Celestine at the pool (+ my instagram account!)

Yesterday was such a nice sunny day, so we decided to go swimming.

Celestine refused to come unless I made her a pair of sunglasses to match her swimsuit. Honestly! (roll eyes) She does insist on being fashionable at all times. I tell you, it can get quite exhausting.

So I quickly made this pair of yellow sunglasses and she perched them on her head. The lenses are made from a ginger beer bottle!

She enjoyed floating about in her new rubber ring.

Love Celestine

X

it's that time of year again...

Celestine does enjoy to feel festive. She's been planning her Christmas outfit too lately. She wants a red satin dress with red tulle under the skirt and a holly and berry hair decoration to match.

 

Hello from Celestine

Hi everyone. It's Celestine here! Harriet's a little too busy to blog right now as it's the wedding eve eve and she has been busy setting everything up. I said 'Don't panic,' in my most calming of voices. I said 'I will take it upon myself to write a blog post. I know it's a great faff for me what with the keyboard being so big and everything (do you know how much longer it takes to type when you are only 4 inches tall!?) but I will do it for you out of the kindness of my heart. Harriet said 'Celestine writing a blog post is not really top of the to do list right now, don't worry about it' but I insisted. I absolutely insisted.

So yes, whilst everyone has been very busy today setting up the marquee and putting decorations up and finding boxes of fairies and driving here there and everywhere, I have been practicing being a bridesmaid. You can see how well I've been practicing by these photos. Do you like my necklace? I made it especially for the wedding. It's swarovski crystal. It's extremely sparkly.

Though actually... I won't really be a real real bridesmaid at the wedding sniff sniff...

I was very upset to hear this at first. I sobbed for absolutely days. But slowly I came round to understanding the reasons why:

One is that being so much smaller than the other bridesmaids I will not be able to keep up with them as they walk down the aisle. Even if I sprint at my fastest run. (And sprinting would just look silly anyway)

Two is that there would be a high risk of me being stepped on. And that would be even worse than looking silly sprinting down the aisle. A squashed Celestine would not be a nice wedding present for Harriet.

So then I suggested that I could be on top of the wedding cake instead of being a bridesmaid. But then I realised what a boring job that would be and I decided that it would just be better for me to watch the wedding from a nice safe place. So that is what I am going to do.

Harriet says it's ok because I am still a bridesmaid in spirit and I can still have a nice bridesmaids dress to wear in the colour of my choice. I chose pink becasue it suited me best. And then today I wore my bridesmaid dress and picked some flowers from the garden and had some photos taken. It's not as good as being a real bridesmaid but it will have to do.

It's actually quite a tragic story now I think about it all. 

Ah well...

I'm getting a bit tired from all this jumping around the keyboard now so I think I will wrap this up soon.

I might write another blog post sometime though. I've quite enjoyed it. It's been cathartic to talk about my experience of not being a bridesmaid.

I'll leave you with a photo of my lovely dressing table in my (unfinished) castle. You can see my sparkly swarovski wedding necklace sitting in my jewellery box (just before I put it on today). Also, on the left, my gold cornish pisky ornament I got when we went to Cornwall last year.

Bye for now!

Love Celestine 

X

Crown Jewels

I just want to show you this miniature jewel cabinet that I created the other day for my castle.  I'm very pleased with it! 

I had been searching for the perfect jewel cabinet to display all my miniature crowns for a while but with not much luck. I couldn't find anything the right shape or size for what I wanted. I wanted one which was longer horizontally than vertically and that seemed hard to find! In the end I bought this one on ebay which was labelled as being a display case for a shop and decided to customize it myself.  

As you can see it's not exactly the most regal looking thing. Also you can't really tell from the picture but the depth of it was bigger than I wanted too.  Silly me didn't think about the depth when I bought it I just looked at the height and width!  When I put it in my castle it stuck out quite far from the wall which i didn't want. ALSO the crowns were too tall to fit on the shelves!

Well! I decided that I would take it apart and re make it exactly how I wanted it. Henry warned me not to. He said there was no way I could change the depth of the cabinet without ruining it and he said to leave it.  But I am a perfectionist. So I got out my little hand saw and began to saw it almost in half length ways. Then I cut the 'glass' in half too, shifted it down a bit so the crowns could fit in, painted all the wood gold and stuck it all back together with superglue.  And it worked!!! I was so proud! I was secretly quite worried that it wouldn't.

Then I decided to fancy it all up with some gold decoration. I bought these little bits and pieces a while ago. I was originally going to use them to make an ornate little mirror but then decided that the jewel cabinet was a more worthy cause.  

So there you go! A fancy little jewel cabinet for my castle. It's going to sit in pride of place!

Castle progress!

I haven't updated in a while and that's because I've been in the midst of wood shavings, paint and superglue for the past two weeks.  I've been sawing and cutting and measuring- all in the aid of getting on further with my castle.  This year WILL be the year I finish it!  I never put myself down as a 'woodwork' kind of person before but I've actually been enjoying myself quite a lot!

To you it may not look too much different than before but this is now the current state of my castle:

I have wallpapered all of the outsides with stone patterned paper and painted the edges and tops grey (it took me three coats of grey paint to find the perfect shade!).  I have ALSO- and this is the part I am most proud of- made a flight of twisty stairs for it!  (I don't like dollhouses without stairs.) 

To make the stairs I bought a length of wood doweling and chopped it up into three inch pieces. Then I stuck them all together with superglue and voila!

Then came the hard part- how to cut a hole in the floor.  I watched a you tube video and realised it was possible to do with a craft knife.  When I say possible I mean possible if you're happy to sit there for three hours doing it.... Still it was worth it and created quite a neat, precise effect.

I am so proud of myself for doing it!  Since then I have also cut another hole in the floor above (to the top/attic room) and made a little ladder to go up to it. 

I am now very almost (apart from a last coat of ceiling paint) ready to start putting in the carpets and wallpaper and lighting.  I can't wait!

Celestine does Baking

On Monday evening my friend Nicola came round and we decided in premature preparation for Christmas, that we would bake some festive gingerbread men.  It was Henry's idea really (he loves gingerbread, in fact one of our first dates was a gingerbread making date but that's another story) so he did the main making of the mixture and then we all cut them out and decorated them together.  

Of course Celestine wanted to bake too so I set her up a little table with her own gingerbread cutters   but she spent most of her time covered in flour and trying to climb into the sugar bag instead. 

The miniature cutters by the way I discovered online here thanks to Polly.

Pumpkins and Dewdrops

So many things to post about!  Firstly what do you think of Celestine's new Halloween quilt? It's all purple and green, witchy colours.  Celestine likes it very much. I think it will stay around a bit longer than Halloween!  I kind of did it as a side project, sewing bits together whenever I had a spare bit of time.  It's nice to have something on the go that you can just pick up and don't have to think too hard about.  Here are all the pieces laid out below.  I find a great tip is to stick all the squares in the order you want them onto a sheet of paper with sticky back tape and then peel them off as you go... works well for me anyway!

And here's a little Halloween mobile I made too.  I found these great sequins for a pound in Wilkinsons.  I especially love the ghost and pumpkin shapes! They're so cute!

The mobile didn't take too long.  On Saturday we had friends round and had a crafting session just for fun. The idea was to make a full size Halloween mobile but mine ended up being miniature.... those sequins were just too perfect not to use!

On the subject of pumpkins, Henry and I have been growing our own ones this year in the garden.  They are finally picked and ready to use and last night we chopped the first one up and made it into soup!  They're surprisingly easy to chop- I always think they're going to be really tough. Here they are in all their glory:

We have lots of plans for these pumpkins.  Along with soup we also want to make pumpkin bread, pumpkin dip, pumpkin crisps, pumpkin ravioli and pumpkin praline cheesecake!  Not all for ourselves I might add! We are going to have a pumpkin themed dinner party for Halloween. Let's just hope the guests like pumpkin!

Here's Celestine sitting on her own little munchkin pumpkin. She sure does love that munchkin pumpkin! It's her new favourite place to sit and read.

All this talk of pumpkins reminds me that I saw some amazing pumpkin sprinkles (for cupcakes) in a shop last week. I didn't buy them but I did look at them for a long time! There were black bat shaped sprinkles too.  I've just never seen such a thing! Maybe I have been shopping in the wrong places all my life. 

Tonight I plan to make a pumpkin house and we are making the pumpkin ravioli to freeze for Saturday.  Yes, my life really is just one big pumpkin right now.

That's probably enough talk about pumpkins for the moment- oh wait just one more picture...

sorry!

Ok new subject.  Here are some photos I took this morning whilst out walking the dog. It was such a misty morning. I loved looking at the dew drops hanging off everything. 

That's Celestine in the second picture by the way just in case you can't tell what she looks like from behind.  She's wearing her black pointy hooded cloak, walking into the mist.  I'll take more photos of her in her cloak soon...

I love all the beautiful and intricate photos you can take in this kind of weather though I'm kind of hoping it gets a bit sunnier again soon. Sunshine makes me feel happy.

What have you been up to? Are you going to carve any pumpkins this year?