Mike and Katie and Snails

This post is mainly dedicated to the lovely Mike and Katie our close friends who have just got married.

It's also dedicated to our new friends Brian and Tracey who are plastecine snails that we made a couple of days ago.

Katie and Mike are a totally brilliant couple, they were totally brilliant as individual people so it's only logical that they are brilliant together. My favourite thing about Katie is that she says yes to everything which means she's always up for fun times/ helping you grout a mosaic/ agreeing to have an armchair you're trying to get rid of. I asked Dan (who knows Mike a bit better) what his favourite thing about Mike was and he said "he's honest, he's funny and he cares about his friends a lot."So they are just a couple of the great things about Katie and Mike.

We wanted to get them a nice wedding present.  When we got married, Katie asked me 'if you could have anything in the world what would you want?' I thought about the time we had a lot of fun messing about on someone's canoe recently and without a lot of thought to practicalities said 'canoes' because I didn't think it would actually result in all our friends chipping in and breaking a van in the process of buying us two enormous canoes. This is them in our garden.

 There was no way we could top that, but I decided to make them a handmade present all the same, it took me a very long time to make this thing and I was still making it on the morning of their wedding day. I didn't leave myself much time to wrap it well. In fact it was just wrapped in cardboard with a mixture of gaffa and electrical tape. It looked a proper mess, and it wasn't as if I could hide it way behind the other presents as it was A1 sized. We took it to the reception venue, using it as an umbrella, only to discover that we were in charge of taking all the presents home, so actually I could have just left it at home and wrapped it better.

Dan was the best man, I was 'wag of best man and Grace sayer' which is a really important role. The grace sayer bit came about because just before we got married Katie said she loves saying grace (of course she does- she loves everything) So I said she could say grace at our wedding, and she decided to return the favour although it was only decided 5 minutes before grace.

 Will Evans introduced the grace and told everyone to bow their heads. It was then a bit embarrassing when the microphone didn't work, and I did what a lot of people do to test a microphone, which is say 'hello' in a slightly awkward way, at that point the microphone did work. Everyone who had bowed their heads looked up at me in an odd way. I think they thought that was the beginning of my prayer, but Katie said she thought I was about to start some impromtu stand up.

Anyway it was a super brilliant wedding, I wish them a lifetime of happiness and I hope we stay lifelong friends. 

But that's enough about Katie and Mike, what about Brian and Tracey our new plastecine snail friends with appalling midlands accents? Click Here to see a very short clip of them that we made using stop frame animation. We want to make a proper little film with them but we are looking for ideas. 

Happy New Year.

Low budget ways to entertain yourself

Hello friends and possibly stalkers.
Last time I blogged I was talking about all the things we could possibly do with our lives now that we're back from the big trip that even I am bored of mentioning now. We have not managed to achieve any of the big exciting things I mentioned yet but here are some of the lower budget weirder things we have been doing:

1) leaving all our skype friends video messages from 'Pablo' and 'Sandra'

2) T-rex tidying - doing normal everyday chores with our arms in the t-rex position i.e. tiny arms.  It makes the chores a lot more challenging but it's also a lot more fun.

3) Having date night which involved going to home bargains to spend a pound each. I got 500g of fake liquorice allsorts. The great thing about liquorice is that so many people hate it, so even though I've offered to share with a couple of people they've all said no.  (that's not the only thing we did on our date night we also had a meal in that new Lebanese place on bold St)

4) Singing 'Mancunian way' to the tune of 'arabian nights' (from Aladdin) last night whilst on  the mancunian way.

5)  Inventing a game that's already been invented. The game we invented, we called 'tilepix'

Everyone has 2 minutes to make one of the words on the cards from 25 tiles.

So for example this is quite clearly a giraffe. This game was born out of my rebellious way of playing bananagrams.  I can never win in spelling games so I just tried to make pictures from the letter tiles instead.

I decided to make 10 of them to start with to give away as presents or sell. But because it takes soooo long to make each game, particularly the box lid, I'm not going to make more than the 10 I've already made. If you want one I have only about 3 left to sell and they are £12. I emailed a games company with the idea and they told me a very similar game called 'squint' already exists. Mine's loads better though.

6) Making up jokes. I've just been in a comedy competition. I was the only girl out of 18 people, and I thought that might give me an extra edge but then a 13 year old entered and was actually really funny. The only way I can compete with that is if I was a dancing puppy or something. Dan helped me make up some new jokes about Movember for my set and I also had some new material on eskimo muslims. Here's me performing it: