulled pork. Both are going in 'the book'. This is where recipes go that we want to use again. The last recipe to make it in there was Chicken Fajita Lasagne, but that's a tale for another day ...

Getting healthy

One of my goals this year is to work on getting more healthy. I'd like to lose a bit of weight too, but that's not specifically my aim. I'd like to eat less processed food, make better choices and do more exercise.

Exercise has always been a big issue for me. I'm not good at sport and I always hated PE at school. This really didn't set me up for a lifetime of good habits, actually apart from a couple of ill-fated attempts at going to a gym, I've pretty much ignored it. The problem was always that I couldn't actually do the tasks. At the gym, they'd say, 'then jog for ten minutes' TEN MINUTES! I had no clue how people did that.

Finally I realised I needed to learn how to do exercise from a more basic level. In the same way you have to learn cooking. It's all well and good to have a recipe, but if you don't know what boil or whisk means? It's not going to work.

That's when I found this: NHS Couch to 5k plan.
It's a series of podcasts which guide you from doing nothing to being able to jog 5k (about 3 miles) after nine weeks.

It starts you off running for 60 seconds at a time. The first week I even found that difficult, but I quickly learnt that breathing in enough air is one of the most important elements. Getting out of breath, amongst other things, was why I couldn't do ten minutes on a treadmill. Each week the amount of running you do builds up, you run for a bit then walk for a bit to recover. The podcast tells you when to speed up and when you can slow down again.

I can now run for 25 minutes in a row. I'll admit that it's taken much longer than nine weeks - some things got in the way. But I'm getting there.

I really recommend you give it a go if you want to get moving, it's free to download, so what have you got to lose?

New home

You might have noticed a couple of changes around here over the weekend. The most notable being that 'Other Amusements' has moved to: www.otheramusements.com 

This name not only reflects the contents more accurately but also marks the beginning of a new chapter. I'm looking forward to doing more blogging now I have a new computer (finally) and working on my writing and photography skills. I hope you'll join me.

p.s. Everything should redirect automatically.

Week in the life project

Ali Edwards is a scrapbooker and graphic designer who teaches classes and designs digital assets for the scrapbooking community. Her work is usually very modern and has a nice clean style.

Every year she runs a project called 'Week in the life' where you record in detail your everyday life. She produces templates which you can buy if you want, but you can do it any way you like.

I've decided to give it a go. I doubt I'll get each day finished on that day, but if I take lots of pictures and make some notes, I should be able to catch up quickly.

With this in mind, I made a start by designing some base pages to work with during the next week. The folder I am using is around 6in x 8in, so they are set up for that size.



Quite a few people seem to have already said they'll be taking part. I like the idea that everyone will be documenting the same week but they'll all be so different. I'm also looking forward to seeing how others  approach the project creatively.

If you want to know more about 'Week in the life' click on the banner at the top to head over to aliedwards.com for lots of info and inspiration from past years.

Easter treats

So, Easter. We are not religious at all, but we do like to celebrate. In the way that Christmas is our winter feast, Easter is our Spring shindig. We usually have a tasty family dinner and then eat lots of chocolate. This year instead of buying giant eggs, I made a few treats for my family. I'm not ashamed to say that they are 100% Pinterest inspired. You can check out the originals on my 'food board'.

First up - Easter bark. We don't really have 'bark' in the UK, but I've seen it a lot on American blogs. It mainly seems to crop up at Christmas but this version from The Browy Blog looked pretty easy to do. It's not quite as simple as she makes it look! Chocolate is a pernickety substance and one drop of water makes it seize. Which is gross. It goes from a glossy liquid to a lumpy dry mess in seconds. This happened the first time I put a tiny bit of food colouring in even though I used the paste kind. Luckily it was only a very small amount of chocolate and mixing more in saved the day.

I packaged it up in cellophane bags and added the cards on the top. I was going to create some cute bunny themed designs for the tops but I had this scrapbooking paper from My Mind's Eye. The colours are so Easter-y, and it's such lovely quality, I couldn't resist using it. I used a punch to make the scalloped edge then stamped a simple message. Done.

I also made these fun teabag shaped biscuits. They go quite well with a cup of tea apparently, though I can't guarantee you be able to un-dunk them using the string.

I used matching paper to make the tea tag and stamped it with a t. I suppose it should have been a T, but there aren't any capitals in my set. I don't think anyone minded.

Happy (belated) Easter!

Our wedding invitations

Hello there. Today I was taken by the idea of photographing our wedding invitations. There was some light coming in through the windows which was ideal, and you want to see, right?

I didn't write much about our wedding before the day as I didn't want to give anything away to our guests. Not that we did anything crazy, I don't think it was a surprise to our friends and family that I didn't wear a white dress! I also doubt it was very surprising that I made a lot of the bits and pieces myself, including the invitations.

I designed and made them from scratch. As we got married in October I wanted to incorporate a pumpkin, but not have it be too Halloween-y; so I designed a pumpkin-heart which became the main motif on the other pieces. They took quite a long time, but I think it was well worth it. What do you think?

  

Discoveries

I have discovered tea, podcasts and Instagram. Yes, I am behind the times. Several thousand years with tea.

People are very surprised if you don't like tea, especially if you don't like coffee either. Perhaps even a little put out. It's like saying you don't like bread. Who doesn't like bread? There are people who can't or don't partake. But just can't abide by it? Not so much.

So I thought I'd make a bit of an effort. See what all the fuss is about. I'll be honest, I still don't like real tea. Apparently what I like is a 'tisane' or herbal tea. I started with green tea and then, lemon and ginger. My current favourite is chamomile. I'm part way to being acceptable in an office environment.

The podcast thing is not linked to the tea thing. Not listening to podcasts does not make you a workplace weirdo. Though like the herbal teas, I did know about them, I just didn't seek them out. The main reason why I've not looked for podcasts before is due to the areas in which I am interested. I couldn't see how you could talk about crafts, sewing, photography etc without having any visuals.

However, I have discovered that you can talk a lot about process and how you work in these endeavours. How you keep your creative ideas and grow them for your projects. And in fact it is a really great thing that you can't see any actual work whilst you are thinking about this. It's about coming up with your own ideas rather than finding inspiration in other people's. As Paul Smith says 'You Can Find Inspiration in Everything - (And if You Can't, Look Again)'. That's an interesting book, the foreword is written by William Gibson who is one of my favourite authors ... but that's another post.

I am currently listening to the Paperclipping.com Roundtable podcasts. They talk mainly about scrapbooking, but also the idea of 'memory keeping' in general. I like that term as it covers so much, photo albums, sketchbooks, journals and blogging.

Which brings me nicely to Instagram. An iphone app which is a fun and easy way to record everyday life in pictures. I've been using it to share pictures of things which catch my eye, like the picture above.

It makes me smile.

Book club journal page

I've joined a book club. I said that I wanted to read something which I wouldn't normally choose and my wish was answered. The book for the February meeting was 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog', it was written by a French author - Muriel Barbery and translated into English.

It's quite philosophical and not an easy read. I had to look up at least ten words whilst reading it and I'd like to think my vocabulary is pretty good. I probably wouldn't have made it to the end if it hadn't been for the book club, but I'm glad I did, there was a lot more story towards the end.

I mainly enjoyed meeting some new people. They were very welcoming and had some great insights into the book.

I made a page in my scrapbook/journal about the meeting. It probably needs a bit more work, but I had fun putting it together. I'd like to keep a record of each book this way, though I don't how long I'll be able to keep it up.

First Snow

This weekend we've had the first snow of the season, it's nothing compared to last winter but it's still got everyone excited. There wasn't enough for a snowman (mope). But it was nice and bright on Sunday morning; so I thought I'd pop out and take some pictures before it all went slushy and brown and decidedly un-photogenic.

I didn't want to go too far since it was still freezing cold. On the other hand I've photographed everything within a mile radius of my house in minute detail. I didn't set out to do this, it just happened and now I feel guilty if I don't put in a bit of effort to find an interesting subject matter. With this in mind I walked up to the cemetery.

The cemetery in question has been there a long time and has lots of amazing stone monuments. There is a section which is still in use, so obviously it's not very nice to be hanging around there with a camera on a normal day. Today however, there was no-one around, so I headed towards the oldest part without fear of reprisal.

It was totally silent. I mean it's usually quiet in a graveyard, but the snow added another layer insulation. There were no footprints at the entrance and I thought I had the place to myself. Except I noticed some tiny paw prints. Then every time I turned a corner there were some kind of animal prints, maybe a fox? I thought. Probably a cat more like.

The light on the snow was beautiful and it was very peaceful.

This is my favourite picture from the visit.