Easter Snow (by sarah)

It's the Easter holidays and it is snowing so after dropping Mary off at the Nursery my dad helped me take some photos of the hills and things. This one is my favourite:

Followed by this one of cracking ice:

And then this one I took with the idea of portals or the Door to December:

I quiet like this one of a farm house as well - the sheep and colours say spring but then there is snow on the hills:

Then we have bleak landscapes mostly taken on extreme zoom!

Click through if you want to see bigger images or go to the here on my photo blog.

Easter Egg Hunt With Cranham Scouts (by sarah)

Wednesday evening I organised an easter egg hunt for the Beavers, Cubs and Scouts. The Beaver leader organised games and Alaric sorted out camp stuff with the parents.

I put chocs and chicks and stickers into plastic eggs.

I also made dairy free chocolates for the children with special dietry requirements.

We had a campfire for the Scouts and their's was done in the dark after the two younger sections had gone home. I had rabbit and duck marshmallows for toasting, hot cross buns of various varieties - again toasted on sticks.

Then I had creme egg splats and as it is Nation Science and Engineering Week and I had gone in to help with their astronomy badge a few weeks previously I created a came called Splats for Facts. They loved this game even though I had inflicted The Little Chicken Song on them all whilst their egg trail was being laid (some of the eggs where in the trees!).

I ended the night by telling Jean a Horice The House Dragon story - it was a continuation of one I've been telling her for a while but off course all made up on the spot. To my amazement I ended up with a group of teenagers all sitting around listening to it and even those I thought weren't listening were as they answered questions about what the story was about to those who arrived back a bit later from the hunt. They seemed very impressed that it was made up of the top of my head 🙂

It was a lovely evening and I took video of the fire and played with my camera in the hope of using the footage for something arty later on!

I took lots of low light level pictures of trees 🙂

We Love Sugru (by sarah)

We love Sugru which is a putty like stuff that you can form into shapes, sticks to just about everything and is flexible - it is basically a funky silicon rubber from my understanding. When we first heard about it we couldn't get hold of any and so had to wait as they had sold out but the wait was worth it!

Since then we have used it for tonnes of things from embedding electronics in hair pieces, making creatures for the visually impaired, fixing fridges, shoes, adding little feet and buffers to all things electronic, fixing broken mugs and making jewellery. I plan to fix my electric guitar with it though need to see how it reacts to having glitter added to it!

But it is more important to me than it's usefulness. To me Sugru represented something more, when it appeared I was struggling with both scientists and artists telling me that there was no cross over between the two areas. My tag line o twitter is that I am The Artist Scientist or Artistic Scientist and to see this product - the result of something an artist (ok design student) had produced, being so wonderful for science/tech and artistic endevours.

This was the sort of fusion of art and science that I was sure should exist but was being told didn't and my examples of how the modle builders of film dinosaurs had ended up solving the mystery of joints and movement that paleaontologists has been struggling with was falling on deaf ears.

So I turned up at The Cheltenham Science Festival debate on science verses art that year with my sugru bracelet and my ESA t-shirt I'd won for Celestial Montage and found that people didn't seem to really cae on either side of the divide, they have their opinions of the others and that is that. Stuck in the middle as all ways I gritted my teeth and looked for more science-art related things and found it under the title science communication.

Recently Sugru posted their life story so far and asked what inspired others, so I told them - they inspired me! They provided the evidence I needed that science and art can create wonderful productive and helpful things by learning from each other, they are an example of a dream that was followed and they provided the very material I had been trying to work out how to make myself - I was mucking around with resins casting, silicon mould making and fimo in order to get something like sugru and I was failing and could not make the projects I wanted. I hadn't even thought of applications beyond my own ends and there WOP! appeared sugru ready to go and so I went and so did Al and he has even written up one of his repairs/hacks for their website!

Sunday Silliness :) (by sarah)

After Mary's belated birthday party we had two of Jean's friends stay over for the first ever sleep over which was fun for them but did result in a wee-wee incident and a bedroom you could no longer see the floor of!

Jeany was a little pedant and when I'd told the kids to move the luandary from the bottom bunk so the kids could sleep - I unthinkingly told Jean to move 'All her cloths' so they emptied the wardrobe and draws too but left the baby's cloths in place :/

After they went we did a bit of a clear up and Alaric went off to finish his ladder. Jean and my friend Charlee who had also stayed disappeared off and our garden was suddenly infested by giant pandas! I think it was a mummy and a baby!

As we can see they had a good time.

I especially like this photo of the baby panda!

And this one of the big panda hugging the girls 🙂

Mary found a little LED flashing ring that Jean had bought at a festival and she would not put it down!

My mum has been knitting Jeany a rainbow jacket for ages and Sunday was the day of trying it on - Jean loved it so much she refused to take it off even though it is not yet finished!

Mary was very excited to be the bell ringer for lunch time 🙂

She had a great day of opening presents and cards and exploring the garden in the lovely sunshine which we had all so missed!

Portrait of a Cat and Other Animals (by sarah)

I have of course been playing with the new camera - I really loved the way these photos of Tom came out 🙂

Also the bunny is settling in outside and seems very happy - the only issue is that him and the black and white cats now can't sniff at each other - something they are both finding hard. Though it would appear they have sort of worked around it 🙂