My new little "frog lizard" friend

OK so I have just tried my first post on Instagram for the post that I made on Tuesday. I didn't really think that it would hugely do anything as I have never even used Instagram at all but within about 2 minutes of posting I have gone from 1 view on that post (me when I was testing if it worked!) to 5 (another is probably me again) but still I'm sure that that's 3 new people who have looked within a couple of minutes. Hopefully that means that I will have a few more of you reading this and enjoying what I'm doing here.

The last time I posted it wasn't quite in the essence of what I'd like my blogs to be about and that's trying to spread some happiness and show you some of the fun and creative things that I have been trying to do. I just felt I needed a little explanation as to why I've not been around for a while before re-starting to post about the fun and happy stuff.

It was about a year ago now that I joined a WI group close to where I live. The one in the village meets during a day and from the photo's on their website it looks like more of a "traditional" WI group. I therefore found one in a little town not too far away that I have joined. This one is a "modern" take on what a WI should be. There is wine at every meeting and they try to intersperse some of the more traditional talks and things with some more active meetings. I did actually decide to join when I was starting to struggle with how I was feeling and hoped that me going out to meet new people and do something a little bit different each month would help. It has been good for me and I am starting to grow with confidence each month now that I recognise some people who go and am starting to get to know them. I still find some of the activities a little difficult but this month was a classic of showing how I can pleasantly surprise myself.

This month's meeting was on Wednesday of last week and the session was pottery painting. It's something that I never thought that I would have been any good at and really didn't have any confidence in before I started. If I'm honest I even got pretty panicky at the start. Just making the decision of what I was going to paint got my heart racing and then choosing colours was another thing again.

I decided to paint this "frog lizard". I'm calling it that as when I was choosing what to paint I wasn't entirely sure what it was. I knew that whatever I painted was going to end up brightly coloured so I guess it doesn't really matter.

Unfortunately I never thought to take a "before" photo so I'm afraid that the "after" photos later on will have to do.

I decided to add some star shapes to each of its legs and arms as well as a few to it's back too. There were some stickers provided that you were able to stick on and then paint over to leave the shapes blank underneath. I was a little worried that this wouldn't work as well as I would have liked as the stickers didn't seem to stick very well to start with. Apparently there was no knack to this other than to stick and hope and to not put too much paint on so that it was less likely to bleed under the stickers.

It was slightly tricky to be able to tell which colour was which once you had poured them out of their labelled bottles and even more so once you had painted the first layer onto the clay so I am really hoping that I got the yellow and the orange the right way round for the second coat.

Here he is all painted up and with the stickers removed to show the original white underneath. Some of the stars weren't perfect as some of the paint did bleed under the stickers a little but I hope that this will still be ok once it is baked.

I'm really excited to see what he looks like once he's done but this is as finished as I can show you at the minute.

I bottled out of painting his eyes but when I got home my hubby said that he might be able to put a little gloss black paint on them to make the little guy come to life a little more.

There were pre-warnings at the beginning as to how difficult it was to use the bottles with the fine nibs to squeeze out some black ink. These could be used for outlining anything that you want to highlight or to write on our pottery.

I wasn't brave enough to add anything onto the top of my "frog lizard" but I did have a little go right at the end to add my name underneath. We were asked to label them so that it was easy to tell who's is who's once they have all been fired. I did point out that I really can't imagine how many starry multi-coloured "frog lizard's" she is going to have in the kiln at any one time but at least this pushed me to have a go and try the writing paint. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

I am trying to keep up with my blogging more often still at the minute and have a few things in the pipeline to tell you about over the next few weeks so I hope that you come back to read more soon.

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