made by bees!

Here is a vase that was made by bees, for reals! The designers, Studio Libertiny, made a vase-shaped hive that the bees then colonised. It took took 40,000 bees a week to make the vase! You can read more about it here.

I have recently started working full-time, which means that by the time I get home on a wintry evening, it is too dark to take a photo of the cross-stitch I'm working on. I'll try to take a photo this weekend, though! It's coming together really nicely. It's my first time cross-stitching my own design, and I'm pretty happy with it.

jessica insists on yet another blog

I have a comics blog, and a (largely neglected, although this is shortly to be remedied) blog for random thoughts and other things. But yes, I need another one. This one is for craft: making things that aren't comics. This blog is for different readers, I guess: people who aren't interested in comics (although I find this confusing and strange) and just want to see pictures of things I make, and sometimes photos I take, and that sort of thing.



Anyway, I am finishing off my doctoral degree and I feel full of the desire to make things. I know that if I share the things I'm making, I'll be more motivated to work on them and finish them.



To start me off, here is a picture of an old project, an amigurumi monkey called Calvin that I made for my friend Zoe. I love amigurumi because it's so unstructured: you just increase for a while till it's big enough, then decrease after a while till it's small enough. And you can pull out your stitches and not have to pick them back up! Brilliant. I made this one freestyle, just trial and error. I like the way he turned out: kind of cheeky-looking.