Hats

Here's the tag from the bookkeeper's new beret. It's nice to know she got a hat-sized hat!

Rumpelstilzchen part 1

Bookkeeper was busy this week, and she drew three illustrations for the story "Rumpelstilzchen" for you to see. She intends to draw more next week, and if she's lazy or forgets, feel free to throw rotten vegetables at her.

So! Here is part one:

One day, a poor miller had a chance to speak to the king, so he said to the king: "I have a lovely daughter who can spin straw into GOLD!"
 

"I can do WHAT now?"

The king loved gold, so he ordered his servants to fill a room with straw and put a spinning wheel in it. He then had the miller's daughter brought to the room and he told her, "If you have not spun all this straw into gold by early tomorrow morning, you will die."

Because everyone works harder
when they're tense and sleep deprived.

Then the king closed the door and the poor miller's daughter was left alone to ponder her hopelessness, because she (obviously) did not know how to spin straw into gold.

When the door opened again a short time later, a very small man stepped into the room. "Good evening, Mistress Miller! Why are you crying?" He asked.

How did he get past the guard, anyway?

"Ach" she said, "it's because I don't know how to spin straw into gold."

THE END (of part one)

As any good long-time readers of this blog should know, the bookkeeper is working on writing her own story. It takes place after the "Rumpelstilzchen" story and the main character is the king and queen's young daughter.

Flee in terror as she wields her magnificent sword!

Here four more characters from the story. Most of them don't have names yet:

"I'll name all of them FRED!"

The king, queen, and miller all have multiple pictures because Bookkeeper needed to design a version for her story, and a younger version for the original Rumpelstilzchen story. 

Yes. The miller has three pictures. You're very observant, and you should be proud.

The Computer and I: A Parasitic Relationship

Bookkeeper does not like computers. Sure, they may play games, run Photoshop, and connect to the internet, but mostly they just drain her life and sanity.

For example:

• Thursday the bookkeeper's computer froze up, turning a picture she'd worked on for hours into an empty, corrupted Photoshop file. (She can post a picture of her error message for you to admire, if you want)
• Friday the same computer suddenly decided it would no longer connect to the internet.

Pretty cheeky for machine that can't run or even turn on without a human's help.

Stick with the agreement okay? You work and Bookkeeper lets you use electricity. Neither of your has to like the other.

Basically, the bookkeeper is just re-wording what she said in this post: click here

Random Mid-Week Post

The bookkeeper bought a new hat today, and it's a beret; the kind of hat that makes you look artistic even if you haven't any talent!

Will you look at that? Bookkeeper's a Real Artist now!

A Real Artist who just drew eyebrows on top of her hat. She's the next Picasso!

A Bookworm's New Year's Resolutions

Hello everyone!

Over her holiday break the bookkeeper got to do many exciting things like visit relatives, count down the seconds to the new year, and forget to post on her blog.

And now she'd like to bore you all with...


...don't worry, it's not details of her vacation. She's not that heartless...

...her New Year's Resolutions.

This year the bookkeeper has resolved to:

• Write a letter to one of her many favorite authors (preferably one who's still living)
• Learn to read a second language (and maybe speak it too)
• Figure out how bookbinding works (duct tape)
• Read all the books she got for Christmas (if she takes her time, they might last a week)
• Sew a new book bag for herself (not that she doesn't love her old one... thanks Mom!)
• Find out if she likes e-readers (does no papercuts = no worries?)
• Read The Lord of the Rings trilogy (no she hasn't read it yet, yes you're all shocked at this)
• Design her own set of bookmarks (she named her blog after them, so she might as well...)
• Buy some cool bookplates (because sticky notes just aren't classy)
• And... write out that story she's been working on (without thinking how long it'll take to edit)

And that was all the bookkeeper had planned to write about today, but then she realized that there aren't any pictures in this post (you may now gasp in horror)! So she decided to upload some pictures she took of a gift she made for a friend:

Held together with sticky tack because it's not in the bottle yet.

You see, Bookkeeper didn't have a gift for this particular friend. Then the idea popped into her head, "I know! I'll make a dragon out of clay and put it in a bottle. I'll save money because handmade gifts are cheap* and it'll be easy to make.**"

*Yeah, right.
**YEAH... RIIIIIIIGHT.

Dismembered dragon pieces. Lovely.

Her original plan was to make the dragon out of four pieces of clay and glue them together in the jar.

Over the next several hours, her four pieces of clay ended up breaking into twenty little pieces of clay. ("That last snap you heard wasn't the clay, it was my sanity.")

Only after the pieces had been baked and painted did it start to come together and the bookkeeper realized she should take pictures.

So, here you go:

It's like putting together a ship in a bottle, but with a smaller bottle.

Finally she finished, after spending some time bonding with the glue. The longest craft project of her life was finally over. And the dragon in a bottle didn't turn out that bad at all:

Happy New Year!