This month on emuse

This month there have been some creative things here on emuse:

Bullet journal book trackers

Birdie card

Colouring postcards

Moomin display

Snow bunnies

And a few interesting things that I've been getting out and about doing:

Edinburgh Zoo - Chinese lanterns

Modernist jewellery exhibition

Selfie spots

Beachcombing

This month I have been mostly...

Doing:

My main passion at the moment is visiting the local beaches to collect sea glass and pottery shards. I've been having great fun, finding lovely things, getting exercise, and all without spending any money! And at the start of the month I went to a vintage kilo clothing sale in St Andrews where I was able to get some great bargains! Other than that I haven't been doing much as I had the flu cold that's going about (stealing an expression from the Chalet School there!).

Sadly my auntie's dad died this month, and I attended his funeral. He was a lovely man who we used to see every Christmas at my auntie and uncle's house, and I thought of him like an honorary grandad after my own grandad died.

We were face-fit tested for our dust masks at work and it was rather a surreal experience. Imagine wearing a large white hood over your head while bowing over repeatedly - we felt like we were being inducted into a secret society! And all the time you are breathing through your mouth to see if you can detect the bitter vapour that is being pumped into the hood!

Reading:

I have finally finished two books that I have been reading for a very long time! Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham was full of such descriptive language that I felt I really had to take my time over it, and I've been reading it since about October! And, even worse, I had started reading Josephine Tey: a life by Jennifer Morag Henderson a year before that! It was such a well-researched book full of interesting information, that it took me a long time to get through it, although I really enjoyed both of these books! I finally succeeded in finishing them by committing myself to reading 5 pages of each a day, keeping one at work and one at home. This meant the task seemed less overwhelming.

I have also been continuing my Chalet School re-read, and have now reached the final 10 books which is making me a bit sad! But I can always start at the beginning again. I'm on track to finish them before May which is a year since I started.

Watching:

I'm keeping on the nostalgia theme by continuing my re-watch of Knight Rider, and my parents and I have been watching the first two series of Teachers. And I'm loving Back in Time for Tea which was filmed near my friend Margaret's family home! 

I thoroughly enjoyed Spiral as usual, and am glad to hear it may be coming back for another series (though how they will go on from the situations some of the characters are in, I don't know!). I haven't got fully into Modus, I think partly because some of it is in English and I keep missing the dialog when the subtitles disappear! I'm undecided on whether I'll continue watching Marcella.

I've been having early nights ever since the flu cold thing, so I've fallen behind on Call the Midwife and haven't even started the new series of The X-Files!

Bullet journal book trackers

One of the things that I'm finding my bullet journal really useful for is tracking my reading and book collections. I've shown you some of my reading trackers already, but since then I've been creating some more to keep track of some of the books I enjoy reading.

I've recently got into the work of a couple of local authors, Val McDermid and Jenny Colgan, so I wanted to create lists of their work and track those books I own or have read. For Val McDermid I did a very simple crime-themed spread.

I based the Jenny Colgan spread on the book I was reading at the time, The Endless Beach. I loved the colours of the cover, the style of illustration, and the brush lettering, so I used all of these. For each of these authors I divided the books up into the various series and standalone novels.

I always seem to turn to Italian crime novels in the summer months, and I have been working my way through the books of Andrea Camilleri and Donna Leon. I combined these on one spread with a simple map of Italy in the middle, with dots representing the settings of the books (I just did a rough guess of where in Sicily to locate the Montalbano books!).

Finally I created a list of the Abbey Girls books by Elsie Oxenham. Now that I have completed my Chalet School collection I can think about building up my collection of these.

Beachcombing

When I went on holiday to Italy in 2015, I had a final morning wandering around the town of Sestri Levante, where I was staying, and ended up at a little beach where I began to spot pieces of sea glass, pottery, and interesting stones. These were great souvenirs to bring back with me.

Now I've started to explore some of my local beaches in Fife and discovered that I can find sea glass and pottery here too, and I'm starting a collection. This year I've been really keen to get out and look for some, after starting to follow m0n0patin on Instagram who always has some amazing finds!

I'm starting to find some interesting pieces of blue and white patterned pottery, and glass with textures and lettering. And I always have my eyes open for shells and pebbles too!

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” — Isaac Newton

Sunday self-portraits: Selfie spots

A few weeks ago I wanted to get out for some exercise, and came up with the idea of seeking out some fun selfie spots in my local area. I founds lots of great murals all of which are within 5 minutes walk of my house!

Birdie card

Here's the birthday card I made for my younger nephew this year, to match the book I gave him, Fly by Xavier Deneux. This book is one of the many great book ideas I've got from following Bookbairn on Instagram!

The design of the card was really easy, because it's made up of circles and other simple shapes.

Colouring postcards

I've been colouring in some more postcards from Secret Japan by Zoe de las Cases. I really love colouring postcards because they are lovely and compact to carry around, and you don't have to worry about colouring into the crease of the page. I love trying to add a bit of depth and shadow when I colour them in, and I'm really pleased with how these have turned out, in particular the sandals.

Modernist jewellery exhibition

I really love modernist designs, and jewellery, so this exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland was perfect for me. I'd previously been to another exhibition there of Nordic modernist design, which contained a lot of jewellery, but I was pleased that there wasn't any overlap I could see between the items in the two exhibitions. 

This exhibition did have some Nordic designers featured, but had designers from other countries too.

Like at the previous exhibition, I did a drawing in my Moleskine of some of the items that particularly appealed to me, and added colour when I got home.