I've had a really busy weekend, and got loads done.

Its New Zealand winter now, so it's cold but most days we get some sun. We went to Bethell's Beach on Saturday, which is where Xena was filmed (Calliope's cave). Really beautiful beach, lovely sand dunes,and HUGE waves that were whipping up foam which we caught as it blew across the beach.

Today I carried on working on the fairy grotto - I'm making the door of the room into a giant tree trunk by painting a tree around it - it's quite difficult to get the shape of the boughs right. So far I've used 3 colours of leaves, but I'm going to have to go back and reshape some of it. I've been using acrylic paint, and one of the tubes was almost solid and smelt like old brussells sprouts (not kidding) - it worked okay once I'd mixed it with water. I also reorganised and sorted out all my daughters toys, and did all the washing and cleaned the fridge. This is mainly because we've got a visitor arriving on Wednesday for a month.

I'd been having weird dreams lately, lots of dreams about dead people, so I have had a phone round over the weekend to make sure everyone is still alive. I spoke to my best mate, who I hadn't really spoken to for a few months cos it's difficult with a 12 hour time difference when we're both doing things. I was also looking up something on Google, and by chance I tried putting in one of my friends from college, who came up on her work website. I emailed her and she wrote back - we lost touch years ago, cos I used to move about every six months with work. I don't know if it's because its winter, but I am trying to catch up with people I owe e-mails to now, and trying to update our family website (which is only for our family to see photos of what we're doing here).

I'm also really tired and trying to eat more healthily because of it - today I lapsed with a danish for breakfast, but had celery soup for lunch, which is meant to be very cleansing, and steamed veg with cheese sauce for dinner, although we started doing stuff for lunches for the week after dinner, so I also had a cheese twistie and a banana muffin and a bit of chocolate shortbread ( we add the healthy stuff in later)

First day back at work today (boo).

Still managed to find time to paint a bluebell fairy on M's wall. She wanted it to look a bit like her, so it took me ages to mix the right paint colour for the hair and eyes. Looks pretty fab now though.

That means there are fairies on all 4 walls - I've still got to do an autumn fairy and a boy fairy, and maybe a couple more flower fairies. Will upload a picture into my icons (tho not tonight).

Been scrolling through some of the fic and art flagged in the best buffy fics community I just joined - some of them are amazing - vamptastica does amazing artwork and ljs wrote the best giles/anya fic I have ever read, in the context of Hugh Grant films!

Got Bones S1 for xmas, so I want the outlaws to go away and give me time to watch it

Another day, another fairy!

Getting better at the drawing straight onto the wall thing now.

Went for a starlight fairy, so I did her dress in dark blue - used some kids paint, which didn't go on very smoothly - it seemed to dry at differential rates, which left it looking streaky. Next time I'll try mixing it with a wall paint and see how that goes!

My daughter painted the wings herself - blue glitter. Looks pretty good - the patterns are definitely cartoonish, and quite solid rather than ethereal - I don't think that's a bad thing - I think kids are surrounded with enough 'too beautiful' things.

The icon used is the wish fairy I did last week. Next week - who knows!

Started decorating my daughter's room this w/e. She'd asked for a fairy grotto, so I got some what looked like very pale pink paint for the walls (note to self - when its on the whole wall it looks a hell of a lot pinker), and some fake ivy plants in hanging baskets. No, it looks good, really!

What she really wanted tho was fairies! So I copied one out of a book of hers, as the first one - made it about 10 inches tall, and did a practice run on paper first. Headed upstairs feeling confident - turns out that you can't erase pencil off of walls without leaving big greasy eraser marks and streaky black smudges.

Worked out eventually that those funny little foam blocks made to get marks off the walls will work - they're too 'blocky' for detailed work, but they do okay if you get a whole leg wrong (like I did).

So, outline done - then I started painting. I'd made another mistake here - I'd bought a few emulsion test pots to use, which are much runnier than art paints. Cue much more use of the magic block!

It turned out okay - I used some kids paints for the wings - silver glitter, outlined with silver pen. Now I have to do another one next weekend, and obviously ~I'd picked the easiest-looking one to do first. Daughter thinks I'm god's gift to art tho, so its worth the pain!