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!