Progress and Insanity

Well it's less than two weeks until the first previews for the Teddies Worldwide Show are up and my elephant is continuing to challenge me: not always a good thing! I've spent today wrestling him into submission though, and will be working on his costume tonight: I hope you'll love him when he's all finished. I've been playing around with my new photo tent which I've bought for the upcoming show and I love the results already: hope you like this shot of The Bomb! Work on my show pieces is going pretty well and I have almost made all the bears I need for my minimum quota: I want to add a hare and a sloth to my five bears and an elephant so time is precious to me right now...

Careful also found a home this week and has already arrived with his new mum, but I did get one last light tent photo sesh in before he got packaged up... I can't remember if I said before but last week Careful found fame on the popular website Deviantart: he was a featured piece of artwork for a day! It's like teenage me's dream come true :D

As for the insanity, yesterday I went (under non-violent duress from the boyf) to see 'The Woman In Black' as a relaxing, recreational after-work thing. Normally I hate horror films but I figured hey, it's a 12A: what's the worst that could happen?? Full of chinese buffet we rolled in during the adverts and settled down to be mildly thrilled.

Well as it happens the worst that could happen is me coming home, physically scared of anything with glass eyes and wanting to die to avoid being scared: less worried for the souls of the children I teach, more for myself and my sanity. Anyway, the logical thing to do in this situation is hide the dolls and bears and so on away, right? Well as I was planning to do this I thought 'oh no, then they'll think I hate them and will wreak horrible vengeance on me. Clearly any punishment is more likely to come from those I've neglected in the last week or so'. As a result in order to placate a fictional character who actually has nothing to do with toys at all I have taken lots more photos today alongside my sewing.

I hate horror films.

Chloe and the Lugly's xxx

Wordle and Have a Great Christmas!

Have you ever heard of Wordle?

It's my new favourite thing. Basically it looks at your blog/essay/bunch of text and works out the words you used the most in it: we've used it a lot of educational documents this year. I thought I'd give it a go on the Lugly Blog, and the results are not too surprising, I guess? Lots of use of the word 'bear'! I can't see 'sloth' on there at all though...

Anyway, this post has two actual reasons for being here: the first is to point out that I've started a trial on Bear Pile. Bear Pile is a website that artists can use to list their creations instead of using Ebay or Etsy or their own site... I thought it might help with making sure more people can see my weird creatures. I've added Moreno to the site, as well as a couple of faces you might recognise :) I've also updated the blog layout so that it looks like my website, hurrah!

Last but not least, have a fabulous Christmas and a great New Year! I just finished an essay on the public understanding of the use of dissections in schools, which is the third most boring thing I've ever had to write (just behind my undergraduate literature review "Current Opinions of Multilevel Selection Theory" and my final project "Can a Altruistic Trait Survive in a Population of Selfish Individuals?", sadly!). Now that's over I can pack up and get out of here (I'm the last person left in my student flat!) and finally start to enjoy the feeling of being on holiday.

Merry Christmas!

Chloe and the Luglys' xxx