Stupid Blogger...

I went to revamp this blog only to find that none of my changes are showing up - backgrounds/fonts etc and so I decided to start again with a new template...only now it's stuck on this one and I can't change anything!

 

Apparently the little google elves are trying to sort it out but argh, so annoying!

'The Studio' Past and Present

Seeing as I took photos of it when it was tidy the other day (it's a miracle! :o) I thought I might as well show you lot. :D

As we don't have a spare room with any space for displaying ponies or working on customs and the like (where I'm typing from just now is our spare room which houses the PC and shelf upon shelf of family history research c/o my parents.) I've had to make do with my bedroom which is fine in principle but when you're as chronically untidy and disorganised as I am things get messy pretty quickly. These days I'm able to keep on top of the debris reasonably well but in the past it was horrendous. Luckily for me, I took photos along the way so you can see that I've improved a bit! XD

This is a photo of one of my class diaries from Primary 6, describing my room - as you can see, I wasn't exactly known for my organisation even then, aged 9!

Gotta love my teacher's comment too. XD

I don't have any photos of it at it's worst but here's some taken whilst I was giving it it's most exhaustive blitz ever.

I particularly like the little circle of debris surrounding the bit of floor I'd been sitting on whilst trying to sort stuff out.

I used to make tack on that tiny little space in front of the roombox - yes, even when it looked like this!

How could I cope with it in that state?

Practice. XD

I had drawers full of half finished tack and props alike and this is what I ended up with when I tipped it all out. O_O

Ok, I'm rather ashamed by all that but fear not, it's much better now! See!




Everything's neatly labelled and look, FLOOR! O_O

Granted, the desk can still look cluttered and messy when I'm shooting a photostory or whatever...





...but now it can look nice and shiny afterwards too!


 

As you can see my Schleich/Papo/Safari/MBH live on the top left shelf on a base my mum painted for me when I was a lot younger. It's just MDF but it's so nice I can't bear to let it go.


The Julips have the other two shelves and both stables on the desk and below but even then I'm pushing for space. I'm hoping my dad can put another shelf up above them so I can fit more in - with forty-odd Julips to house I need all the space I can get!

I've tweaked the layout a bit since this was taken - see above and below

The little set of shelves on the left were a fantastic bargain at WH Smiths recently. I was in the process of reorganising my room and spotted them priced at £14.99. Ever the cheapskate I initially passed them over but finally decided that - for the greater good - they'd come in handy and took them to the till...where the woman priced them at £4.99! I don't know if it was a mispriced item or whether they had them on sale but I wasn't going to argue! XD



While I don't have much in the drawers yet other than jumprings, tack hardware and bits and bobs that are too small and foutery to keep anywhere else, they're sure to be useful. The orange box on top of them has all my finished fimo food and materials along with some miniature leaves and moss I thought looked nice inside some fancy jars.
I have a pincushion and threads next to it, a couple of containers of sculpting tools, all my glues and sculpting things on the left (plus a pot with knitting needles and HP themed wands - just in case :P) and, rather randomly some hairspray which I only ever use to seal pastel customs when I've run out of actual sealer, lol. The little hats are from Innocent Smoothies when they do their annual 'Big Knit' thing for charity - people send in handknitted hats and they sell them with their smoothies with some of the money going straight to Age UK. :D I don't often buy them as they're pretty pricey but they're worth it for the hats. :P






Here we have a rather varied selection of things from a photo of my long dead cat Tilly to those of the ever-missed Cruzhorse. :( All but one of the medallions are sculpted by myself - the unpainted one at the bottom is 'Todd' by Clare Stokes of Meadowview Artistry. For a first sculpture he's incredible and I can't wait to paint him once he's told me what colour he wants to be! lol
I also have a printout of EA Equestrian so I can plan photostory setups properly. Sad I know but in my head the place is as real to me as anywhere else so I like to be accurate!

Further along on the other side of my room is the big set of drawers with all my ribbon, mohair and building materials. As you can just make out, my roomboxes are on the right and mini models and Trads below.



 

I have so much in the bottom ones it's unreal...

Last but not least, the fabric stash! (and Giovanni the PS3 - my pride and joy!)



This chest of drawers used to be home to most of my clothes but you know, model stuff comes first so now everything I own is stuffed into a tiny little wardrobe. XD The top drawer is full of backgrounds and bases while the other two are nearly overflowing with fabric.







So there you go, proof that I can in fact be organised!

(just don't remind me of that when my room looks like a bombsite - I'll not be pleased. XP)

New blog!

I've been meaning to do this for months but kept procrastinating...

Anyway, if any of you followed the comings and goings of life at EAE through the yard diary on the site, you'll be pleased to know that I've finally got a proper blog for it set up on blogspot! Webs is a pain to update as it makes everything overly complicated and stuff but I love blogger so it seemed the perfect way to go. Hopefully it means I won't have massive six month gaps between updates now too, lol.

So yeah, you can subscribe to it here - I've got some nice christmassy pics up today. :)



 

This is also a good excuse to revamp this one a little bit too...

Merry Christmas Everyone!

I'll be online tomorrow (me take a day off the internet? NEVER! :P) but I probably won't get a chance to post a blog thingy so consider this your festive message from me and the herd. :D




We hope you've managed to find all your presents...



...wrapped...



...and left under the tree...






...and that all conflicts...



...no matter how trivial...



...get resolved by tomorrow. :)



So, from myself and all at EA Equestrian, a very merry Christmas to you all!

 

Christmas Nibbles! (in 1/12th scale)

I felt like making some more polymer clay food the other day. It's odd, I find it incredibly relaxing!

Every Christmas we make up a selection of 'nibbles' to have as a kind of starter before we get the turkey and trimmings sorted out. They're usually small and light snacky things and my favourite is always these - cherry tomatoes with pesto and mozzerella on cocktail sticks. Here's the ones I made up a couple of years ago...

NOM!

 ...and the fimo version from the other day...

 

 The pesto is simply some green 'scenic scatter' for dioramas mixed with some clear nail varnish and a little drop of Games Workshop paint wash to give it a little more colour. The cocktail sticks are actually very very fine wire, painted afterwards. Annoyingly they make them look more like little stuffed chillies but oh well!

One thing that my parents love to get every year is Stollen. I'm not a big fan because I don't really like dried fruit (which explains why I don't like fruit cake, christmas cake, christmas pudding or indeed, mince pies!) but I love the smell and the look of the thing so I couldn't resist trying to make one for my little people who don't have such picky appetites!

It's all fimo - the 'fruit' was baked prior to the actual loaf being made and then glossed with clear varnish to give it that lovely moist look. I mixed lots of other bits into the 'dough' of the loaf but they didn't really show up afterwards which was a bit disappointing so I ended up just shoving these ones in afterwards, texturing the surface, colouring it all with pastels and some thinned down paint and then baking. The sugar effect was created with a combination of oil, baking powder and pastel dust. I have no idea if it'll stand the test of time but it looks brilliant in photos so I'm happy. :P

Bokeh ftw!

As I mentioned before, two of the other things I don't actually like are christmas cake and mince pies...



These photos are terrible but in reality that icing looks AMAZING! The cake texture itself is awful though; I wish I'd spent more time on it before I baked it. :/

The mince pies worked out really well though and I probably would eat one if they weren't so small...

Now, onto things that I really want to make in real life!



White chocolate and cranberry cookies! I've got a recipe for these somewhere so I might see if I could attempt to make them sometime in the new year because they're just so damn tasty!



Same process as the Stollen with all the ready-made fruit/chocolate chips mixed in and I sprinkled some pastel dust over them before baking to simulate cinnamon.

Seeing as I didn't really like the christmas cake, I thought I'd go for something that I was sure to like instead - CHOCOLATE!






You can never go wrong with chocolate cake, let's be honest. ;)

So yeah, that's what I've been doing, well, I was going to say 'this week' but I actually made all that on the same day so it doesn't really count, lol. I have a rather exciting project starting at college that I can't wait to get started on but you'll have to wait a little longer to find out what as I need to do rather a lot of planning before I can actually do any making which is a pain but hey-ho.

Anyway, if I don't get the chance on the day I wish you all a very merry christmas/cake-nomming day and all the best for 2013! :D


EG out!