what is this? eh? eh?!

January is OVER! Finished! Kapoooosh! Gone until next miserable year! Good riddance I say to the most miserable of the twelve, good bye and god bless. Now if we can all rewind our minds back to a time when January was but a vague notion of a month to come and we were all wondering why it wasn't colder and trying to get in the festive spirit of things, there was a television programme running on Channel 4 called Kirstie's Homemade Christmas. A huge farce of a show where she really really really really really enthusiastically turned her hand to some craft or other under the watchful eye of a pro in each field, really really really enthusiastically exclaiming the whole time how satisfying and exhilarating and amazing the process was and how she was really really really inspired and so on and so forth. I think the aim of the series was to give ideas to those of us sitting at home of how to be creative and resourceful with our spare time and inspire us to make some of the best home-made Christmas presents ever. Unfortunately for the most-part her artistic endeavours were not so easily accessible to the average Joe Soap like our good selves. I mean yeah I'd love to give my mum some glass baubles blown from my own two lungs or fill the stockings of friends with sweet candy canes thrown by my own arms, but when am I going to afford to enroll on a glass-blowing course or fly to NYC to visit the oldest sweet shop in the world (never to mind having thought of doing so 16weeks beforehand) Absurd! Utterly preposterous!

There was, however, an exception.

Episode Salt Dough.

She finally found a craft worthwhile, and what did she do? Stood back and let a schoolroom full of children make a mess to show us just how easy it really is. Sold. She had me wanting the salt dough, wanting the gloopy buckets of slop, wanting the wobbly-edged, very home-made-looking, end products. Which, one month later, I got.

February has begun with my finding a newfound passion in ceramics or, eh, "ceramics"...It's a real Art Attack feeling, albeit at a snail's pace of what she lead us to believe when showing us the children shoving their decorations in the microwave, whamming on a bit of poster paint and hey presto. We took two days to make, bake and glaze ours, and with one bag of salt, one bag of flour and one cup of water, this is what we got up to: