Aug 19th, 2024

Author: donich_admin

Cripples, bastards and broken things

Well, cripples (me at the moment) and broken things (picture frame) anyway. The quote in the title is one of my favourite episodes of Game of Thrones (my favourite TV show of all time). R loved it too, but in his mind it was so totally ruined by the last two series (7 and 8) where it ran off the rails into a pile of shite that the whole thing was blighted in his eyes. I agree that it all went very very wrong at the end, but for me, I have cut it off in my mind at the end of series six, and imagine that it had finished there. Or rather, I imagine my own ending which would have been better than what they came up with. But I digress.

My mum has a picture frame with a photo of her old cat Heidi, who died many years ago. Heidi was actually a boy and was not that friendly. By the last statement I actually mean that he was one of those cats that like one person (my Mum) a lot, and basically hate the rest of humanity. He used to positively enjoy clawing and biting me, although I must admit that that was because I kept picking him up. The frame came from a lovely little gift shop in Castle Douglas, and my brother and I spent ages trying to get a photo of Heidi reduced to the right size and then printed on a rather primitive photo printer to fit into the frame. Anyway for many years the frame looked nice, until it got knocked over and the dragonfly mounted on it fell off.

My brother tried repairing it to no avail, so I had a go myself. The problem was that it had been repaired before, and the back of the dragonfly (where there was a slot in the frame for mounting) had become so encased in old dried glue that it was too distorted to fit back on. So last night I (carefully) took a craft knife and a file to it, removed all the old glue and re-prepared the slot and mounting peg so that they actually fitted together. Then I stuck it back together again with UHU rather than with superglue, because the UHU is not as brittle when set.
It has held fine so far, although I fear that taking it on a ride to Helensburgh today may possibly be its undoing. Sadly the thing the description of this whole process reminds me of is the operation on my ankle, to which it bears not a little similarity.

If you think my craft bench is currently overpopulated though – check out the new kids on the block. This is the daddy of all watercolour pencil sets which I treated myself to. This was driven by the fact that my dark green pencil gave up the ghost (after heavy use drawing landscapes!) and the only 3 green pencil set I could find on Amazon cost £9.99 (£3.33 per pencil) The set in the picture cost £42.00 for 120 pencils (36p per pencil). Go figure.

What you can see in the picture is only the top layer of pencils. There are three layers in a sliding drawer arrangement within the box.