Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Sewing by candlelight...

For some unknown reason we spent the whole of Sunday with no electricity. I know it was off from about 4 am as I woke up to one of my coughing fits to find myself in the pitch dark with no light coming in from the streetlights.  The power finally came back at about 4.30am this morning when its return set the burglar alarm off.... so after two nights of rubbish sleep I am feeling a bit rough around the edges. Luckily I do have a lot of beading to do on the current dress I am working on, which has to be done by hand so the lack of sewing machine was not too disruptive to my work plan. But MY GOD it is difficult sewing by candlelight! Even with about five candles, a plate of tea lights and a torch rigged up with gaffa tape, I still could barely distinguish the beads and stitches and I had to give up after my eyes started watering all over the place.

It is a bit worrying how reliant we all are on the old electricity.  Luckily whoever designed my nebuliser has obviously put a lot of thought into it and it comes with battery sockets to power it, a set of rechargeable batteries and a charger for them. Unfortunately, my tobramycin neb has to be kept refrigerated, so our very kind next door neighbor (who still had power) kept it cold for me, so the entire months supply of very expensive medication did not have to be chucked out. 

One nice thing about no power is using candles.  This is probably because I am a repressed pyromaniac at heart and can't help but play with them! I used to actually make candles (not very successfully!) and love playing with the wax and seeing how you can make it dribble in ever more fantastic shapes. If you can get the wax to run slowly down the sides of the candle you can get some rather lovely dribbly effects. By the time I'd finished with them I think these two would definitely be worthy of any vampires castle and any Igor would not be ashamed of using them for dramatic effect!

I rather like the two tone effect caused by melting red wax onto a white candle, but I think that the plain white one is definitely my favorite with a ridiculous amount of contrived dribbly wax!

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