The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

The Izzie has been busy and not been lurking lately in Cyberia.
Decided to escape the romantic slushiness that was that wedding by attending a local Scrapathon. Booked in a good six weeks ago but it then began to get a bit iffy. Most scrappers are sentimental kitsch loving slush pots by definition and once they realized just what date it was, most of them started cancelling. So just after Easter it looked like the evening would get called off. Only at the very last minute did three people book so the numbers did add up


While all the others were busily cutting and pasting up slushy family snaps, the serpent stash of pretty pictures was notable by its absence. The only concession to happy family snaps was a sticker book with framed glow in the dark portraits of Bellatrix Lestrange, Lucius and Draco Malfoy and a certain Tom Riddle in various incarnations.

They did not end up getting used as the theme ended up being "Advanced Potions Making"
Had acquired two big fat purple photograph albums from second hand stores. One was an old fashioned wedding album with black pages and thin lacy tracing paper separating them. The other was a typical 30cm square scrapbook album with a lovie dovie baby theme with blank plastic sleeves, pages of pastel papers and lots of slushy gooey baby stickers.

Decided that this book would be better saved for grander and more complicated projects. The blank sleeves has the advantage of being able to change the order of pages and to easily abandon ugly efforts with no trace of their existence

So due to the lack of planning, instead of churning out endless pages, just played around and took advantage of the very large collection of art stamps and the die cutting machines.
It's worth turning up for the evening just to play with these and to see what the others are up to.

Did manage to produce four or five half finished pages - the first with just a collection of keys, the second being the contents page had a background of brown parchment paper with mysterious handwriting, a long line on the left of brown 8 pointed seals made using a rubber stamp with a picture of a potions bottle next to each one as well as a steaming cauldron in the moonlight on another
What good is a potions book without any recipes? And what more suitable for that evening than a slushy overdose of Amortensia? No ingrdients list or preparations just a suitable background page.
Lots of love hearts cut out from paper printed with red roses, pale pink butterflies and some fluffy pink flowers. The only item missing was a picture of a Franklin Mint plate with a fluffy frolicking kitten

It was sick and disgusting and just the sort of thing that everyone else was doing. It was also quite amusing to let loose the inner pink and fluffy beast.
Needless to say while there was no television in the scrap booking workshop room, plenty of the people there had brought their mobile phones so they could watch snippets of the proceedings and drool over that dress as well as show it to all their friends

Also signed up for a five week felting class which starts next Friday at the arts centre which was once a lunatic asylum. So the serpent will be kept busy doing all kinds of crafty things
Must go online to get a list of required materials and tools for the class
For that reason will not be going to the next scrapathon but will definitely attend the one after and will be rather more organized next time.

Now it seems that Obama's birth certificate was Osama's last horcrux, will be no lack of ideas for evil inspiration for another few pages.

But that's a story for another day. But it looks like Pakistan has now been confirmed beyond all doubt as absolute Slime Central. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
While dumping of the body into the sea serves the purpose of preventing the fans setting up an earthly shrine, it does conveniently remove the main source of evidence
The serpent smells a dozen rats. But the only thing that makes the story appear kosher and not some Hollywood CGI adventure movie is that you would expect the Hollywood version to be set in some cave on the border of Afghanistan. Right next to the Pakistani version of the Pentagon is just too strange to be fiction and of enormous embarrassment to everyone

Revenge is understandable but the problem is that it works both ways. While one can admire the tenacity of the USA to go to the ends of the earth to find and destroy Bin Laden, there's a whole bunch of Iraqis and Afghanis out there who have had their lives and their countries destroyed by the USA under the pretext of a 'war on terror' and they might be just as persistent and relentless in their search for payback.

But what the serpent wants to know, did Bin Laden need that stash of cola potions - the drink of the enemy so that he wouldn't die of thirst while glued to the big screen last Friday watching a certain wedding?

Izzie has been so absent from Cyberia lately. Simply slinking and lurking rather than squiggling. This state of affairs has not been helped by the fact that the Portkey to Cyberia does work but the connection is terribly slow and that the ancient Precioussss is playing sneaky games. Bad enough spitting the dummy and freezing when getting to 12gb of a 14gb backup and refusing to even acknowledge the existence of the podkin let alone allowing Izzie to update it with new gloomy music and baby backups.
But it's now chewed up Chatzilla and one of its two usb ports which just makes pottering online more of a hassle and less of a wonderful escape from mundane muggleness

But there's also been other temptations. Been a culture vulture feasting on museums and art galleries in July and returned to an older addiction - library books

While at the library in early July came across a notice for a scrapbooking class to be held there on Thursday 16th. It was two hours long and only 10 silver sickles. So why not try it thinks Izzie. It is time to start dipping our toes into the creative world
Actually, from looking at books about scrapbooking and lurking around craft and paper shops, it seems like the hobby from hell for Izzie. A feast of sentimental and sloppy slush and kitsch full of photos of pathetically happy families for a creature who despises and detests kids and is noted for the total absence of photos of herself or any dreary Dursleyish relatives. They are not in our wallet or on the mantel piece or in photo albums or online or anywhere at all.

The class lasted a good bit longer than two hours and there was only 3 scrappers and one teacher! All materials were provided and Izzie knew from slinks in supplies stores that the kits certainly would have cost at least the 10 silver sickles for the course. There were buttons, braid, die cuts, fluffy flowers, pretty printed papers and card
It was so strange getting the paws on scissors, paper, rulers and rubber stamps after so many years absence. Nothing like getting the paws wet to get the taste for more
The serpent has not gotten all sad and slushy but after getting the puke button pushed more than once by the sadness that is scrapbooking, got the notion of adding an evil twist and using it for our own nefarious purposes

Izzie's real obsession is tarot cards and learning how to do decorated journals or altered books and some of the scrappy skills are just the things needed
Was especially impressed with the many effects that can be created with rubber and acrylic stamps.
But apart from the slush, it struck Izzie that scrapping is infested with the same disease that plagues quilting and just about any leisure time activity these days. What began as a resourceful way of using up scraps of fabric or finding inventive uses for old magazines, buttons, ticket stubs and bits and bobs ends up becoming a huge industry where all these things can be got ready made and at a much higher price than the original materials ever could have cost.
There's craft stores that specialize in nothing but pretty coloured squares of fabric for quilt making and the ridiculous prices that the scrap stores charge for buttons, bits of leaves and pretty cutouts that could be gotten from any old magazine is just truly astonishing

No way is Izzie ever going to pay a fortune of forty silver sickles for a glorified photo album, archival quality or not. The inner scrooge slinked into an op shop and found an old but empty and possibly hand made album with brown paper and pretty lacy interleaved white sheets separating the pages. That was the tell tale sign that the thing was designed for putting photos in
This cost the princely sum of two silver sickles and will eventually be adorned with some of the contents of a very large bag of leather scraps - some big enough to cover it along with various coloured metal chocolate wrappers and blobs of splodgy spidery ink
Izzie's only concession to newness is a sticker book acquired in the remainder bin of the local Coles supermarket. None other than the sticker book for the latest Potter movie which is now so very last month and therefore ancient. Would have loved some of those Ministry logos and decrees from the last sticker book which unfortunately never did get sold off cheaply
Such a pity that the cauldron sticker is no bigger than the size of a golf ball as it would have been just the perfect thing to pop on the cover
Yessss. Izzie has found the perfect antidote to the lovie dovie icky sickly sweetness and light of the scrapbooking set.
If the serpent cannot snatch or steal a copy of Advanced Potions Making, then the only thing to do is make our own.
It will be a fun way to practise and to learn tricks and tips for use in the other grand project which looks like it will end up being moved onto the next 101 things in 1001 days list