Steampunk Circus Swap

My partner has now recieved her package for the steampunk circus swap so I can post all the goodies I made her, first up, she mentioned that she'd like something to decorate her apartment so I made a circus bunting and altered a picture frame for her.
I also made an "acrobat" steampunk circus set complete with headress, choker, earrings and brooch. Please excuse the rather rubbish photo of my modelling the headress!Finally I made a few small crafted items for this swap, two altered mirror compacts, a mini shrine out of a matchbox and a couple of hairclips.

Japan Day Seven - Return to Tokyo

By day seven of our trip it was time to return to Tokyo and I can admit by this stage we were starting to get a little tired!

But before we caught our train to Tokyo we did have a chance for one more sightseeing excursion, this time to an old, beautiful palace near our hotel.




Finally it was time to get back on the bullet train and return to Tokyo through the snowy Japanese scenery.


When we returned to Tokyo it was time to check into our hotel, but this hotel wasn't quite like the others we had stayed at, as most people know Tokyo is a very expensive city so to try and save a little bit on accommodation on our last few days in the city we decided to stay in a capsule hotel.

Japan Day six - Monkey Mayhem

On day six in Japan it was time to visit the "Japanese snow monkey's" except these little guys weren't actually living in the snow, they were living in a park in Kyoto. The "colony" of monkey's is a little bit like a reserve, the monkey's are really used to people but at the same time they are still wild animals not caged animals. They are really amazing to watch and you even have the opportunity to feed the monkeys. The monkey's seem to be fairly uninterested in people (except for when you're feeding them of course!) and just go about their lives. This place was really amazing and a lot of fun, I think it was my favourite thing in Japan.












After spending some time with the monkey's we decided to go for a walk along the river near the park as it was really peaceful after all the madness of Tokyo. Along the river we saw lots of sign's pointing towards a temple so we thought we'd check it out, the walk was much longer than I originally thought but that was ok as it was nice to be out in the fresh air! When we finally arrived we found a quiet and pretty shrine on top of a hill with an amazing view of the city - it was so nice to be somewhere like this that wasn't completely over run with tourists.




In the evening we decided to have a look around Gion, a very important historic area of Kyoto which sometimes feels like stepping back in time there are a lot of cobbled streets and winding lanes. Apparently if you're lucky you might see a geisha in Gion but we didn't see any - I think the geisha's would actually be a little scared of stepping outside as there are so many tourists waiting with camera's to take photos.




We decided to head home but on the way home we came across the most amazing and exciting thing ever. A New Zealand themed cafe, complete with fish and chips. We had already had dinner but I couldn't let this opportunity to have hokey pokey ice cream pass me by. We were so excited about this cafe!

Scooby vs the Zombies

I really really love zombies and anything related to zombies, in fact, if you put zombie's in a movie I will watch it no matter how bad it is.

Also my favourite all time TV show from when I was a kid was Scooby Doo, I watched it so much that my Dad hates Scooby due to the hours and hours of Scooby Doo he had to endure when I was a child. It also didn't help that both my younger brother became huge Scooby fans as well, so he had to go through complete Scooby immersion three times.

Given my love of both Zombie's and Scooby you can imagine how excited I was when my friend Emi posted this picture on her facebook page of Velma and Scooby kicking some zombie butt! That's a Scooby Doo movie I'd pay good money to see!