Bah Humbug!

I'm back on the IV's again..... How very, very dull!  I've had this really annoying cold since before Christmas, which despite Ciprofloxicilin pills, would not go away and had started my lungs bleeding again, not very much just somewhere in there is weeping gently and it was not showing signs of stopping.  So I've given in and decided to be sensible before the bleeding gets worse and more serious, and took the Doc's advice, and have started on the big strong drugs.  Sadly the stupid end of the IV line which I think is called a BioConnector (it's the bit you shove the syringe into) broke this morning.... Instead of resealing when you remove the syringe it left a small hole and this resulted in the line leaking! Not a lot but enough to be not very helpful and a risk of infection.  So we tried to get a replacement from local GP's but we had to goto Papworth in the end- 45 mins there and back to change a small piece of plastic that took 5mins to replace and that if I'd had one I could have done....grrr! I've never had this happen to me before and I've been doing IV's ever few months since I was 16, so that is quite a lot or experience! 

One good thing that has come of this IV course is that I've finally managed to see WALL.E :-) I've wanted to see this for ages, and the lovely Simon came to cheer me up and brought DVD's including my new favorite film! (Lots of brownie points for Mr EB) I know it is incredibly cutezy, but its also so funny and I love the fact that he is obsessed with Hello Dolly as that is another of my favorite films! Every cloud has a silver lining....

Black and Cream Fantasy

So having managed to curl my feathers, they obviously needed a hat to go on.  Carrying on my Fibonacci obsession I used the golden ratio to work out the hat's dimensions by starting at the hat ribbon width and working up from there to get the second ribbon's width, the height of the band and the diameter of the hat! So here it is-

Curling feathers

So I've had quite a bit of free time on my hands due to my daft lungs playing up again... I've had a couple of bleeds since the New Year which is incredibly annoying!  There does not seem to be any reasonwhy my lungs just decide to start bleeding, I've had a slight cold but not anything drastic and have actually managed to out some weight on and maintain this so my BMI is around the 20 mark for the first time in years. Anyway rant over, back to the feathers!

Because of my health stupidness I've only been able to manage a light workload, which whilst very dull has at least allowed me to have a bit of an experiment and do some more mad hatting!  One of the things that I have been meaning to try for ages is curling feathers to make decorations for hats and fascinators.  You see these all over the place at John Lewis, Debenhams and so on, but you can usually only buy feathers in their slightly curved original condition.  So having collecter quite a few spikey goose biots (pictured) over the years I thought I'd have a go and curling them. 

Several of my hat books and lots of websites suggest that feathers can be easily curled just like hair, using a curling iron (mine is just a good old Babylis thing I've had for years pictured above) .  I have to say I was rather sceptical about this, and was fairly convinced I would only end up with singed fingers and setting the feathers on fire!  As you can see from the picture and my plastered finger I did indeed singe myself whilst wrapping the feather around the hot barrel, but the curling actually works!

Here are a few of the feathers I have managed to curl-

They are going to be used on a rather elegant black and cream silk mini-pill-box that I am  in the process of making, photos of which will get blogged once its done!